The most sacred day of the Jewish practice, Yom Kippur, is a day of fasting and prayer when we remember and look directly at our existence in this world and ask ourselves what kind of world do we make, for ourselves and others. The words of Leonard Cohen, in his song, The Future, are relevant. He asks: "When they say Repent, Repent, I wonder what they meant?" He is right to ask. Instead of castigating ourselves for the harm we do, and then repeating the ignorance the day after, we can instead dive deep into our sources. There we can discover the seeds of light, in the Jewish and Buddhist traditional languages, the Tzaddik, or the Buddha Nature, hiding within under layers of conditioning. The same sources will show us how to live with purity, sensitivity and wisdom, and happiness will follow, as in the famous quote from the Dhammapada, as a cart follows the horse.

Jonah, like many of us today, was faced with an utterly impossible mission - to change a whole city that had gone into violence and crime. He sank into despair, but was saved by a kind of suicidal intuition to go down to his most basic place. The dark, primal basis of existence. Like a death. From which he was reborn into new powers and was able to achieve the impossible. We can find new power to make a difference in this world if we touch the basic sources of life within, and from that place, everything can change. Karma, fate is not fixed. It is a dance of possibilities. With awareness, transformation and compassion we can go beyond what we know.

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We all have an inner beauty and a big soul that we tend to forget, especially when there is much pain and struggle in our circumstances. Nevertheless, we can recognise this Buddha Nature, through many qualities and insights, for example, our deep longing for freedom and transcendence, our moments of fulfilment, our intuitive wisdom that can just appear when it is needed, our dance with mystery and existential questions, and our deep love and awareness that is primal. The dharma encourages us to keep trusting and embracing this Buddha Nature, yet at the same time allowing and knowing the expressions of our human nature, not as a mistake or a collapse, but as the creative expressions of life and awareness that is born into forms. The forms can include emotions, thoughts, reactions, views and so on, and our task is to recognise and allow them, witness them as they arise and pass as they do with wisdom and inner freedom. Our life can be a journey in which our Buddha Nature and Human Nature, Nirvana and Samsara, are fully embraced, and we dance within both.

Compassion, Karuna, is the wise, open and loving heart that also knows the pain of ourselves and of all life. It is a natural part of the way the heart connects us to the world, and in the traditional image, compassion is the trembling of the heart that vibrates with all of life, with its joys and struggles. Today, we are living in difficult times with much conflict. We feel a natural and deep wish to reduce the suffering of ourselves and all others. Compassion is not abstract or idealistic or difficult to develop. It is the understanding, the practice and the commitment to radiate kindness as much as we can. A little kindness can go a long way. It can sometimes profoundly change the narratives and experiences of ourselves and others. This talk was given at a Tovana retreat in July 2025.

The Buddhist insight into love is that it is fundamental, primal and unlimited. Metta, love, translated sometimes as boundless friendliness, or loving kindness, is the first of the 4 Brahmaviharas. They are sacred because they are immeasurable. We mostly limit our love to addresses which feel safe, such as a particular person, family, group, tribe, nation, organization, and most powerfully, ourselves. But the practice of metta is to keep expanding the boundaries of our love. To loosen the control of our conditioned mind over the heart until it becomes a liberating sense of total relationship and belonging. This talk on metta was given at a Tovana retreat in July 2025.

This is a guided meditation on all 4 of the Brahmaviharas, the immeasurable powers of the heart. In this meditation, we will dive into the natural capacity of our heart to embrace ourselves and the world, to radiate kindness and love, and to experience basic compassion. The meditation was given in a Tovana retreat on July 2025

Equanimity (Upekkha) is the 4th. of the 4 Brahmaviharas or boundless qualities of the heart. It is our capacity to see things from a more unlimited sky-like and less subjective pint of view. It allows us to surf the waves of change, of pleasant and unpleasant experiences, rather than being knocked over by them. It is a vast serenity. This talk was given at a Tovana retreat on the Brahmaviharas in July 2025.

This is based on a famous quote from the First Tsoknyi Rinpoche, who lived in the 19th century. It points to the basic truth that the ordinary conditioned mind is like clothing that covers a beautiful, inherently aware and limitless being that is our real face. We are all made of the same heart-mind as The Buddha. We just forgot. Our spiritual journey and the practices that we learn on the way are about uncovering and appreciating what is already there, as much as developing capacities and powers for that purpose. Our wise heart already knows this, let it call us!

This is a guided meditation that will help us access and discover the inner powers and potentials that we need to cope with and transcend the struggles and conflicts that we meet in daily life. It includes a simple appreciation of the truth of this lived experience, moment by moment. It also touches on trust, kindness and the empowerment that presence can give us.

We look around and see that there are brief moments of happiness and lots of struggle. Wars, violence, conflict, environmental destruction, sickness; it seems we are born into endless struggle. But maybe life is not the problem. It is just life. We long for relief, and there is much we can do to help ourselves and our community. We can develop skills and qualities such as steadiness, compassion and joy of life, that help us meet uncertainty. In addition, we can develop and access a more transcendent perspective, in which we take the pains of samsara less personally. Nondual Dharma  invites us to see life as perfect just as it is and yet transform the way we receive it moment by moment.

An authentic journey of transformation, the opening of doorways to the beyond, is utterly dependent on reducing the dominance of the self over our consciousness. We can gradually realise that the self point of view, which seems so dominant over everything we think and perceive, is transparent, illusory, and a will-o'-the-wisp. It is also a construction and a thought, although primary. When we soften its hold on us, we can let life and liberation get in.

We are so busy trying to get things better that we forget how to be in intimacy with this life, with all its surprises, gifts, joys and pains. Can we gradually become aware that this life is vast, mysterious and less personal, and let it take us.