Telling love from dependency

I received a few comments to my previous post, some of them not on this page. What they had in common was the idea that we need others because we love them and needing people was in fact not so bad. In short: we need to need people.  I believe that the idea that some [...]

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How can you love people when you need people?

If I had a prayer, it would be this:
“God, spare me from the desire
for love, approval, or appreciation”.
From “Loving What is”, by Byron Katie
Let me say from the start:  when it comes to romantic love, I was cultured into the whole you-complete-me belief  through films, books and some ideas that basically made it [...]

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Scientists catching up with Buddhism on issue of no-self

Natasha Mitchell of ABC Radio National and Radio Australia had another interesting guest on All in the mind show – German philosopher of mind Thomas Metzinge spoke about his research of the self as well as the first hand accounts of out of body experiences and lucid dreaming. Metzinge published his conclusions in the book [...]

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Practice unfolding: real tools in the toolbox

In episode 118  Buddhist Geeks interviewed Daniel Ingram on his book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha that Daniel revised and made available online in PDF-format (Thanks, Daniel!)
Why all this excitement about yet another book on Dharma? Books we have plenty of but manuals packed with straightforward techniques – not so many.  Daniel describes [...]

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If I didn’t tell my body to fight, who did? (2)

So what was happening in my brain that night?
The picture gets clearer as I read about how information my brain receives through eyes and ears travels inside the brain. It is first transmitted to the auditory and visual thalamus and from there it takes two different paths. The first one goes to the cortex, where [...]

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If I didn’t tell my body to fight, who did? (1)

Anyways, what all this brain science talk is good for on the day to dy level? How can learning about my brain mechanics help me better understand myself or why I act the way I do?
In “Mind wide open: Why you are what you think” Steven Jonson embarks on a fascinating trip inside his own [...]

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Copying by way of crafts

I got another one of those knitting fits that strike me now and then. In the last few years I noticed that I experienced the knitting itch not only when I had pleanty of free time but surprisingly also when I felt I had no free time at all. For example this last one came [...]

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Same me but different (1): apparently I eat meat

Earlier I thought of an appropriate response as some esoteric act that only cats, lamas and other enlightened beings were capable of. This notion has been evolving with time and I see it now as showing up for a situation, seeing what it asks for and acting from that place. There is no separation between [...]

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On forgetting stuff

In Amélie Nothomb’s hilarious book “Stupeur et tremblements” (“Fear and Trembling”) the main character, a frail young Belgian woman, is ordered by her Japanese boss Saito-san to forget Japanese that she speaks fluently: “A partir de maintenant, vous ne parlez plus japonais”. (I realise he was speaking in Japanese but reading the lines in French, [...]

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Reading: Eat, Pray, Love (3)

The third part – Love – is very uplifting and truth be told, I really enjoyed it.
Again, many lines strike the chord. One of the excerpts that especially moves me is when right after her painful divorce the main character goes alone to this small Indonesian island, on a ten-day silence and solitude retreat, [...]

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