Mindfulness practice Drill #1   “ Awareness of spaces” Zen calls our brain-mind a monkey mind because, like a monkey, our mind jumps from one branch to another one non-stop 24/7. Branches, of course, mean thoughts and feelings. In fact, it is estimated than this crazy monkey is running thru around 110,000 branches per day. […]

Building confidence during insecurity and incertitude Psychology says that we can learn self-confidence through positive thinking. Creating good thoughts to counteract bad ones can only make our mind busier and....worried. Like putting a Band-Aid on a wooden leg. Zen practice builds confidence in a total different way by:  - Minimizing detrimental overthinking,  - Noticing the […]

                     A step toward Awakening “ What are you” or “Who are you” is a classic Koan that every Zen student has to answer properly. If the answer is related to the “I, me, myself & mine” the student fails and must work on the Koan again and again. So....How to define yourself w/o talking […]

About complaining Complaining is one of our ego’s favorite strategies for feeding itself in order to get stronger and more powerful. Ego loves complaining even if, most of the time, complaining will not change anything excepting producing negative energy, which will neutralize our positive one. I will talk about these later on. Every complain is […]

Dharma talk # 346                   Is suffering necessary? Of course not or ..maybe! However physical and emotional pains are unavoidable. Events in Life are what they are and not what we want nor what we don’t want to be. “When we do not get what we want or when we get what we do not want,” […]