We all want to help ourselves, help each other, support life, and look after things. It is very natural and basic. Life wants to live. This is the essence of compassion. Our heart responds to the world and vibrates with all existence. Looked at this way, compassion is a basic energy that we all have. But it is often limited by fears, concerns and our narratives. So we have a responsibility to expand the boundaries of compassion so it stretches out to those we do not know and to all living beings. The practice of awareness and mindfulness encourages a deep intimacy with all others, and also deeply resonates with the vulnerability and beautiful fragility of existence. This will empower our compassionate heart.

This guided meditation while lying, starts with ways of totally softening and relaxing all the parts of us, the stories that we carry, the tensions that accumulate, and the blocks in both body and mind. It goes on to explore the nature of trust and surrender instead of resistance, and uses the power of the earthe to reveal what it is like to let go into a vaster world.

This meditation explores a presence which is both inner and outer, our personal experience of the world of our body and mind, and the experience of he world around us, and the seamless connection and inimacy with both. It is a meditation that we can practice anywhere, while waiting in line or walking in the park. It opens worlds with kind awareness.

This is a complete sitting meditation of about 40 minutes, emphasising refuge, settling into presence, celebrating the life of the body and mind, and discovering the freedom of allowing everything to flow naturally.

The mud, or a better term would be compost, is all the stuff that gives us difficulty, that seems stuck to us, that we struggle with and sometimes feel drowned in. It could be social, personal, psychological, spiritual or the physical pains and issues with our body. These days, everything can seem muddy. In this talk, we explore how to work with the mud based on the great wisdom of the dharma, the Buddhist inspired teachings, to help us grow beautiful flowers and a fulfilling life in which the mud is a resource, not an enemy. This is beyond coping. It is about transcendence. And then we can also realise that the duality of mud and lotus, samsara and nirvana, are points of view, and we can embrace a non-dual ecological awareness that can hold it all.

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.