21 Sep 19. Lazarus of Bethany. Klingsor.

My practice is flourishing. This morning, I sat for an hour. So simple. Watch the breath. Short. Long. Deep. Shallow. You are not breathing. When you are breathing, you want to control the breath. It is not even that your body is breathing. Not even - the body is breathing. A body is breathing. When …

14 Sep 19. I keep dying.

When I meditate each day, I observe how the default mode network in my brain takes over each time I lose my focus. And each time, I die a little bit. My body is there, but my mind is not. I pop in and out of existence. When my mind wanders - what is that which …

29 May. I know… but I won’t tell ya!

When I meditated on Saturday morning, I saw my negative thoughts flowing within me silently like a thick black river. On the following night, I had a dream. I dug a whole outside my family house in Poland where I grew up. I accidentally dug into a dark concrete tunnel. It stretched forever in both …

25 Feb.

Stress began creeping on me again. I hadn't been putting enough time and effort into cultivating the silence.  Meditation practice truly is like digging a hole in wet sand. There is nothing permanent in this world. Even though my house was full of noise and commotion I just had to find the time to reconnect. …

5 Feb. My great-grandmother.

Last night, I dreamed about rocks falling from the sky. During the night a storm would lift them up and shoot them into the sky. They left trails of red sparks behind them. During the day, they fell down. Yesterday, I meditated with Zen Soto folks. The teacher gave a talk about Zen ancestors. Towards …

3 Feb. And now I will meditate.

When I sit and observe my mind, I realise that almost all my thoughts are driven by greed, aversion and delusion. This is extremely weird as my behaviour in daily life is different: there are very little hatred and greed. The only thing I am not very proud of is my tendency to complain and …

19 Jan. Stress.

I uninstalled the Insight Timer application. So yesterday morning, I used the standard timer on my phone, mistakenly set it up to 20 hours and realised something was wrong only when I heard my neighbors leaving for work. The last social media / entertainment application that remains on my phone is YouTube. But this one …

15 Jan. Doing what’s right.

I manage to sit every day. I am delighted. Not because I am getting anywhere but because I am doing what is right, what feels natural. It is not always pleasant. Sometimes it is hard. But it always feels right. Here I am sitting on the floor in my living room. Here is my body. …

9 Jan. Ordinary pain.

At the entrance to the pub in Dublin where I was celebrating New Year there was this security guy who was holding a huge mala while persistently turning the beads. What a peculiar sight among all the late night drinking mess. He just stood there, hardly moving at all, looking pretty dangerous, calmly scanning his …

5 Jan. Free will. Freddy Mercury.

I watched Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. It got me thinking about free will. I came across this article that states: Many neuroscientists, armed with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other brain scanning tools, argue that, now that we can peer into the brain, we can see that there is no "agent" there making choices. Is Buddhism …