Suffering happens when our thoughts are not in alignment with reality, says Venerable Robina Courtin. Ajahn Brahm puts it like this: Accepting the present moment and giving it loving kindness leads to peace.

Cristof tells his experience with Vipassana meditation, first as taught by S.N. Goenka, then how Ajahn Brahm added pieces to the mosaic, and finally how Bhante Vimalaramsi rounded off the picture.

This week we learn from Ajahn Brahm, what important role joy plays to prepare for meditation. How do we arouse joy on demand? Besides Ajahn Brahm’s instructions, we let His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu inspire us.

Mens sana in corpore sano - goes the often quoted Latin saying: which is best translated in meaning as a healthy mind can only live in a healthy body. Do you want to know who came up with that?

Last week, we learned from Bhante Vimalaramsi about adding smiling and relaxing to the active part of the process of meditation. Today, I want to let Ajahn Brahm chime in. He’s big on smiling, enjoying, and relaxing during meditation. We often hear him say: “Relax. To the max.”

Picking up from last week's class where we talked about the importance of finding out what's truly important to us, today we discussed the process of making that what's important to us happen, the process of realizing it in our daily lives.

Using the metaphor of making a fire, we presented how to create the right conditions of our goals and outlined the three pillars that support the experiencing of these goals.