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THE THREE GREAT AGENDAS: #1 Aggression, your inner Ghengis Khan
This is the first of a set of three blog posts on the three great agendas that we secretly (or not so secretly) commit to when we let the...
Alistair Appleton
Mar 31, 20184 min read
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FROM RETREAT #4: Daylight and the Fourth Time
About halfway through the retreat – after the fireworks of NYE were distant memories and I’d got used to the regular routine of my day –...
Alistair Appleton
Mar 31, 20183 min read
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FROM RETREAT #1: Jesus Christ Superstar
Daniel was away in the Rockies on Dathun (the silent sitting retreat that Dharma Ocean runs) this New Year. So to start 2018, I stayed in...
Alistair Appleton
Mar 31, 20183 min read
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FROM RETREAT #2: Cushion in the Filth
Shortly after I shook off ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’, the next layer of neurosis came out of the haze, ‘filthy’. I have often noticed that...
Alistair Appleton
Mar 31, 20183 min read
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FROM RETREAT #3: Field becomes Figure, Background becomes Foreground
Bimbling around the wintery garden in my ‘chores’ window each afternoon, I was very aware of that inner soundtrack of my thoughts – often...
Alistair Appleton
Mar 31, 20183 min read
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FROM RETREAT #6: Light Over Tidemills
Tidemills is a former 19th C. workers village on the shingle beach between Seaford and Newhaven where I live. It was built to harness the...
Alistair Appleton
Mar 31, 20183 min read
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HEATH ROBINSON MACHINES: Uninventing the Ego Contraption
While we up on Holy Island this month, the retreatants and I were discussing the ludicrous tangles our thinking minds get into. When we...
Alistair Appleton
Mar 28, 20183 min read
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HEATH-ROBINSON MACHINES: Uninventing the Ego-Contraption
While we were up on Holy Island this month, the retreatants and I were discussing the ludicrous tangles our thinking minds get into. When...
Alistair Appleton
Mar 28, 20184 min read
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EGO TRIPS: You can’t be at your own funeral
Speaking personally, the ‘ego’ and everything to do with it was a real turn-off for me previous to this Summer. There was something about...
Alistair Appleton
Mar 28, 20185 min read
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EGO TRIPS: You can’t be at your own funeral
Speaking personally, the ‘ego’ and everything to do with it was a real turn-off for me previous to this Summer. There was something about...
Alistair Appleton
Mar 27, 20184 min read
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Alistair Appleton
Mar 17, 20180 min read
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Bob Thurman on the state of the world:
We cannot blame the massive subliminal despair and defeatism we harbour about sustaining our lives on this planet just on some greedy...
Alistair Appleton
Oct 12, 20171 min read
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A dark night of the Buddhist Soul
I was listening to my podcasts on the way home from a weekend in Devon. Daniel and I are both avid podcast consumers and I have a bunch...
Alistair Appleton
Sep 5, 20173 min read
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Talk at the British Museum
One of the lovely things about being a teacher for a while is that ex-students pop up in unusual places. I was really incredibly...
Alistair Appleton
Sep 5, 20174 min read
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The toad that croaks “No!”
This was the second of our Mindsprings summer retreats exploring the overlap of marking-marking and meditating. Isobel, my friend and...
Alistair Appleton
Aug 29, 20173 min read
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Ryan#5: Dharma Poetics
These are the Silence Islands where what outsiders would consider almost imperceptible aural amusements land like coconuts on the...
Alistair Appleton
Aug 28, 20174 min read
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Gayles Art Retreat
A selection of artworks from the “Drawing on Mindfulness” retreat at Gayles in 2016 and 2017. Many thanks to our wonderful artists and...
Alistair Appleton
Aug 25, 20171 min read
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Start of Term
It feels like the start of term. After our unseasonably early Summer and hot spells, the year seems to have been teased into running a...
Alistair Appleton
Aug 25, 20174 min read
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“To see is to love”
“To see with the eyes is not to see. To see with the mind is not to see. The only way we truly see things is to love them. What we don’t...
Alistair Appleton
Dec 8, 20161 min read
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Ten Reasons Why Samadhi is so Necessary Right Now
Samadhi, the forgotten twin sister of mindfulness practice, is a meditation approach that focuses on spaciousness and steadiness. In this...
Alistair Appleton
Dec 2, 20162 min read
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