As the Buddha was about to become enlightened, his enemy Mara - and Mara's forces - arrived and shot 40,000 arrows of doubt at him. Who was he to be awakened to the Truth of Our Existence? I have heard two stories about what happened next. First, the Buddha calmly looked upon Mara and the [...]
Take a deep breath… and as you exhale… please pause. Notice where your shoulders are. Take your shoulders down to where they fall naturally. Feel your breath enter and leave your body, feel your belly rise and fall. Notice your thoughts. Listen to the ticker-tape chatter, the Monkey Mind, the galloping Idea Horse. Smile as [...]
I could never “successfully” meditate until finding my Jizo. Maybe I was too young, maybe my ego could not surrender to the process (likely it really hasn’t even now but there has been some progress). What I have found is that the grounding aspect of Jizo, whose Sanskrit name – Ksitigarbha – means Earth Womb, [...]
When I Google “Idea Horse” nothing much shows up. The first hit is the Ideal Horse in Aristotle’s concepts of the Ideal-Fill-in-the-Blank. When I search for The Monkey Mind and The Idea Horse, I begin to find small mentions. […]
In all my years on the path, no one introduced me to the Idea Horse. He is a close relative to the Monkey Mind, a term most American Buddhists and yogis are familiar with. Both represent the racing thoughts, the distracted mind, the things people wish they could silence with meditation. The problem is, it [...]
Say “Hello, monkey.” Whatever the chatter is — no matter how harsh, silly, irrelevant or distracting — you must learn how to handle the monkey mind: that endless chatter of fear, restlessness, distraction and other voices in our heads that Buddha described as monkeys clamoring for our attention. If you hate the monkey mind , [...]
