Burgs Podcast

The five hindrances are the grossest parts of the mind that need to be attended to before we get properly settled or make progress towards refining the mind. So much of the work is around the refinem…

The Buddha shared the teachings of insight and concentration to those people who were committed to living a virtuous life. The ego pursues different things from the Dharma than the heart. We don’t be…

When human consciousness is refined with kindness and respect and our hearts are pure, we are close to the divine.  Our inspiration is to be close to that. But when humans get too self-absorbed, we a…

When the Buddha taught the Dharma he hoped that beings would free themselves from suffering. We swing from periods of good fortune to misfortune. When we are fortunate, there is a danger that we run …

How you are feeling now is a result of how you have reacted to what you have experienced in the past.  The way we react is hardwired into us. It is a conditioned response. We each have a different st…

Giving back and breathing out can be an adventure. You have to put a significant amount of time and energy into your practice to see what you are truly capable of. Committing to a long retreat, for e…

How can I manage my life in such as a way that I feel comfortable and settled in the experiences that I am engaging in? Part of the answer is looking at taking care of yourself, being realistic and m…

The experience is what has a transformative effect in meditation. Seeing something we have not seen before can create a paradigm shift which helps us transform our suffering. Peak experiences are not…

The Buddha was not interested in teaching the momentary cessation of suffering but finding a pathway to cut off at the root the habit of bringing ourselves to suffering. When he was a prince twenty-f…

We may not have recognised it but somewhere inside us is a longing for a sense of deep connection to what we are part of. We try to do meet this through ideas but this is not the same as being totall…

With more mindfulness, you can see what you are bringing to this moment from the past. When you witness this without a sense of self, you see things much for how they really are rather than what you …

The goal of meditation is to free ourselves from suffering of the affliction we experience in our life. To see clearly what life is, we have to polish the lens that we look through.  Understanding co…

What did the Buddha say was the cause of suffering? You might think that attachment is the cause of our suffering, but attachment itself is caused by ignorance. If we saw what life truly is, we would…

You don’t know what you are going to get in life – good luck or bad luck, who knows?  Sometimes life goes your way and sometimes it does not.  It does not matter what you get, it matters how you meet…

Sometimes the conditions are not present for us to be flourishing and we are either struggling or coping.  The maturing of our insight ensures we can make more skilful life decisions, so that our exp…

What causes disturbances in our meditation once we have established serenity and are not throwing any more pebbles into the pond of our mind?  It’s our old stock of unwholesome mental states which sh…

Are you looking to learn to meditate or realise the path out of suffering?  Your welfare in the here and now is dependent on the accumulation of merit in the past.  If you are practicing to enhance y…

Following on from the last episode, Burgs explores the themes of vitality, karma and stress.  The quality of your mind has a very significant impact on the quality of your life – much more so than wh…

What is the mechanism by which the state of our mind impacts our health?  There are four causes for the arising of material states; temperature, nutriment, consciousness and karma / action energy.  I…