Buddhistisches Tor Berlin

10/04/2025

23/11/2024

Alle sind herzlich willkommen

26/06/2024

Alle sind herzlich willkommen!

12/04/2024

18/08/2023

17/08/2023

What tone of voice do you speak to yourself in?

What kind of commentary do you give yourself?

About the way you look, your life, your worth…?

It’s important.

Sometimes it can be very sad to hear the way we speak to ourselves about ourselves, with a nasty critical voice.

More like an than a .

Then we flip into the other direction.

And we ‘put ourselves first’ with a militant defensive attitude which isn’t really being kind to ourselves either.

This is what the first stage of the Bhavana is about.

You could say it’s a priority and our duty as to learn how to develop and stabilise our self care/love.

For ourselves but just as importantly, for the sake of others.

It’s about strength and independence.

Both of which lead to clarity of vision.

The metta bhavana meditation is powerful.

It literally our life by going to the root of the matter.

We step in at the beginning and stop becoming victims of our own states.

The kindest people I’ve met seem to love themselves in a very straightforward healthy way.

Oddly enough you can practice Buddhism for a long time and never get down to fully loving yourself like that.

Someone who is genuinely kind to themselves is a rare creature. There is an ease in their being.

And obviously that and love doesn’t end at the borders of their skin.

It overflows into the lives of those around them.

Real love or metta is nothing sentimental or self indulgent.

It’s not narcissistic to actually love and care for your body and mind and feel directly connected to your life force and the life force around you.

We are simply developing into what calls the happy healthy human.

Of course, in secular society that is the end goal of life.

Interestingly, in Buddhism, the happy healthy human is just the beginning of the Path…

11/08/2023

The world is full of heroes and heroines. Ever since mankind was able to tell stories, outstanding human beings habe haunted our imagination. Buddhism is also full of heroes and heroines. We might not always feel heroic, but Sangharaksh*ta says that to follow the buddhist ideal is to follow a heroic ideal. So, in tomorrow‘ s Saturday class, Dharmasara will be exploring this topic with you. Class starts at 11am. Please arrive 10 minutes ahead of start. Suitable for newcomers. Class is based on donations. See you there!

20/07/2023

…With an attitude of and care towards this body and this .

Life can be very difficult sometimes.

Sometimes extremely difficult.

We all need and through practice we learn to become a .

Towards ourselves and others.

The rest of this thing called ‘our life’ is a mind made madness.

Running around like headless chickens pecking at each other over nonsense.

(Hmmm, that image doesn’t really work does it, never mind, you know what I mean!)

We forget we are animals sometimes with real animal bodies.

We tend to live in abstracted universes.

But we need to get back to our ‘here and now’.

The immediate basics.

A better life.

Feet on the ground.

down into the base.

Remembering that our thoughts are just that…thoughts.

Strange temporary shifting ghost-like things…

They are only one small part of our overall reality but we usually let them dominate our entire experience.

Without being aware of it we give them too much power and priority.

We are capable of more than this.

Realizing all this is a bit like sobering up.

And it is also the basis of .

So, tonight we will be exploring how we find our ground, not in thoughts but directly in our experience, as the foundation for the heart to rest and even potentially open.

14/07/2023

We often hear about the and being the two sides of .

But there a third aspect which is often missed out.

And that is .

When we see into the nature of directly there is an ‘unbinding’ in the words.

We are not tangled up in the tight knot of selfhood and .

We are free.

But what are ‘we’?

What is this ‘we’ that is free?

You could say really and truly that we are energy.

That is what ‘we’ are.

And when ‘we’, or this stream of psycho physical energy, is not tangled up in mind made ghost worlds, in knots, all that energy is freed up.

It can move.

It can break through and break out of the mental webs and suffocating misunderstandings we loose our lives in.

It’s true that most of the time the path is gradual.

Step by step.

That’s part of the Buddhas genius, finding a way to help people like us grow.

But sometimes there is a break through.

Perhaps even is a kind of violence required.

There are things that need to be broken and broken through.

Destroyed even.

But what exactly is it that we break through in order to free ourselves?

What keeps us tied to the Wheel of unsatisfactory and painful repetition over a lifetime?

This Saturday Aryabandhu will be exploring all this!

For those of you who don’t know Aryabandhu, he is the Chairman of Buddhistisches Tor and the reason we have the English speaking activities in here in Berlin at all and much more besides.

He deliberately asked me not to do some massive thing bigging him up, he’s not into all that.

So I will just say I feel blessed to have him as a friend and I find it amazing what he has done in Berlin to help to this Buddhist centre grow and keep growing.