It’s helpful every so often to ask ourselves what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. What habits are we reinforcing and what kind of life are we building for ourselves? What it is that we’re cultivating? And if we have a spiritual practice of any kind, maybe to ask ourselves whether that practice is helping us to respond to our world more skilfully.

The Buddha’s teachings encourage us to hold our practice lightly. To apply what we’ve learned in a practical way, not to encumber ourselves with it.

Often the path requires us to embrace apparent contradictions. Some of our practice has to be understood from different perspectives, depending on how we’re going to apply it.

Training ourselves to stay with the opposites helps us keep our minds pliable and open. It counteracts our tendency to fit everything we hear into our existing world view.

One way to practise fearlessness and a more open, receptive relationship with our world is through the Brahmaviharas, also known as the heart practices. These four qualities of friendliness, compassion, joy, and equanimity describe our potential for emotional and psychological freedom.

They’re capacities that already exist in us. By cultivating them, we’re making them our natural home.