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.

The Buddha's disciple Ananda appears throughout the early scriptures as someone who was faithful, humble and above all, human. In many ways, he wasn't the perfect monk. There are occasions when his sensitivity and his expressions of grief seem at odds with the Buddha's teachings on non-attachment and impermanence.

His honesty makes him an excellent role model. It’s easy to get uptight and self-absorbed about our practice. If we can be completely honest about our imperfection, our complete lack of enlightenment, the times when we lose our equilibrium and the times when sadness overwhelms us, then we open up to being fully alive.

There are parts of ourselves that we choose not to share with the world, patterns and beliefs that we don’t want to acknowledge, even to ourselves. If you ever notice yourself reacting or becoming lost in rumination, there’s an opportunity to learn about yourself.

It might be time to shift your attention from the outside world back inside.

In our meditation practice we’re not trying to rise above the raw and messy. We’re not trying to transcend our humanness. We’re practising opening to our tenderness, our vulnerability, our sensitivity, our insubstantial nature.

Our experience of body and mind is constantly changing. That means our sense of self keeps changing. There’s nothing solid to hang on to.

Our need for security means we spend a lot of time and energy trying to hang on anyway, and that clinging generates a lot of our suffering and dissatisfaction.

With practice, we start to see just how insubstantial the sense of self really is. We see that it’s just part of the flow of experience.

The Pali word ‘saddhā’ is often translated as ‘faith’, but a better translation might be ‘trust’ or ‘confidence’.

Saddhā conveys a willingness to engage in and commit to practice. There’s no need for belief in a higher power or a deity because saddhā is grounded in direct personal experience.