Don't Take Your Life Personally

Ajahn Sumedho urges us to trust in awareness and find out for ourselves what it is to experience genuine liberation from mental anguish and suffering, just as the Buddha himself did two and a half thousand years ago. Ajahn Sumedho, an American Buddhist monk, practised for ten years in Thailand with the well known monk, Ajahn Chah. He has since spent over thirty years in England and is the founder of the Cittaviveka Forest Monastery in West Sussex and the Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in Hertfordshire. ‘Mindfulness or awareness is knowing. It is a direct knowing, immanent here and now. It is being fully present, attentive to this present moment as is. But defining mindfulness tends to make it into something — and then it is no longer mindfulness. Mindfulness is not a thing; it is a recognition, an intuitive awareness; it is awareness without grasping.’