Your Mind is Conditioned in The Gap

Last year I discovered “Dependent Origination”, a Buddhist teaching. During my mindfulness enquiry I came across a podcast episode on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, I highly recommend it. On it was Andrea Fella of the Insight Meditation Center, Redwood, California, USA.

Listening to her being interviewed I could have sworn that she was almost shouting, well at least talking at an elevated pitch to try and get the concept of Dependent Origination across. I was thinking, wow this person is quite aggressive, actually I’m not sure if I want to listen to this, but I persisted as she was talking about matters I had never heard of or understood, except to say that after a while I started listening so attentively that I needed to learn more and investigated Andrea further. She was obviously ‘shouting’ for a reason and that was for ME to pay attention!

Let me firstly share a very brief explanation of Dependent Origination: “In the Buddha’s teachings, the second noble truth is not a theory about what happens to somebody else, but is a process which is going on over and over again in our own lives-through all our days, and countless times every single day. This process in Pali is called The process of dependent origination is sometimes said to be the heart or the essence of all Buddhist teaching. What is described in the process is the way in which suffering can…