Unexpected Freedom

Unexpected Freedomintuitively drawn to a source-oriented approach but at thesame time keeping a half-hearted commitment to goalstriving.A predicament which led me into years ofconfusion in which I vainly tried to synthesize and reconcilethe two approaches in my own practice. Finding myselfencouraged by one of our senior monks to follow my ownintuition was quite a relief, freeing up a lot of energy. Part ofthe newly kindled enthusiasm went straight into the effort toget the talks edited. With the help of a few good friends wemerged them into one text called ‘We are all Translators’, thesecond of this collection. There was a particularly strongincentive for me to do this, having seen how many otherpeople, particularly Westerners, shared the same response tothe talks or the theme developed in them. And the receptionof the talk seems to have proved its relevance, as it has nowbeen reprinted in several languages.Soon after coming to Aruna Ratanagiri, the monastery atHarnham, in the north of England, where Ajahn Munindo isthe senior incumbent, a number of other talks sprang to myattention that seemed similarly significant, addingperspectives and themes that felt like cornerstones of AjahnMunindo’s way of living and presenting the Dhamma: ‘Whenwe fall in Love’ with its appreciation of how to harness all ofour enthusiasm for life into our practice; ‘What isRenunciation?’ explaining the need for a proper container inwhich our passions can be transformed; and ‘Prayer andDevotion’, concerning the engagement of our heart’slongings and aspirations in a way that usually gets littleattention in Western presentations of the Theravadateachings. Then, over a period of a few months I heard AjahnMunindo give a whole series of talks illustrating theapplication of present-moment awareness to variousdifficult situations and emotions, culminating in the ‘The