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Monks’n’Drugs’n’Rock’n’Roll

The first 7 posts were originally published, in rather more concise form, in Thailand’s Plus Seven magazine, in 2020. Beginning as an account of a personal journey back in 2002 from London’s music industry, via drug addiction, to a Buddhist monastery. After that, it veers in multiple directions, but usually swerving back to a core curriculum of overcoming the bad stuff.

These pieces are ordered like a standard blog, with the latest first. If you would prefer to read them in sequence, then that would be starting here.

Elementary – part II

Hello! Continuing to address my own sceptical question, “aren’t stories just for kids?” I am now going to present my second auto-rebuttal – the one I called “general” – a bit more. Hopefully, by the end of this I will have got some way to making the case that we continue through adulthood to interpret…

by phrasuparo

Elementary

I reckon it is fast-approaching time to move on from mythic lands, and instead focus the next pieces on some more immediately obviously practical stuff. I have amassed a bit of a backlog there of things I would like to share, mainly as a result of cross-referencing my own experience with that of others, who…

by phrasuparo

Hercules and the Mystery of the Disappearing Detective. And a Dog

Through a considerable effort of will and sacrifice, I have determined to try to wrap up my exploration of the relevance of classic myth and story to our personal journeys out of our destructive habits of body and mind. For the time being at least – I am certainly not swearing that I will not…

by phrasuparo

Hiscules vs Themesis

In last week’s post I was intending to rip through a lightning tour of heroic myths, ancient and modern, and make the case that these are really worthwhile things to get into. I think I can summarise my reasoning as being along lines that: I believe that the big, proper myths do not in fact…

by phrasuparo

(S)crappy New Year – a seasonal sermon

Well, I enjoyed my Christmas Eve foray into vicaring and sermonising so much, that I think I’ll do it again. Blessings and compliments of the season to you. I’m saying “the season” rather than “Happy New Year”, because this time of year has always seemed more like a trajectory to me, than a series of…

by phrasuparo

Peas be with You

As a reverend gentleman of the cloth hailing from the leafy and undramatic Home Counties of England [non-Brits, think: “The Shire”], in an unscheduled departure from usual programming, I have decided to exercise for the first time, my God & Queen-given right to compose a cozy Christmas homily. Were I to do this in line…

by phrasuparo

More Fun Than a Treefull of Monkeys

I devoted much of the previous post to underlining the rather large amount of failure, destruction, and death that attend a problem like chronic addiction, and then enumerating and discussing some powerful forces which are aligned against us when we embark on a quest for freedom. Things with catchy names like “despair”, and “self-pity”. So…

by phrasuparo

Tree – mend us

So, it took me nearly 6 months of procrastination deep reflection and research to come up with the last blog post, in which I then rashly gave myself a fortnight to come up with this one. I have decided that deadlines and structures are good for me (much as I resist them), while “getting around…

by phrasuparo

The Devil made me do it…

Hello! So, after a hiatus of several months, I’m back on the blog. Why? When I first put these pieces up online, in early 2021, my initial motivation was: After nearly a year of travel restrictions, we had seen hardly any non-Thai patients at the detox in Thamkrabok monastery. Speaking to old friends back in…

by phrasuparo

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