We often underestimate children’s capacity to understand grief. We imagine them as too fragile or too innocent – as though sparing them the sorrow somehow preserves their childhood. — This visual is human-created, AI-aided.
When I first visited Amaravati Buddhist monastery in the United Kingdom, I expected my stay to be a blissful “spa for the mind”, surrounded by birdsong and blooming gardens.
Instead, I found myself wondering what I’d signed up for when I’d learned a Theravada Buddhism chant inviting us to reflect on the impermanence of things. It begins, “All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will become otherwise, will become separated from me”. British people can have their moments of melancholy, but the monastics of the Thai forest tradition took it to a whole other level.
