I was initially turned off by Buddhist metta meditation. I felt it was silly sentimentality, like putting on a Pollyanna-ish fake smile. But slowly, things changed. Now I hold this practice most dearly. It turns out loving-kindness meditation is not sentimentality, and it is not really affection. It’s more about living with the Buddha called
We can experience deep Buddhist insight by examining our present moment experience of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking. This mind of our is pretty amazing. Our cognitive power propels us to the top of the food chain on this planet, and maybe even on others as we plan the colonization of Mars. But
The other day I read this haiku by the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa. It stopped my distracted mind in its tracks. What a strange thing!To be alivebeneath cherry blossoms. What a marvel, what a special thing it is to be conscious, to be aware, and to know that we’re aware. We’re not here for that
Meditation helps us put down the baggage we carry around. Traveling lightly, we feel airborne. We move into a keener love of simplicity. There is a story by Mark Twain about someone who dies and goes to “heaven” and gets a pair of wings and a harp. At first, they used the wings as a
The comedy improv teacher Jimmy Carrane mentioned in a blog post that the Illinois State Lottery once had a slogan that went: You can’t win if you don’t play. Although I’m not endorsing gambling here, we can apply this slogan to how we practice mindfulness. If we approach our practice as a grim duty to
This is our work: to live wisely, not in contention with anything, and able to love. What does it mean to practice Dharma in the home stretch of 2023, with all the wars, hate crimes, refugee crises, and environmental catastrophes all over the world? I would offer a short and simple response, quoting Sylvia Boorstein,
We breathe, and open our hearts no matter how difficult it feels, bringing some peace to our minds as we ask what is compassion? The ongoing events in Gaza are hard to take in. I am sorry to bring this up, but I can’t shake these feelings. If I could draw a picture of my