When you don’t feel compassion as you scroll through the daily newsfeed horror show- just be aware of not feeling particularly compassionate. I have received emails from readers asking whether we can cultivate a mature mindfulness practice and not feel particularly compassionate, especially regarding the state of the world. The horrors reported on media channels
If we get uptight about feeling uncomfortable in meditation, just remember this simple instruction- give careful and kind attention to whatever arises. Do you ever find yourself feeling uncomfortable in meditation after just settling in? If your mind could text you, what would it say? Lately, mine would text: Oh, no- not my aching knee
One of my first meditation teachers, Sharon Salzberg, often talks about her early days learning how to meditate in India under her teacher, Munindra. One of his first counsels to her was: Try to be with each breath as though it was your first, and as though it was your last. Anagarika Munindra Being with
Someone once asked Suzuki Roshi, the pioneering Zen teacher from Japan who founded the Zen Center of San Francisco in 1969: “Roshi, what’s the most important thing?” and he answered: To find out what’s the most important thing. Byron Katie, who teaches a practice called self-inquiry, said that the world’s number one problem is confusion.
Do you have a fear of missing out on a more spiritual experience doing a mountain of laundry, washing a sinkful of dishes, or raking leaves till kingdom come? The meditation teacher Karen Maezen Miller, in a piece published in Lion’s Roar, rightfully calls us on this thought, while describing how the domestic lives of
The title here steals from Carson McCuller’s remarkable debut novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, published in 1940 when she was only 23. Our mind can easily turn into a lonely hunter when it thinks there is something to get or achieve in meditation. When we eat breakfast, can we just eat? Just taste
Mindfulness meditation is not just another way to fix what we feel might be broken in our lives. It really helps us be happy. Maybe you struggle with low moods, motivation, or existential malaise. Maybe you feel lonely, or bored. We all do. Mindfulness re-orients us; rather than striving to get rid of stress and
A New Yorker magazine cartoon depicts a couple strolling down the street, one saying to the other: These are the ‘good old days’ that someday we won’t be able to remember. I think a lot about when the kids were little, and how great it felt to be a new dad, and now that both
One of the most frequent misunderstandings I hear about meditation practice is it will turn us into non-judgemental zombies. It’s easy to see why one would think this, since mindfulness teaches us to pay attention to our direct experience non-judgmentally, well, then it would seem to follow that we will eventually lose the capacity or