As you set out on your meditation journey- avoid aggressive self-improvement. There isn’t anything to improve; the present moment is just fine as it is. One of the trickiest aspects of mindfulness meditation is the whole thing about letting go of goals. It seems to make no sense at all to not have any goal
We savor our life just as it is, messy, littered with abandoned to-do lists and unfulfilled expectations. We appreciate our life now, we’re not just managing it. When asked about the fruit of meditative life, the 13th century Japanese monk Dogen Zenji replied: “enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” Mindfulness allows us to intimately
As we let go of expectations in our mindfulness practice, it generalizes in our life-we are more present and responsive, and less reactive. Buddhist practice is not so much about answering the so-called big questions of life and death, but rather about dissolving the angst around the questions themselves. mindfulness is about appreciating the present
Tears well up as I type these words. I ask myself, can I let myself be mindfully undone by this pain and not shut down from it? A few days ago, President Zelensky addressed the UN Security Council via video link from Kiev. He ended his talk with a short video montage of still photos
What is mindfulness meditation, and do I have to be a Buddhist to benefit from practicing it? I am frequently asked if someone needs to be a Buddhist to benefit from Buddhist meditation. My answer is a qualified no. I say qualified because if I simply said no and left it at that, then mindfulness
That Putin is digging into a hole he will not get out of, is a trigger for the Buddhist contemplation practitioner to re-frame this situation as a historic teachable moment. Last week I asked if we should be preoccupied with the war in Ukraine. I got several answers back from you, the most pithy being:
I am ambivalent about mixing politics with spirituality, so I am trying to be very cautious here. But as the French sculptor Daniel Buren once wrote: Every act is political whether one is conscious of it or not. If our meditation practice is to be of any real value to us, it must shine a
As we soak in the healing waters of the present moment, the chasms between sacred and mundane, bearable and unbearable, dissolve. We live in uncertain times. Putin’s recent cold threat of a nuclear strike against Ukraine, and the real possibility of our mutual assured destruction, escalates our unease. How do we live with such insecurity?
When we come home to who we are in our entirety, as we are here and now in the dynamic flow of impermanence, we discover we never left this place of true refuge and peace. I spoke on the phone the other day with a dear friend I had not seen in 40 years. We
The practice of present moment awareness shows us that whatever we are dealing with does not define us. Difficult stuff comes up, but it doesn’t diminish our well-being. Maybe right now as you are reading this, you feel a little overwhelmed, anxious or bored. There is well-being in this, too. Give this a try. Make