Our simple practice of sustaining mindful attention on the most ordinary happenings in our everyday life, can bring this feeling of really being alive. We meditate for many different reasons. Often, our original motivations morph as we move forward on this path. It’s juicy to reflect on why we keep this up. Maybe we
Ram Dass encouraged us to embrace our foolish selves rather than try to fix them I heard the news as I was driving home from work this past Tuesday morning. Ram Dass was dead. Maybe I will remember this drive home like I still remember that bleak winter day in late November in
Good poems, for me, are often potent teachings on how to live this precious life we are given. Over the years I have been moved to tears reading poems. There is one poet in particular I keep coming back to, the Japanese poet Ryōkan Taigu, who lived from 1758–1831. Ryokan, as a Google search tells me,
You can’t push the river, the Zen masters of old would say. And wow, how I have tried—reading, studying the Dharma, going on retreats, even fasting at times. Then I read U Tejaniya’s teachings. I have been stopped in my tracks, stunned and ultimately grateful for key instructions given at just the right moment, but
As a species we seem to have solidified a very real revulsion for the inevitable, as well as toward the smaller slights along the way. We hide death and suffering like some grand failing; we distract ourselves into oblivion as if to avoid taking our predicament seriously. Another of my early teachers, Sharon Salzberg, tells
Meditation is not easy, I get it. There are aches and pains in the body and the mind can get restless … and there is inner simplicity. But, as Hawaii-born retired Sumo grand-master Akebono would say to reporters after winning yet another match, “I just try my best.” That’s all we ask. Try your best.
Do we feel we are missing out on some better, or more spiritual, experience by being stuck with a mountain of laundry, a sink overflowing with dishes, or a yard full of leaves to rake? Karen Maezen Miller, in a piece in Lion’s Roar, describes the domestic practices of ancient Zen masters as intimate daily
The little way of St. Therese Lisieux is a path, she would say, of awareness and willingness, of gratitude and surrender, of confidence and humility; and above all, of love. When I remember this saying, my heart releases what it’s fixated on, and it’s almost always fixated or worrying about something. Sylvia Boorstein once quipped
Mindfulness meditation leaves the self-help mindset in the dust by challenging the existence of the very thing we are setting out to improve, the self. In an article on the self-help movement in New York Magazine back in 2013, Kathryn Shultz observed she knows people who “wouldn’t so much as walk through the self-help section
While everyone is wishing their co-workers, friends and family a fantastic new year, I would settle for an ordinary new year. Wishing others an entire year of monumental experiences or events, is curious to me. I am not sure I can handle anything too out of the ordinary. In fact, I am quite happy with