Progress happens when you don’t think about it. I was struck by a poem the other day while reading a new translation of the Therigatha, a small book of verse compiled in the beginning of the 6th century BC, by Buddhist nuns, chronicling their spiritual struggles and victories. It is…
Do you have to meditate every day? The question really should be can I be happily present with things just as they are, rather than struggling with a goal? I find that newer students don’t ask this question much in their meditation groups, fearing, perhaps, that they might be the…
With the gradual deepening of your practice, you will feel a wonderful stillness when you simply rest your awareness on the body. The meditation teacher Gil Fronsdal, in one of his talks, speaks about visiting his son one day when he was in preschool. The kids were all running around,…
I think so, but the real question is how to develop patience with the meditation process itself. The only way to fail at meditation is to stop meditating. As long as you show up, the meditative process happens. It’s really simple: sit down on a chair or a cushion, set…
Just as in a moment of lucid dreaming we realize Wow, I’m dreaming, we can similarly realize while meditating Wow, I’m thinking. I had this dream the other night that allowed me to see similarities between lucid dreaming and meditation. In the dream, lines from an obscure American poet kept…
There is a lot of pressure on the whole pandemic New Year’s thing, right? I mean, the pandemic, economic turmoil; not to mention I am behind a few loads of laundry. And all of a sudden I am somehow supposed to start fresh, become a brand new, happy, healthy person,…
Buddhism offers us a path to decolonize the mind, thankfully. It not only teaches inclusion, it points out the shared insanity of separateness that causes so much suffering. Lama Thubten Yeshe was one of the first Tibetans to teach Buddhism to Westerners. I went to see him in Nepal, but…