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
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
Who is maladjusted? It is someone who lost the ability to be surprised. We must re-learn how to be surprised. Alice Walker has good advice for all of us who practice mindfulness meditation: Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise. As a meditation teacher, I’m happy when folks describe feelings familiar from childhood resurfacing in meditation,
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 haunting me, and I couldn’t
Despite all that is wrong, I can still take delight in a moment of well-being. News stories are not the conversation starters they used to be. In the day, I could fill an awkward gap by saying “Guess what I heard on NPR this morning?” I don’t use that line anymore. These are intense times.
I feel that I should be above it all, but mostly I’m not. I struggle with my emotions. Practicing mindfulness of emotions helps a lot, but sometimes I am just plain sad or overcome by all that is untenable in the world, borrowing a line from Brother Steindl-Rast. I feel that I should be above
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
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
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