Now, while loving-kindness and compassion might sound like these grand ideas, they’re actually really practical meditation practices. When you put in the effort, they truly transform your heart. Think of it as a master gardener bringing dead soil back to life. These practices can do the same for parts of yourself you’ve neglected. In a…
Mindfulness allows us to live into all that cannot be solved. It’s also a gateway to equanimity, the peace of the present moment. The other day, I listened to a podcast of an interview with Frank Osteseki, who is a pioneer in end-of-life care, founding in 1987 the Zen Hospice Project, the first Buddhist hospice…
The mind throws up resistance to the process of liberation- but we can metabolize this, allowing deep change and a graceful opening into a timeless presence. The American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön tells a story about meeting your edge- of a group of people climbing up a very steep mountain. Some made it to the…
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…
The other day I came across a very short poem by the 11th century Japanese woman poet Izumi Shikibu, and it struck a chord: Although the windblows terribly here,the moonlight also leaksbetween the roof planksof this ruined house. Although The Wind … the Israel-Hamas war I knew in my heart there was some meaning to…
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…
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…
Lately, I’ve been dealing with a relative of monkey mind I am calling crabby mind. They may be far apart on the biologic tree of life, but they are kissing cousins on my meditation mat. I’ve turned into a real crab. No, I didn’t wake up one morning to discover I was a decapod crustacean…
The Zen teacher Sobun Katherine Thanas in a book which was published not long after she passed a few years ago, wrote: I have come to realize that our work is to love the world just as it is. Teachings of Katherine Thanas The work she is talking about is our simple meditation practice. I…
Relaxing into not-knowing is a key to the present moment. When you don’t know, all possibilities are open. How do we live our life knowing that it’s temporary? We have this opportunity to live this life, and we don’t know for how long. And we don’t know what will happen next. I am guessing most…