Meditation reveals that I rarely live my life in a “pure” state. Instead, a relentless, buzzing inner narrator constantly insists on labeling each moment before I have the chance to genuinely experience it. Sometimes I feel I have morphed into a character in a New Yorker cartoon, standing before a magnificent sunset while holding a…
Our simple practice helps us release the unhelpful preoccupations that creep into our minds as we sit quietly and observe our thoughts. Releasing these, I find I have less need for quick “hits” of distraction, like the news. What would it be like to spend more time absorbed in the awe of existence, rather than…
Life for me right now is good. I returned from two months of intensive practice in Sri Lanka and Malaysia. My health is OK. I even went to the gym yesterday. Yet stuff comes up. Not because of anything in particular. I’m sitting here typing this and I sense some uneasiness, some anxiety, perhaps 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 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 top, and some, gripped by fear, had to stop halfway up. She observes: Life is a journey of meeting your edge again and again. That’s where…
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 of 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. the Israel-Hamas war I knew in my heart there was some meaning to the poem’s effect on…
Do you have a fear of missing out on a more spiritual experience doing a mountain of laundry, washing a sink full 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…
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 willingness to judge. Mindfulness is actually about slowing down the often rapid-fire judging most of us are doing non-stop…
I have turned into a real crab. No, I did not wake up one morning to discover I was a decapod crustacean of the infra-order Brachyura, sort of like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, the traveling salesman in “Metamorphosis,” who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a giant insect — a dung beetle, by…