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. We need to find our footing in an information age that may be getting the…
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 it all, but mostly I’m not. Reading lines from ancient Zen stories, ones…
Yes, I know pandemics happen. Evolution hurts sometimes, I guess. Writing in the New York Times on September 23rd of this year, the epidemiologist and physician Dr. Amitha Kalaichandran observed Evolution can sometimes look like destruction to the untrained eye. We just passed 200,000 deaths here in the USA attributed to Covid-19. Yes, in our…
OK, that post title is a bit of click-bait. But you’re here now. So let me explain how the 13th century Japanese Zen master Dogen’s phrase is the title of this post. Some of you reading this know I tested positive for Covid-19 on July 9. At present five co-workers on the same shift on…
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…
Karen Maezen Miller, in a piece in Lion’s Roar, describes the domestic practices of ancient Zen masters as intimate daily life transformations. Following in their steps she reflects: In the fall, the broad canopy of giant sycamores in my backyard turns faintly yellow and the leaves sail down. A part of every autumn day finds…
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…
We bring a gentle, loving awareness to this body. We treat it softly, and with respect. It knows; our body feels respected. One little peek at my phone yesterday and bam, my screen screamed out: “Trump freaks out after the Midterms and ousts Sessions.” I think we are all freaking out just a little too…
The prominent Buddhist teacher, author, and activist, Joan Halifax, on the day of this shooting tweeted “I want to live in a country that loves its children more than its guns.” I would like to wish everyone a thoughtful International Woman’s Day (today, March 8, 2018). Here in the USA, the #MeToo and the Time’s…