Just when I thought things couldn’t get more dreadful, they did. 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…
The suffering in the world is overwhelming, but the whole mess looks differently when we when know how to meditate every day. Everyone is frazzled. Shootings, politics, racial and economic disparities, climate catastrophes. That’s why it’s really important to learn how to meditate every day. This is not a post about learning to meditate in terms…
I got it that while I talked Dharma, I wasn’t walking the path during this illness very well. 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…
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…
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…
Your well-being is actually independent of conditions. As your practice matures over time, the feeling of well-being arises more frequently and in all kinds of situations. We have all we need to lead a fulfilling life now. If you can breathe, you can be mindful. We may feel a little chagrined finding ourselves in those…