Meditation helps us put down the baggage we carry around. Traveling lightly, we feel airborne. We move into a keener love of simplicity. There is a story by Mark Twain about someone who dies and goes to “heaven” and gets a pair of wings and a harp. At first, they used the wings as a
This is our work: to live wisely, not in contention with anything, and able to love. What does it mean to practice Dharma in the home stretch of 2023, with all the wars, hate crimes, refugee crises, and environmental catastrophes all over the world? I would offer a short and simple response, quoting Sylvia Boorstein,
Someone once asked Suzuki Roshi, the pioneering Zen teacher from Japan who founded the Zen Center of San Francisco in 1969: “Roshi, what’s the most important thing?” and he answered: To find out what’s the most important thing. Byron Katie, who teaches a practice called self-inquiry, said that the world’s number one problem is confusion.
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
We have been practicing the opposite of what meditation asks of us for so many years, no wonder it is so hard to meditate every day. I am often asked why is hard to meditate every day? Despite the utter simplicity of the practice itself, why is it so difficult to consistently sit down and