Aloha Sangha

Ok, that post title is a bit of click-bait. But you’re here now. So let me explain. Some of you reading this know I tested positive for Covid-19 on …

  I love Buddhist humor. I especially love the way many Buddhist meditation masters find humorous ways to show us how uptight we can get.   Back in ancient …

Our simple practice of sustaining mindful attention on the most ordinary happenings in our everyday life, can bring this feeling of really being alive. We meditate for many different …

  Ram Dass encouraged us to embrace our foolish selves rather than try to fix them.   I heard the news as I was driving home from work this …

    I feel that I should be above it all, but mostly I’m not.   I struggle with my emotions. Meditation helps a lot, but sometimes I am …

Good poems, for me, are often potent teachings on how to live this precious life we are given. Over the years I have been moved to tears reading poems.  …

  You can’t push the river, the Zen masters of old would say. And wow, how I have tried—reading, studying the Dharma, going on retreats, even fasting from time. …

One of my teachers, Michele McDonald-Smith, once recounted that a 92 year old relative of hers, on being informed by her doctor of a terminal cancer diagnosis, became upset …

  Meditation is not easy, I get it. There are aches and pains in the body, the mind gets restless; the breath fades in and out of awareness.   …

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 …