My news feed, if I let it, can incline my mind toward fear, confusion and anger at all the crises we face. But I can also re-frame my news feed to feel compassion for the suffering of others. This compassion is really the opposite of wallowing. The news. OMG, how to deal with the news?…
As you set out on your meditation journey, don’t set yourself up for failure and avoid aggressive self-improvement. There isn’t anything to improve. And really, the present moment is un-tweak-able. It’s just fine as it is, and so are you. One of the trickiest aspects of mindfulness meditation is the whole thing about letting go…
We savor our life now just as it is, messy, littered with abandoned to-do lists and unfulfilled expectations. We appreciate our life now, we’re not just managing it. When asked about the fruit of meditative life, the 13th century Japanese monk Dogen Zenji replied: “enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” Mindfulness allows us to…
As we let go of expectations in our mindfulness practice, it generalizes in our life-we are more present and responsive, and less reactive. Buddhist practice is not so much about answering the so-called big questions of life and death, but rather about dissolving the angst around the questions themselves. mindfulness is about appreciating the present…
Tears well up as I type these words. I ask myself, can I let myself be mindfully undone by this pain and not shut down from it? A few days ago, President Zelensky addressed the UN Security Council via video link from Kiev. He ended his talk with a short video montage of still photos…
What is mindfulness meditation, and do I have to be a Buddhist to benefit from practicing it? I am frequently asked if someone needs to be a Buddhist to benefit from Buddhist meditation. My answer is a qualified no. I say qualified because if I simply said no and left it at that, then mindfulness…
That Putin is digging into a hole he will not get out of, is a trigger for the Buddhist contemplation practitioner to re-frame this situation as a historic teachable moment. Last week I asked if we should be preoccupied with the war in Ukraine. I got several answers back from you, the most pithy being:…
I admit I am preoccupied with the war in Ukraine. Should I not be? I am ambivalent about mixing politics with spirituality, so I am trying to be very cautious here. But as the French sculptor Daniel Buren once wrote: Every act is political whether one is conscious of it or not. If our meditation…
As we soak in the healing waters of the present moment, the chasms between sacred and mundane, bearable and unbearable, dissolve. We live in uncertain times. Putin’s recent cold threat of a nuclear strike against Ukraine, and the real possibility of our mutual assured destruction, escalates our unease. How do we live with such…
When we come home to who we are in our entirety, as we are here and now in the dynamic flow of impermanence, we discover we never left this place of true refuge and peace. I spoke on the phone the other day with a dear friend I had not seen in…
The practice of present moment awareness shows us that whatever we are dealing with does not define us. Difficult stuff comes up, but it doesn’t diminish our well-being. Maybe right now as you are reading this, you feel a little overwhelmed, anxious or bored. There is well-being in this, too. Give this a try. Make…
Progress happens when you don’t think about it. I was struck by a poem the other day while reading a new translation of the Therigatha, a small book of verse compiled in the beginning of the 6th century BC, by Buddhist nuns, chronicling their spiritual struggles and victories. It is also regarded as the earliest-known…
Do you have to meditate every day? The question really should be can I be happily present with things just as they are, rather than struggling with a goal? I find that newer students don’t ask this question much in their meditation groups, fearing, perhaps, that they might be the only ones with this…
With the gradual deepening of your practice, you will feel a wonderful stillness in meditation when you simply rest your awareness on the body. The meditation teacher Gil Fronsdal, in one of his talks, speaks about visiting his son one day when he was in preschool. The kids were all running around, as little…
I think so, but the real question is how to develop patience with the meditation process itself. The only way to fail at meditation is to stop meditating. As long as you show up, the meditative process happens. It’s really simple: sit down on a chair or a cushion, set the timer on your phone…
Although I try to not address too many political issues on this blog, for reasons I hope to make clear if you choose to read this post, the coup in Burma the morning of February 1 is worthy of some discussion. Please forgive me if the opinions expressed here come off as cheeky or…
Tears just flowed from my face when I heard Amanda Gorman, the first national youth poet laureate at only 22 years old, stride up to the microphone in front of an anxious worldwide audience and recite her emotionally moving poem The Hill We Climb during the inauguration yesterday. I have wept often in my 64…
Realize that for many our negativity bias is on steroids right now, and that’s OK. Notice the lovely things that happen in your day. Just let these short sweet moments in, and nurture your resilience. I’ve always loved the way Japanese poets influenced by the Jodo Shinshu tradition express their wisdom in verse. Here…
Just as our mindfulness meditation builds the capacity to unemotionally witness the unfolding imagery in our waking state, it also allows our dream-awareness to neutrally observe its own late night show. I had this dream the other night: lines from an obscure American poet kept haunting me, and I couldn’t remember the poet’s name….
There is a lot of pressure on the whole New Year’s thing this year, right? I mean, the pandemic, economic turmoil; not to mention I am behind a few loads of laundry. And all of a sudden I am somehow supposed to start fresh, become a brand new, happy, healthy person, and so on. Not…
Buddhism offers us a path to decolonize our own minds, thankfully. It not only teaches inclusion, it points out the shared insanity of separateness that causes so much suffering. Lama Thubten Yeshe was one of the first Tibetans to teach Buddhism to Westerners. I went to see him in Nepal, but he had just left…
As I write this, the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election is still up in the air. The major news outlets sense our anxiety. We wonder how this can be? When will it be over? Many of us watched for four years as what we held most dear, our aspirations and hopes, disappeared under…