Sep 21: William Deresiewicz, Learning How To Think (16056 reads)
Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s...

Sep 14: Krishna Das, Movie Of Me, Now Playing 24 Hours A Day (7936 reads)
What keeps us away from the gentle rain of grace? It's our endless obsession, all day long, with I, me, mine. We wake up in the morning and start writing "the movie of Me": What am I...

Sep 07: Marti Leimbach, The Broken Piano In 1975 (5336 reads)
My favourite piece of music is Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, an hour-long piece improvised, as all of Jarrett’s concerts are, on a solo piano in front of a live audience. You know...

Aug 31: Irina Tweedie, Glory And Terror Of It (5688 reads)
The realization that every act, every word, every thought of ours not only influences our environment but mysteriously forms an integral part of the Universe, fits into it as if by necessity, in...

Aug 24: Jack Kornfield, The Wisdom Of Uncertainty (9359 reads)
One day Ajahn Chah held up a beautiful Chinese tea cup, “To me this cup is already broken. Because I know its fate, I can enjoy it fully here and now. And when it’s gone, it’s...

Aug 17: Mary Oliver, The Central Commitment Of The Creative Life (9324 reads)
Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always -- these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of...

Aug 10: Annamalai Swami, Does The Mind Exist During Our Sleep? (7182 reads)
Every time you go to sleep you have the experience of being without a mind. You cannot deny that you exist while you are asleep and you cannot deny that your mind is not functioning while you are...

Aug 03: Chris Lombard, Mistakes: Results That Show The Truth Of Things (6689 reads)
The biggest fears are actually the biggest opportunities. I have seen falls. I have seen blood. I have seen gashes and swelled joints and broken bones and I have seen death along with them. I...

Jul 27: Pema Chodron, To Be Continually Thrown Out Of The Nest (9285 reads)
We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. Seeking security...

Jul 20: D. T. Suzuki, Discipline Of Tao (11602 reads)
A master called Yuan came to Tai-chu Hui-hai and asked: 'When disciplining oneself in the Tao, is there any special way of doing it?" Hui-hai: 'Yes, there is." Yuan:...

Jul 13: Anonymous, We Were Made For These Times (7134 reads)
The world is made up of stories. A secret web of agreements about what is “right” and “wrong”, what is “normal” and “weird”, and what is...

Jul 06: Barbara Fredrickson, The Positivity Ratio (12127 reads)
Imagine you’re a water lily. It’s early dawn and your petals are closed in around your face. If you can see anything at all, it’s just a little spot of sunlight. But as the sun...

Jun 29: Viktor Frankl, It Is Life That Asks The Questions Of Us (9420 reads)
The question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me? Now we also...

Jun 22: J. Krishnamurti, Mass Movement (12236 reads)
We see throughout the world extremes of poverty and riches, abundance and at the same time starvation; we have class distinction and racial hatred, the stupidity of nationalism and the appalling...

Jun 15: Otto Scharmer, Four Types Of Listening (9224 reads)
In my years of working with groups and organizations, I have identified four basic types of listening. “Ya, I know that already.” The first type of listening is downloading:...

Jun 08: Larry Yang, Inclining Toward Freedom, Even Through Imperfections (8050 reads)
If we focus only on awakening, we miss most of the spiritual practice. I’m much more interested in how we practice with not awakening, with not being enlightened, because, frankly, those...

Jun 01: Mark Manson, From Transaction To Trust (8684 reads)
The most precious and important things in life are, by definition, nontransactional. And to try to bargain for them is to immediately destroy them. You cannot conspire for happiness; it is...

May 25: Kahlil Gibran, The River Cannot Go Back (13748 reads)
It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and...

May 18: Robin Wall Kimmerer, To Find Something, Don't Look For It (7906 reads)
Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into the sun’s glare, the landscape is only a flat...

May 11: Doug Powers, What Can You Trust? (9272 reads)
In young people’s minds right now, the main issue is what they can trust in their own experience. In the 50s and 60s, we trusted ideologies, religions, universities, and economists. There...

May 04: Lynne Twist, Harder I Work, The More I Love (11187 reads)
Burnout is being disconnected from Source. I don’t think it’s as related as we'd like to think, to working too long or too hard or eating pizza and Coke instead of veggies and...

Apr 27: Richard Rohr, Opposite Of Meditation Is Not Action, It's Reaction (9747 reads)
It seems like our society is at a low point in terms of how we talk about challenging, controversial topics within our political discourse and even our spiritual reflections. I believe the only way...

Apr 21: Kate Murphy, Why We Listen Better To Strangers Than Family (10501 reads)
Once you know people well enough to feel close, there’s an unconscious tendency to tune them out because you think you already know what they are going to say. It’s kind of like when...

Apr 13: David Mckee, Turning Ourselves Toward Stability And Hospitality (10080 reads)
The Benedictine-Camaldolese monk, Bruno Barnhart says it very well:  “We humans prefer a manageable complexity to an unmanageable simplicity.” A complex instability is our...

Apr 06: Chris Corrigan, Into The Chrysalis (10951 reads)
Chrysalises both inspire and baffle me. The thought that a caterpillar can crawl into a sac made of its own body and dissolve its form and come out as a butterfly is a cliched image of...

Mar 30: Martin Shaw, Keeping The Smoke Hole Open (8962 reads)
In Siberian myth, when you want to hurt someone, you crawl into their tent and close the smoke hole. That way God can’t see them. Close the smoke hole and you break connection to the...

Mar 23: Rachel Naomi Remen, Life May Itself Be A Koan (15486 reads)
Consider the Zen practice of the koan, the question or problem proposed by Zen masters to each other or by masters to students. The koan is a dilemma, a mystery which the rational mind cannot...

Mar 16: Lynn Ungar , Pandemic (21712 reads)
What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath -- the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world...

Mar 09: Troy Chapman, I Have No Need For An Enemy (11639 reads)
In passing my sentence, the judge said, “There’s no hope that you can ever be rehabilitated.” My sentence of 60-90 years was a tragic and too predictable end of the road I’d...

Mar 02: Gert van Leeuwen, Releasing Willpower From Movement (9074 reads)
Initially, I used to move from willpower; I was concerned only with results. In retrospect, I realize that this created a sort of tunnel vision; my consciousness was debilitatingly limited. I...

Feb 24: Barbara Brown Taylor, In Eyes Of God, We're All Minorities (8513 reads)
Krister Stendahl, former dean of Harvard Divinity school, told a reporter shortly before his death in 2008, "In the eyes of God, we are all minorities. That’s a rude awakening for many,...

Feb 17: Heather Platt, The Liminal Space (11500 reads)
What do you do when a friend has lost a child and you can’t ease their grief? Or when your partner loses her job and you can’t resolve it for her? Or a client has to make a big decision...

Feb 10: Climbing PoeTree, Being Human (11896 reads)
I wonder if the Sun debates dawn some mornings not wanting to rise out of bed from under the down-feather horizon if the sky grows tired of being everywhere at once adapting to the mood...

Feb 03: John Fox , When Someone Deeply Listens To You (13075 reads)
When someone deeply listens to you it is like holding out a dented cup you've had since childhood and watching it fill up with cold, fresh water. When it balances on top of the brim, you...

Jan 27: Tenzin Palmo, A Heart Of Warmth Is Not Something Impossible (11761 reads)
What does love mean? In the West, we mistake the meaning of love; we bandy the word around all the time, from “I love ice-cream” to “I love God”. But we mistake love for...

Jan 20: Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee, Meaning And The Song Of The Soul (12082 reads)
Meaning is what calls from the depths of the soul. It is the song that sings us into life. Whether we have a meaningful life depends upon whether we can hear this song, this primal music of the...

Jan 13: Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, Spiritual Materialism (8379 reads)
What first comes to mind to speak about is my own spiritual materialism. I find that as I'm reading or reflecting upon the teachings and something becomes clear to me, I immediately want to...

Jan 06: Jean Klein, Silence (10559 reads)
Silence is our real nature. What we are fundamentally is only silence. Silence is free from beginning and end. It was before the beginning of all things. It is causeless. Its greatness lies in...