Reading Archive (Awareness)
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing
I am the youngest of eight siblings. Five of us have died. I share losses, health concerns, and other challenges common to the human...
The Difficult People In Your Life
We don’t always know why difficult people show up in our lives. There are some good theories about it, of course. Jungians,...
From Being Driven To Being Drawn
When I was a young man, I liked ideas and books quite a lot, and I still read a great deal. But each time I come back from a long...
When Light Shines, Darkness Becomes The Light
From time to time you may become restless, and the restlessness will not go away. At such times, just sit quietly, follow your breathing,...
The Positivity Ratio
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,...
Touching the Earth
In the great myth of the Buddha’s journey, there came a point when he is completely overwhelmed. As he sits meditating under the...
Zen Of Archery
In the 1920s, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel moved to Japan and began training in the martial art of archery, with a legendary...
You Are Saved By Your Love
Love is the power that reveals truth and drives our search for it. You may have noticed that if you study something deeply - an animal, a...
Turning Ourselves Toward Stability And Hospitality
The Benedictine-Camaldolese monk, Bruno Barnhart says it very well: “We humans prefer a manageable complexity to an...
Deep Ecological Awareness Is Spiritual Awareness
The sense in which we use the term "ecological" is associated with a specific philosophical school, founded in the early 1970s...
Unconditioned Stillness
Stillness, a sense of the unchanging, is all around. For example, it’s not the ultimate stillness, but there is that...
Attention Is Inseparable From Interrogation
Our attention is much more than we generally think. It is much more than a simple mental or cerebral mechanism. It concerns our whole...
Spiritual Life Begins Within The Heart
The truth is that we spend our lives in the centrifuge of paradox. What seems certainly true on the one hand seems just as false on the...
Inclining Toward Freedom, Even Through Imperfections
If we focus only on awakening, we miss most of the spiritual practice. I’m much more interested in how we practice with not...
Meditation: A Process Of Retraining The Mind
Gently, but firmly, without getting upset or judging yourself for straying, simply return to the simple physical sensation of the breath....