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...
From Transaction To Trust
The most precious and important things in life are, by definition, nontransactional. And to try to bargain for them is to immediately...
The River Cannot Go Back
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...
To Find Something, Don't Look For It
Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into...
What Can You Trust?
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...
Harder I Work, The More I Love
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...
Opposite Of Meditation Is Not Action, It's Reaction
It seems like our society is at a low point in terms of how we talk about challenging, controversial topics within our political...
Why We Listen Better To Strangers Than Family
Once you know people well enough to feel close, there’s an unconscious tendency to tune them out because you think you already know...
Turning Ourselves Toward Stability And Hospitality
The Benedictine-Camaldolese monk, Bruno Barnhart says it very well: “We humans prefer a manageable complexity to an...
Into The Chrysalis
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...
Keeping The Smoke Hole Open
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...
Life May Itself Be A Koan
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...