Reading Archives (2020)

Four Stages Of Groundedness

John J. Prendergast

The ground is both a metaphor and a felt sense. As a metaphor, it means to be in touch with reality. As a felt sense, it refers to feeling our center of gravity low in the belly and experiencing a dee...

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14K reads, 6 comments

An Unusual Gift From My Grandfather

Rachel Naomi Remen

Often, when he came to visit, my grandfather would bring me a present. These were never the sorts of things that other people brought, dolls and books and stuffed animals. My dolls and stuffed animals...

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47K reads, 33 comments

The Moment We Encounter True Happiness

Ilie Cioara

The moment we encounter true Happiness, we are in fact outside time and space. The “ego” – with its intrinsic duality – has completely disappeared. In that moment, the Sacre...

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12K reads, 10 comments

A 13-Year-Old In A Museum

Nancy Collier

On a recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art with a friend and her daughter, meandering through the museum’s exhibits, I was struck by how often my friend’s 13-year-old daughter asked us ...

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14K reads, 19 comments

Parliament Of Subconscious Minds

John Yates

You may object to the idea that your sense of being a self is a mere construct. After all, it feels very real. How can we reconcile this powerful sense of self with the idea that we're just a coll...

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12K reads, 5 comments

Time Confetti And The Broken Promise Of Leisure

Ashley Whillans

It’s true: we have more time for leisure than we did fifty years ago. But leisure has never been less relaxing, mostly because of the disintermediating effects of our screens. Technology saves u...

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15K reads, 6 comments

Half A Pomegranate

Brian Conroy

Early one morning, the Buddha and his disciples set off on an alms round. He announced that on that day all of the offerings they received would be given to the poor.  The community sat beneat...

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19K reads, 46 comments

The Three Narratives

Joanna Macy

When we come together for this work, at the outset we discern three stories or versions of reality that are shaping our world so that we can see them more clearly and choose which one we want to get b...

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15K reads, 4 comments

How Caterpillar Turns Into A Butterfly

Norie Huddle

If you kneel down on the ground and look at a caterpillar very carefully,  you'd probably think he's a pretty nice furry fellow with a rather boring life. And you would be right. BU...

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17K reads, 9 comments

The Game Is To Be Where You Are

Ram Dass

When I was born I donned a spacesuit for living on this plane, it was this body, my spacesuit, and it had a steering mechanism which is my pre-frontal lobe and all the brain that helps with coordinati...

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26K reads, 20 comments

Now I Become Myself

May Sarton

Now I become myself. It's taken Time, many years and places; I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people's faces, Run madly, as if Time were there, Terribly old, crying a warning,...

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24K reads, 18 comments

We're Voting With Our Attention

Leah Pearlman

At the base of the brainstem there is a bundle of neurons called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The RAS acts as a kind of bouncer for the brain. Our senses take in waaaaay too information for ...

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14K reads, 12 comments

Substituting One Cruelty For Another

Anthony de Mello

Many people swing into action only to make things worse. They're not coming from love, they're coming from negative feelings. They're coming from guilt, anger, hate; from a sense of injust...

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15K reads, 8 comments

A Route Back To Wonder

Fabiana Fondevila

“What is a sunset without clouds? A circle that crosses a straight line,” says Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, creator of an original form of activism and o...

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13K reads, 12 comments

Learning How To Think

William Deresiewicz

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 colleg...

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30K reads, 40 comments

Movie Of Me, Now Playing 24 Hours A Day

Krishna Das

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 goi...

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18K reads, 14 comments

The Broken Piano In 1975

Marti Leimbach

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 the...

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15K reads, 15 comments

Glory And Terror Of It

Irina Tweedie

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 the v...

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12K reads, 8 comments

The Wisdom Of Uncertainty

Jack Kornfield

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 gone.&...

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20K reads, 13 comments

The Central Commitment Of The Creative Life

Mary Oliver

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 th...

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21K reads, 7 comments