One day, a baby fish asked his mother, “Mom, everyone is always talking about the sea...where is this ‘sea‘ I keep hearing about?”
“It’s all around you,” she replied, “you’re swimming in it!” “Then why can’t I see it?” said the baby fish.
In my life as an educator, one lesson has served me and my students more than any other: in order to provide a good education to students of all backgrounds, a teacher must have high standards and have
There are two kinds of confidence: the kind you pump up and the kind to which you wake up.
Conditional confidence comes from some kind of credential. If I read a book about cooking, I'm confident I know something about cooking. If I get...
We live in a world that emphasizes results, rewards, and winning.
If we buy something at a store we get our rewards card swiped in order to accumulate points that lead to a future benefit. Many of us get up early in the morning in order to...
“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.’ I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”
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To be perfectly honest, I have been an awful Buddhist, an even worse meditation teacher. Since I started working full-time, my practice has been quite bare bones. What’s worse is that I have been easily lured into hateful, angry, and insecure...
Accepting the love and support of others is a great challenge for me, and throughout my life I've emotionally closed down or cut off the concerns and help of friends and family. This defense reaction served me well during a chaotic childhood,...
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Amongst the ongoing fears of plague, peak oil, and drastic climate change which adorn our era (and at the timely tail end of a lingering cough and cold), I saw Steven Soderbergh's new movie Contagion...
Being good enough is a practice, one that combines lots of Buddhist skills: patience, acceptance, loving kindness, appreciation, generosity. It requires nonjudgmental, kind, present-moment awareness.
Sitting on the cushion, watching my mind lets me see that there is a gap – however infinitesimal – between the stimulus and the response. If I am aware enough to notice the gap, I can then choose how to react: to mouth off, to back off...
Meditation is a lot like weeding; we’re just clearing stuff away so that what’s really underneath it all has a chance to show itself.
Each time we practice we’re starting the process of working with our fertile minds,...
