Greetings, IDP readers! I’m so delighted to have an opportunity to share with you some of my thoughts and reflections on the dharma at this uplifted location. A big thank-you to everyone at the Interdependence Project for the opportunity to join...
One evening after my Wednesday night meditation class, Amy, a member of our D.C. meditation community, asked if we might talk for a few minutes about her mother, a woman she often referred to as “a manipulative, narcissistic human.” Amy’s mother had...
We fully acknowledge now, without any reservation, and with the heaviest of hearts, that because of our failure to address our teacher’s sexual misconduct, women and also men have been hurt, women and men who trusted us with their Zen practices, and...
So I think we are starting Week 2, but, Wait! Wait! I am still working on concentration. Wait! Wait! I have been doing this since 2008 and I am still on Week 1. Jeez, Meredith, hurry up and get it together. Get with the program! OR REAL HAPPINESS...
In order to find a solution we first have to recognise that there is a problem. Then we can get to work on how the problem can be solved. ... Both men and women need to publicize and condemn any abusive behavior of which they are aware and to...
Last week I mentioned that I was going to meditate every morning for thirty minutes. After a few brief activities to relieve my body’s discomfort, I sat down each day for the session and worked with the simple technique of lowering my gaze more than...
I was drawn to my first Buddhist mindfulness retreat during a time when my son, Narayan, was four, and I was on the verge of divorce. During a slow, icy drive through a winter snowstorm on the way to the retreat center, I had plenty of time to...
The process of concentration is one of gathering. We gather all our scattered attention and energy, and we bring it together, we bring it home. The result of that gathering is that we attain access to all the energy that is not usually available to...
In Real Happiness, Sharon Salzberg begins by explaining some of the basics of a mediation practice. Since I have a practice, I thought I would share some of my basics.
If you're my friend on Facebook, you know that I share a lot of links. I think of Facebook as a community bulletin board or an envelope of newspaper and magazines clippings that I want to send off to my friends. Here's a bunch of stuff I think is...
The teachers in the ether are sending me a message, it seems.
Three things from three sources have caught my attention and stuck, asking to be contemplated, in the last 12 hours:
Buddhism is not a belief; it's a practice. It's something to do. --...
Every year, I attend the last church service of the year. At the end of December, the minister asks us to write down all the things we want for the coming year. We then draft a letter to ourselves that we will receive a year later (sent back to us...
Romantic love is a myth, perpetuated by Hollywood and a fascination with the idea that someone else will come along and save us from our suffering. Acharya Judith Simmer-Brown from Naropa University says romantic love has become like a...
The controversy surrounding whether meditation practice should be accessible to those suffering from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) brings up a lot of interesting and important questions.
I am definitely a person who came to meditation because I felt 'too stressed out' and saw it as a problem in my life. But what if stress isn't inherently as bad as we commonly think? What if we just need to change our relationship to stress?
After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, as many people feared an ongoing and vicious spiral of retaliation and global violence, a wonderful and well-known Cherokee legend went viral on the Internet: An old grandfather is...
Martin Luther King Jr. changed this world by simply asserting his dream of a society where the boundaries of division and duality would be nonexistent. His was a vision that resonated with the true nature of reality and called into question...
When Buddhist teachers talk about sitting with intense emotions, they're generally speaking about ones we'd characterize as negative: loneliness, anger, sadness, grief, insecurity. I've never heard a teacher talk about sitting with happiness.
I'm not gonna lie: I love award shows. Often I haven't even seen half of the shows or movies being honored, but there is a part of me that loves seeing the drama of celebrity play out in a completely constructed environment.
If I said all experience is my experience, would you shy away?
Right before Part II of his book, “Thoughts Without a Thinker,” Mark Epstein presents a poem written in “the seventh century A.D.” by “the third Zen patriarch,”
When the mind exists...
