Ahoy! Welcome to the second Contemplation Station on our journey: Damascus, Syria! Though its status as the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world is widely debated, the wealth of history that is present here is astounding.
This post is a reminder that Daily Sit invites you to practice meditation with a live online community tomorrow morning. Inspired by "Sitting Project," a daily meditation piece, Kim Brown and I thought it would be supportive to the community to...
I believe it was Dr. Seuss who said:
All Alone!
Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something
you’ll be quite a lot.
-from Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
I was lost. Somehow I had ended up on the other side of lower Manhattan, staring across the water at New Jersey. Which I immediately knew wasn't right.
Imagine the stress faced by students at the nation's top universities, particularly one as competitive and proud as Harvard. Now imagine the pressure on the people who have to deal with them -- faculty, administrators, other Harvard employees.
Metta is a wonderful practice and a wonderful mind-state. The act of blessing or making an aspiration for someone is powerful. But I'd like to make a point that I haven't yet written about: metta is not a practice about making things nice.
Last week I went to see Fran Lebowitz in conversation with Harvard psychology Professor Steven Pinker as part of the Rubin Museum's Brainwave Series. Fran is an icon of the New York curmudgeon variety, and she's known for her observations. In...
A friend of mine is a teacher. As an exercise, he asked the people seated before him in class to write down some words that described them. When the papers were handed back, not one of them contained the word “student.”
I was standing on an ordinary street corner in DC when the change started. Lunch in hand, waiting for the cross-walk to change so I could go back to the office and eat, I was remembering something I said at a meeting, which now seemed...
When I first started meditating, I would sit down and be overcome by a waterfall of thoughts. Thoughts about my clients' lives. Thoughts about what to do tomorrow. Thoughts about what to eat. Thoughts about the person sitting in front of me....
Today is March 1. Those of us who took part in Sharon Salzberg’s 28-Day Meditation Challenge are probably wondering how our practice will continue now that the month of February is over. Commitment leads to evaluation. What did we see, and where do...
"Don't fight the darkness. Don't even worry about the darkness. Turn on the light & the darkness goes. Turn up that light of pure consciousness: Negativity goes.Now you say, 'That sounds so sweet'.It sounds too sweet. But it's a real...
So, this week, as part of the 28-Day Meditation Challenge, I stuck with the close technique (from Shambhala), and then mixed in whatever Salzberg recommended. Mindfulness of the body or whatever. Body scans, focusing on sensation, walking...
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...
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...
Some of us have joined a 30-day yoga and meditation challenge starting tomorrow, Saturday, February 9. If you would like to be a part of the group, please friend me on FB and I will add you. If you're not on FB, feel free to comment and check in on...
