I’ve been so consumed with rehearsing a play of late that I feared my practice was being short-changed. My usual regimen of daily sits and studying had become more of a catch-as-catch-can affair (especially with the holidays and...
Take a 2,600-year-old spiritual tradition from Asia and drop it into the blender of postmodern American consumer culture. Add science and multiculturalism to taste, and mix at Internet speed. This is 21st-Century Buddhism -- a weekly blog for the...
I made a Top Ten Shows of 2010 list as a response to Jerry Saltz's Top Ten list he posted in New York Magazine and reposted on his Facebook page. Why not?
"The problem with being busy is that it is based on ignorance—not realizing that by keeping your mind occupied constantly you are actually not giving yourself a chance."
File this under: "Fairly-obvious-but-pretty-cool-anyway": According to a big NPR story making the rounds, breathing, and focusing on your breath, is really good for you. Check it out. I am quite happy that the health benefits and...
I think this quote from Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche says it all, so I'll keep it short. Ultimately, when we resist our meditation practice, it really is this simple logic that we need to remind ourselves with to come back to the path.
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When I sat down for Thanksgiving dinner last week I asked everybody to eat mindfully. As the words passed over my lips, a little voice inside my head asked, “Say, why do we only designate one day a year to give thanks? And while we’...
I wrote this blog two years ago, on the old One City blog of the IDP. I wrote it around this time of year, when we are shopping, shopping, shopping, urged ever onward in pursuit of what we want, what we need, in order to be generous, to be good. I...
According to a new study, it turns out that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. That's a pretty amazingly simple discovery, but the study demonstrates that our happiness level is less based on what we are doing than how simply we are engaged...
Take a 2,600-year-old spiritual tradition from Asia and drop it into the blender of postmodern American consumer culture. Add science and multiculturalism to taste, and mix at Internet speed. This is 21st-Century Buddhism -- a weekly blog for the...
How often do you really listen without filtering?
Unmitigated, unprocessed listening — no labeling, no judgments, no interpreting — is something very rare.
Most of the time you're probably judging, criticizing and filtering...
While there is poverty in New York, there is quite a bit of privilege here too. Often privilege does not acknowledge itself; it quietly lifts some people through life in a manner that makes living easier.
Many people look to Siddhartha Gautama as an example of someone who attained nirvana, a buddha. Every other week in this column we look at what it might be like if Siddhartha were on his spiritual journey today. How would he combine Buddhism and...
An IDP blog reader who's preparing a paper for a Business Speech Communications class asked me which books I'd recommend to someone investigating business and work from the perspective of mindfulness and Buddhism.
I was reading a piece by Thich Nhat Hahn about emptiness, which got me thinking about being filled up, which got me thinking about a gas station just on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. (Occasionally there is...
“I think the core obstacle we face in modern... 21st century in most of the developed countries, especially in the west, is... busyness.... and lack of having the wisdom to prioritize.... I think that's one of the obstacles we face. We...
Dear Interdependence Project Teachers,
I don’t know where I picked up this crazy idea to dedicate the merit of my practice to something or someone. Well, that’s a bit of a lie; it was definitely from one or all of the teachers...
Many people look to Siddhartha Gautama as an example of someone who attained nirvana, a buddha. Each week in this column we look at what it might be like if Siddhartha was on his spiritual journey today. How would he combine Buddhism and dating?...
