Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to better understand depression, it’s causes, and how it can best be alleviated. It’s not that I’m depressed--in fact I’m happy to report that I’m rarely...
A concern of many new (and old) Buddhist students is the worry that their internal experiences will become dull or lack emotion as they learn greater equanimity and mindfulness. Will I still feel passion? Will I still be...
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I wanted to share a fairly simple observation from teaching this week, related to the meditation practices that focus on the development of compassion, such as metta and tonglen. It's interesting that...
Consciously or not, the Occupy movement has done something truly radical: from the beginning, they have followed the principles of meditation. All of the components of the meditative attitude are reflected in Occupy Wall Street, and they have...
Photographer Peter Seidler has posted a series of portaits taken before and after meditation practitioners participated in a Dathun, a month long meditation retreat. He wrote about his process and shares several of the images on the...
Dear All,
Over the past month, the Occupy Wall Street demonstration has created a unique and powerful forum for social change. Based on the principles of inclusivity and consensus-based decision making, the organizing process of the movement...
Two weeks ago I almost lost someone whom I love very much. The phone rang as I was writing at my desk and it was a doctor I didn’t know telling me what had just happened. As I listened to the doctor’s somber words, I suddenly became...
Blessing (Sanskrit: adhiṣṭhāna, Tibetan: བྱིན་རླབས: byin-rlabs;)
We usually think of blessings as good fortune bestowed on us by a higher power (God Bless You!), a special person like a priest or a rabbi, or sheer luck. It's not...
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A list of Steve Jobs' favorite books and most influential reads was just published on Huffington Post, and it includes Shunryu Suzuki Roshi's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Chogyam Trungpa...
I talk a lot. I always have. I tried once in the third grade to be shy, because I thought the quiet kids were cool and kinda mysterious, but I failed. I’ve long since accepted that I am a talker, that's just who I am, but lately I’...
In a his post on The Interdependence Project's Blog about Occupy Wall Street, Michael Stone quotes the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who spoke to the New York Occupiers at Zuccotti Parkon October 9:
Wednesdays I teach Mommy/Baby Yoga class at The 14th Street Y in Manhattan. This particular rainy, wind whipping Wednesday, my core group of devoted moms strolled in with the little ones and we were more philosophical and chatty than usual. I...
One of my personal samsaric cycles looks something like this:
be busy with enjoyable work
feel like the good times will never end
the good times inevitably end
not be busy with enjoyable work
feel like the bad times will never end...
I spent ten days in New York and worried for almost the entire time. I worried and the worry multiplied like beads of condensation in a sealed terrarium. When I arrived, I felt tired and I worried about relaxing. I also worried about my homework...
"The Irish Potato Famine was one of the great examples of those disasters of the modern era that are not crises of scarcity, but of distribution." - Rebecca Solnit
When I was studying for my MBA, one of my professors told us something that has always stuck with me as I navigated the business world. I paraphrase, but he said if you have to downsize your company you’re not...
Often when we look around at the world duality is what we see. I can see how I am separate from you, from her, from him, from them. But on a deeper level what we feel is that there is no separation. There is only us. There...
The way protesters in NYC inter-act with the police has the potential to become a model for all the protests and occupations happening all over the globe, that's Interdependence in a nutshell.
A man stands on a bench in Zuccotti Park on Wall Street and chants a phrase from a meeting last night: “We don't want a higher standard of living, we want a better standard of living.” He’s wearing a crisp navy blue suit and...
