Jack Kornfield, in A Path With Heart: Many people come to spiritual practice hoping to skip over their sorrows and wounds, the difficult areas of their lives. They hope to rise above them and enter a spiritual realm full of divine...
Before Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment he was a confused twenty and thirty-something looking to learn how to live a spiritual life. Each time in this column we look at what it might be like if a fictional Siddhartha was on his spiritual...
What is abstruse, subtle, deep, hard to see, going against the flow — those delighting in passion, cloaked in the mass of darkness, won't see.
Today I looked at the Olympic mountains and I felt so happy to be here in Seattle.
Ironically, what fuels all of our misery-inducing behaviors is an underlying desire for happiness. All of us wish to be safe, to be happy, to be healthy, and to have an easeful life experience. Even those people that seem bent on making...
Recently, my life has had many changes, which have created difficulties and upset. My instinctive method of dealing with such struggles is to ignore and resist them.
"Some Westerners have misinterpreted the second-turning teachings on shunyata as nihilistic. If all things are empty, it is mistakenly thought, then nothing has any value and everything is finally meaningless. Why bother to be a decent...
Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating it when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious.
We often find ourselves thoroughly confused as to what’s going on.
You think you know someone but they say something that seems grossly out of character or they do something that doesn’t match our expectations...
The week before my mother's death, I knew what to do. Make travel plans, talk to doctors and nurses, comfort my mom, reassure her friends, make arrangements for my cats alone in my NYC apartment, notify family and loved ones. ...
"The sorrow of great and small losses is a river that runs in the underground of all of our lives," Roshi Joan Halifax writes. "When it breaks to the surface, we might feel as though only 'I' know this pain. Yet grief is a...
Over the last few months, I’ve been repeating a mantra of sorts to myself. Almost daily some moment arises where I think to myself: “I am not my thoughts; I am not my feelings.”
Most of my learning lately has been in the form of acceptance, especially around my friendships. It has been radical to see some of my expectations drop and to see how easily they arm themselves, causing me to dismiss the humanity of the other...
The Twin Towers once exemplified freedom and American capitalism. On September 11, 2001, they were abruptly transformed into symbols of terror and tragedy. Our hearts collapsed along with those buildings that morning, as did...
There’s a Zen meal chant that says in part,
“This food comes from the efforts of many workers, past and present,
And its advantages give us health and well-being and promote strong practice.
Seventy-two laborers brought us this...
I think that relationships are tricky. Lovely, certainly and vital, yes, but tricky. For most relationships have stories - stories of shared experience and expectation. This is normal and, frankly, human. The roles within which we are embedded -...
