I’ve noticed myself looking out the window this last month with a particular quality of attention. I will walk to the sunroom window, stand next to the banana tree, and just look out at the outside world. I’m just taking it all in, looking wistfully at the parked cars, the blooming daffodils, the greening grass […]
The end of Christmas as I knew it started with a family meeting, 30-something years ago. Let’s say in 1986. My Mom called a meeting to discuss Christmas. That was all I knew. This was odd. A family meeting? I was on edge. At a family meeting many years before, my folks had announced that […]
I learned Korean zen meditation in the winter of 1989. Zen captivated me. There was the zen mystique, for sure, but also the fresh and powerful language used by the teachers of the zen tradition. There were many awesome things to contemplate, from the sound of one hand clapping to my “original face” before my […]
I’ve been teaching a lot of mindfulness meditation courses this year and I am loving it. Not only does teaching help me go deeper in my own practice, but all the time I spend teaching and meditating with others is deepening my experience of life in ways that I didn’t expect. And so, I am […]
Mindfulness is all the rage these days, but the skill and the practices of mindfulness are anything but new. In fact, the modern mindfulness movement traces its origins back to some of the very earliest teachings of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. Certainly, today’s mindfulness does not look like the practices developed and taught […]