Blog: Notes on Healing and Awakening

This is one of my favorite little stories: One afternoon, a tired-looking dog wandered into my yard and followed me through the door into the house. He went down the hall, lay...

A Heart That Is Ready for Anything ~ When the Buddha was dying, he gave a final message to his beloved attendant Ananda, and to generations to come: “Be a lamp unto yourself, be...

One of my favorite stories took place a number of decades ago when the English had colonized India and they wanted to set up a golf course in Calcutta. Besides the fact that the...

I heard a story when my son was in a local Waldorf school, and I loved it. The children were in art class seated in different tables, working hard at their projects. One little...

Our mindfulness practice is not about vanquishing our thoughts. It’s about becoming aware of the process of thinking so that we are not in a trance—lost inside our thoughts....

To listen is to lean in softly With a willingness to be changed By what we hear   -Mark Nepo What happens when there’s a listening presence? When we’re fully in that listening...

This entire living world - including these forms we call self - is a creative arising and dissolving of empty awareness. I love the Zen phrase “emptiness dancing,” because it...

Happy for No Reason - For years I’d heard that qigong was an ideal meditation for physical healing, and when I first experimented with it, I did find that the practice helped me...

About 2,600 years ago, when Siddhartha Gautama (the soon-to-be Buddha) sat down under the bodhi tree, his resolve was to realize his true nature. Siddhartha had a profound...

Writing and speaking about the nature of awareness is a humbling process; as the third Zen patriarch said, “Words! The way is beyond language.” Whatever words are used, whatever...

The Buddha taught that we spend most of our life like children in a burning house, so entranced by our games that we don’t notice the flames, the crumbling walls, the collapsing...

My friend Richie and I met when we were juniors in college. A shy, thoughtful African American man, he was known for carrying his camera everywhere, listening as others poured...

I was drawn to my first Buddhist mindfulness retreat during a time when my son, Narayan, was four, and I was on the verge of divorce. During a slow, icy drive through a winter...