Blog: Notes on Healing and Awakening

Blog: Freedom Finds Us When We Pause
“Temporary nirvana.” This is how contemporary Thai Buddhist teacher Ajahan Buddhadasa describes the precious interludes between all our “doing;” those times when we pause, and...

Finding Your Querencia in the Pause
In bullfighting there is an interesting parallel to what I call the art of pausing, as a place of refuge and renewal. It is believed that in the midst of a fight, a bull can find...

Blog: Radical Acceptance of Desire
When I was first introduced to Buddhism in a high school World Studies class, I dismissed it out-of-hand. This was during the hedonistic days of the late ‘60s, and this spiritual...

Blog: Saying Yes To Life As It Is
Zen teacher Ed Brown is a brilliant cook and founder of the Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, famous for its natural foods cuisine. But during Ed’s early days as a cook at the...

Blog: Pain Is Not Wrong
Many years ago when I was pregnant with my son, I decided to have a home birth without drugs, assisted by a midwife. My hope was to be as wakeful and present as possible during...

Inviting Mara to Tea
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and...

Inquiry and Naming: Practices to Dispel the Trance
Sometimes, when our carefully constructed lives seem to be falling apart – when we get a divorce, lose a business, or are laid off, for example – we can torture and berate...

When We Don’t Make Anything “Wrong”
Sometimes when I talk about Radical Acceptance, I like to tell the story about Jacob, a man who at almost seventy and in the mid-stages of Alzheimer’s disease attended a 10-day...

Blog: The Sacred Pause
In our lives we often find ourselves in situations we can’t control, circumstances in which none of our strategies work. Helpless and distraught, we frantically try to manage...

When We Stop Running
Siddhartha, the Buddha-to-be, was the son of a wealthy king who ruled over a beautiful kingdom in the foothills of the Himalayas. At his birth, the king’s advisors predicted that...

Running Away Deepens the Trance
A traditional folk tale tells the story of a man who becomes so frightened by his own shadow that he tries to run away from it. He believes that if only he could leave it behind,...

Unfolding the Wings of Acceptance
When we are caught in the trance of unworthiness, we do not clearly recognize what is happening inside us, nor do we feel kind. Our view of who we are is contorted and narrowed...

Blog: Learning to Recognize Our Strategies
Whenever we find ourselves caught in what I call “the trance of unworthiness,” many of us tend to reflexively do whatever we can to avoid the raw pain of feeling unworthy. Each...

Blog: Growing Up Unworthy
In their book, Stories of the Spirit, Jack Kornfield and Christina Feldman tell this story: A family went out to a restaurant for dinner. When the waitress arrived, the parents...

Blog: Imperfection Is Not Our Personal Problem
After graduating from college, I moved into an ashram, a spiritual community, and enthusiastically devoted myself to the lifestyle for almost twelve years. I felt I had found a...

Blog: “My Religion is Kindness”
One of the wonderful teachings of the Dalai Lama, something he says quite regularly, is “My religion is kindness.” When we hear that, it resonates, because it points to something...

Blog: Everybody Has Buddha Nature – Tara Brach
You will be walking some night… It will be clear to you suddenly that you were about to escape, and that you are guilty: you misread the complex instructions, you are not a...

Blog: “Something is Wrong with Me”
When I was in college, I went off to the mountains for a weekend of hiking with an older, wiser friend of twenty-two. At one point, my friend described how she was learning to be...

Reaching Across Years of Evolution
It’s quite interesting to me that from an evolutionary perspective, it was our vulnerability that gave rise to empathy and compassion. In order to care for our offspring, who...

The Lion’s Roar
We typically think of our happiness as dependent on certain good things happening. In the Buddhist tradition, the word sukha is used to describe the deepest type of happiness...