Blog: Notes on Healing and Awakening

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...

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...

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...

Albert Einstein was said to have proclaimed that the most important question any of us can ever ask ourselves is: “Is this universe a friendly place?” It’s a powerful inquiry....

The happiest people I know have something in common: they are whole-hearted in how they engage in their lives...whole-hearted in relating with others, in work, in meditation, and...

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, laid...

The modern-day mystic and Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello once said: “Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.” This statement struck a deep chord within me. It...

Most of us spend a lot of our lives tensed up in fear, or pushing against fear. The fear might be fear of: - something going wrong - not being good enough - not being loved -...

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....

This is an excerpt from an article in the New York Times Magazine a few years ago: William C. Moyers, a recovery advocate (and the son of the journalist Bill Moyers) who for 12...

If we are to wake up out of our patterning, a key element of that is to be able to pause, recognize and open to a larger space than the cocoon that our mind is creating in...

When I was in college, I went off to the mountains for a weekend of hiking with an older, wiser friend of twenty-two.  After we set up our tent, we sat by a stream, watching the...

What gets between us and happiness? This is an important inquiry in our lives. When you’re really happy ask yourself, what’s going on? What’s going on inside you when you’re...

We can't stop the waves, but we can learn to surf. We can't CONTROL what life throws at us; the fact that other people don't like our ideas all the time; or that we get sick or...

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