Feel pressure to buy what may turn out to be unwanted gifts? Research shows gifts aren’t what make the hols great. Here’s how to have a better Christmas or other holiday.
How To Find Time For Your Spiritual Practice
Life is very busy and also very short. It can fly by very quickly. Many of us are born with some particular drive or aspiration or vision to engage in spiritual inquiry. Some of us embrace what feels like our path and others of us push the nagging questions aside in favor of the necessities of the day. Later, after time has passed, some of us regret not embracing those big questions about life. So what can you do?
Fierce Compassion: A Workshop About Spirituality And Activism
We all know about accelerating climate change, failing democracy, endemic racism and other dire global news. Should we have hope? Should we be in despair? What, in fact, should we do? How can we respond in ways that make us feel we are taking care of ourselves while actually helping the world? That is the subject of a workshop on Spiritual Activism I’m co-leading with Lama Willa Miller at the Garrison Institute this September. You should come!
A Meditator’s Approach To Understanding Life
In meditation, sometimes we chase after a particular type of “feeling.” The thing is, in life, everything comes and goes, even nice feelings. Meanwhile, while we are chasing after these temporary feelings, we miss the opportunity to really pay attention and learn about life as it is (as opposed to as we want it to be). Stuck in this chasing loop, we miss the chance to develop our prajna–our wisdom. This post is about how to use meditation to gain wisdom about life instead of to chase after a particular temporary feeling.
A Zen Approach To Deciding Whether To Give To Beggars (Or Anything Else)
A Zen student had travelled to India and had become overwhelmed when he gave to beggars there. On the one hand, he had an intention to help in the world. On the other, he wondered if he was incentivizing begging. I did not want to give him “advice,” but instead to offer an approach to decision making that does not depend on the concepts and stories we tell ourselves but that instead arises from our True Self. The approach involves trusting our intuition and then adjusting our actions over and over as we get new information.
On Coming To Terms With The Human Experience
In addition to my group work, I work with many people on an individual level. Some are coaching clients, some are Zen students, some are people I mentor. Sometimes I correspond with the people I work with and answer their questions. Recently, one of these spiritual friends wrote to me about having a hard time and feeling very down on himself for it. This post is my reply.
Dealing With Uncertainty In An Uncertain World
Not knowing is the fundamental human condition. There seems to be something holy or sacred about it. Maybe this is why so many of the faith traditions abhor idolatry; our ideas or representations of reality are not the same as reality. If we react to our stories of the way things are instead allowing ourselves to react to the way things really are, we find ourselves fighting ghosts and have planted the seeds of future violence.
Using Optimism To Help You Build A Better Life And World
Those of us who want to build better lives that also help the world tend to be suspicious of optimism. Being optimistic causes you to sit on your butt and do nothing about world problems, right? We need anger, fear and desire to motivate us, no? But what if I told you that the science shows that a 20-minute optimism exercise can actually help you be more effective in building a better life for yourself and a better world for others?