Episodes

Cognitive Science is identifying different ways we relate to “self” that are very useful for untangling a challenging moment. This relates beautifully to Phillip Moffit’s quote: A crucial skill from minimizing emotional chaos and sustaining clarity in your life is the ability to distinguish between your experience in your interpretation of your experience. Your experience is simply whatever is happening in the moment— a sound, a taste, bodily sensation, and emotion, any kind of interaction, etc...

Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet wrote, “Work is love made visible.” That’s a beautiful description also of why and how we practice. What orientation is needed in this moment right now for practice to be making love visible?

This sharing explores how opening to our own resistance in a moment, even a seemingly innocuous moment such as dog training, can untangle a whole mess– or at least allow more space to befriend, or be friendly with, the mess…

Quote from Gil Fronsdal: Where in my life do I postpone kindness until non-wellbeing goes away— and what shifts when I practice wellbeing that includes non-wellbeing? A helpful way to practice this is to treat moments of non-well-being as worthy of care rather than as evidence of failure. When irritation, sorrow, fatigue, fear, or disappointment arise let them be included in the field of kindness: “This too belongs.” Then you notice what changes when you stop requiring the inner weather to be d...

In this reflection on Judson Brewer’s “gear 3”, we explore how useful an analogy of riding a wild horse is for understanding our own reactivity.

As we practice, we begin to understand an infinite receptive capacity of awareness to hold it all and allow our wisdom to come forward.

Continuing to explore Judson Brewer’s model– today’s sharing is a bit about “gear 2” and then a self-inquiry exercise. For the pdf of the exercise, click here.

Using the formal sit as a gift to invite the best friend of sati, mindfulness as a support in opening to our own selves.

This meditation explores the interplay between goodwill, compassion, letting go and welcoming the moment just as it is.

Let go a little, get a little peace. Let go a lot, get a lot of peace. Let go completely, get complete peace. A. Chah Sounds good, but how do we really let go?

A beautiful old story from the Brothers Grimm called the Water of Life offers a powerful metaphor for life and practice.

Clouds In Each Paper, by Thich Nhat Hanh If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine ...

This week’s podcast is a re-visit of the Story of the Buddha from 2021 in which we explore the myth story of the Buddha’s life and how it relates directly to understanding our own personal causes of suffering and the path to our healing.

This meditation is opening to a beautiful place that exists right in the heart of any moment– just as it is, easy, challenging and everything in-between.

What happens when we feel like we are being told that we “should” be compassionate even towards people we find the most challenging– whether someone in our personal life or in the world? If we misunderstand compassion as excusing harmful behavior, of course our “innards” will rebel! When we instead begin to feel into the fierce openheartedness of strong courageous compassion, we start to see how much more effective we become in responding wisely to harmful behavior.

In this meditation we explore what happens right at that moment when we wake up from the mind drifting and the rich potency of this moment for teaching us about refuge, release, relief and letting go. BIRD WINGS Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you are bravely working. Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see. Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, y...

This is a second sharing on the importance of bringing a light playful attitude into our heart/mindfulness practice. As one researcher points out: “Play lies at the core of creativity and innovation and allows us to be free of the constraints of time and to experience a diminished consciousness of self. It allows us to explore new ways of thinking and behaving so that we are not locked into a rigid way of doing things, are open to variation, see things in a different way, and gain new insights....

This is a practice of releasing into a silence that is our way to a wholeness, healing and freedom that is our home.

In this sharing, we explore a practice suggested by the poet and writer Colette Lafia regarding the importance of play. As she names, play has particularly qualities that we can forget or get pushed aside as we age, qualities that are very important for deepening our relationship with all.

This meditation explores opening and relaxing into a beautiful space that awareness is always offering.

This sharing is based on a great story regarding a thief and his encounter with a Buddhist master.

Mindfulness has this beautiful potential of bringing our body, mind and heart together in harmony with whatever is here right now.

It is so important for us to know our country’s history and celebrate the movements we have made in the direction of healing and wholeness. It is also so important to know where there is still so much more work to do and make a commitment as best as we are able to name the need for this work. Note: one correction– more than one third of the 8 Fold Path involves ethical principles. Wise Speech, Wise Livelihood and Wise Action are the three ethical or Sila factors of the 8 Fold Path.

In this meditation, we explore letting go into a connectivity with the Earth which gives rooting and uplift both.