You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Right. Remembering these lines I feel something in my gut unclench a bit. I find...
By all accounts the Dalai Lama is the embodiment of equanimity. In the face of persecution, a lifetime of exile, the responsibility of both an entire nation and an entire religion, he has always seemed grounded, open-eyed and to be acting from a base of strength....
Dear Friends, We finally kissed 2020 goodbye a few weeks ago, hoping for more peaceful, healthy, and productive times ahead. And yet as I write this, the U.S. is breaking tragic records for deaths from Covid-19 and Congress is debating whether to impeach President...
I have a strong preference for life to make sense, especially the part that involves human interactions. Do you find that, too? So much rides on our ability to see eye to eye and solve problems. I want everyone’s attitudes and actions, including my own, to line up...
Dear Friends, Lately I’ve been thinking about how I can support myself better in living more deeply in the way I intend: to be more grounded and deliberate in my choices at home, especially. And since I’m home so much more, this matters. Work, play, rest,...
With my serenity, sense of well-being, and actual well-being assaulted on many fronts lately, I’ve been feeling desperate to make things better. At the same time, I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the size and number of crises in our world right now. Maybe you can...
Dear Friends, There’s a poem by William Stafford called “The Way It Is” that we share in class sometimes: There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You...
In my favorite holiday movie, Home for the Holidays, single mother Claudia Larson (the fabulous Holly Hunter) is living the full catastrophe. In the span of 24 hours, she gets fired, kisses her (now former) boss, and comes down with a cold. She’s headed to visit her...
I recently ran across this quotation from James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing is changed until it is faced.” Mindfulness and compassion training help us with this practice of “facing” in so many ways. The practices help...
Stress. We all deal with it on many levels and in many forms every day. Whether in our homes, at work, with family members or partners, sometimes it feels as though stress follows us around like an ironclad shadow. I had always heard that stress is bad for the human...
