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The Benefit of Looking Backwards
Life often turns out radically different from how we supposed it might. Have you noticed? You look back over some significant stretch of life and say, "Could I have imagined things would turn ... Continue Reading
Uncertainty: A Surprising Blessing
Much of our planet is presently at the mercy of weather extremity. In the United States, as in so many other parts of the world, high temperatures and rising water have eclipsed other ... Continue Reading
The Power of a Question
We generally ask a question because we hope to get an answer. Sometimes, though, the deepest benefit of asking comes of turning the eyes from a would-be response and looking back at the ... Continue Reading
Two Kinds of Memory
The storied container of a person's recollected history is a kind of static object that exists in the head. Mental memory is distorted by interpretation and sculpted by a sense of identity, helping ... Continue Reading
Spirituality and Religion
A human being blessedly is endowed with a dual capacity: to experience our oh-so-mortal physicality and simultaneously to attune, in the stillness of the now, to the timeless reality of which we partake ... Continue Reading
The Blessing of Brevity
We keep getting older. From the moment we're born, each day we're older than we were the day before. This is vivid if you're around a baby or a little child. If you've ... Continue Reading
You Don’t Have Time To Rush
A new year has begun. “Happy New Year,” we wish one another. But what if we greeted each new morning (our own or someone else's) with “Happy New Day”? What if we saw ... Continue Reading
Processing the Now
Life happens fast. The irony is noteworthy: while a given moment is utterly still (when you're really there), the succession of lived nows, when the mind revisits a stretch of time, appears to ... Continue Reading
Paying Attention
Once upon a time I prided myself on the ability to multitask. Other people, observing the “skill,” admired me for it. As if it was good to be able to do two things ... Continue Reading
Heart, Mind, and Body
In the nearly 20 years since awakening, I have observed several lengthy “chapters” in the more fully waking-up of the several human expressions: heart, mind, and body.
Prior to 2003 ... Continue Reading
What We Want — Most Deeply
A seeker's aching desire to awaken is not apart from, not different from, what comes to many a regretful human being on their death bed. Oh that I had truly lived! That I ... Continue Reading
What It Is to Know
There is more than one way that knowing takes place in a human being. This is the case whether or not a person is awake, although for the most part the occurrence of ... Continue Reading
The Mind as Friend
People longing to awaken sometimes hold mistaken impressions about what radical freedom would be like. Some suppose that the quieting of the mischief-causing mind, long in the thrall of ego-maintenance, leaves a person ... Continue Reading
The Vastness of the Wide-Open Heart
The fully awakened heart knows what it is to love unconditionally. What could be more life-altering than to come to dwell in -- to dwell as -- radically fearless love, liberated from the ... Continue Reading
Being an Awake Animal
A person who longs to awaken, contemplating what the sweetness of freedom might be like, may suppose that it would mean living at a remove from ordinary experience. That matters of the body, ... Continue Reading
The Delight of Preference Without Attachment
Awakening removed the fear of dying, taking with it the neurotic lifelong obsession with doing what “matters” (or “needs” doing), in the ever-diminishing time left. The number of days on that precious quantity ... Continue Reading
Awakening: Only the Beginning
While it is often supposed to be so, awakening is not typically a single shining moment altering everything on one's interior, in one fell swoop, and then continuing unchanged ever after. Although the ... Continue Reading
Wisdom from Surprising Sources
He is the truest friend of my life, and likely of the before of this life.
How hesitant I was, for the longest stretch of time, to acknowledge (even to ... Continue Reading
Awakening Misconceptions (My Own Included)
There is a bounty of common assumptions about what it is to awaken, and about what it's like to live in the awakened “state.” The vast majority of those impressions are mistaken and ... Continue Reading
Two Births
Once in a great while we are given two births in a single life. There's the one the body has, at its start, with its eventual giving rise to the sense of self, ... Continue Reading
Climate Change and the Climate Within
Recent conditions on my road have made it clear that my Vermont town and my particular life experience is (like the entire human race) subject to the impact of climate change -- just ... Continue Reading
Having a Teacher (Or Not)
Spiritual teachers can be legendary for their ability to open a person's eyes to the truth (and some, for their unfortunate ability to harm or mislead). Does an earnest seeker need a teacher? ... Continue Reading
God and Karma (and Other Ideas)
When reflecting on some life development, do you ever turn toward karma or divine will, or perhaps the configuration of the stars, as a way of accounting for things? Does the prospect of ... Continue Reading
The Anatomy of Desire
Desire is wrongly maligned in spiritual circles. Many a well-meaning seeker supposes it to be the enemy of peaceful well-being, assuming that to want is inevitably to be attached. Desire needn't interfere with ... Continue Reading
Seeking Enlightenment
For most of my life I've carried an impression, an assumption, having to do with a given thought and how it has come about, and what it seems to have set in motion ... Continue Reading
There Isn’t Time
One of the more compelling features of human existence is the way a person is both timeless and mortal. This is a deeply challenging “overlap” to fathom, by whatever means. It's not to ... Continue Reading
Be Kind to Yourself
The life-altering time we're all in carries its potential blessings. The extremity and uncertainty of the pandemic may attune us at last to the matter of what it is to be kind to ... Continue Reading
Taking Refuge in the Now
What is it to be in the now? It's to gently allow awareness to take in whatever is immediate, inside yourself and in the present-moment scene. It's to register what is being actually ... Continue Reading
A Useful Spiritual Practice
The spiritual orientation to life is often set in motion by the desire to address painful inner forces like anxiety, frustration, and disappointment. The natural wish is to soothe oneself, to settle the ... Continue Reading
Real Life Consciously Lived
What is it to live authentically, to be at no distance from the life you're in? It's to know what matters to you, to have a background awareness of where you've come from, ... Continue Reading
Granting Grief Its Space
What does grief ask of a human being? When the heart is aching to break, what's to be done?
A breaking heart brings a surge of pain. Whether physical or heartfelt, ... Continue Reading
Hide and Seek
If a person is fortunate, the question will come. What am I, at my essence? Is there something deeper than the daily struggle to satisfy and solve?
In rare moments of brave authenticity, ... Continue Reading
Awakening: A Whole New Life
Awakening is a beginning, not a triumphant conclusion. There might be the impression that once awakening has occurred, nothing remains to happen -- to develop, unfold, blossom. This could not be further from ... Continue Reading
Prayer
What is it to pray? At its essence, what is prayer? Sometimes in explorations with seekers, the subject will come up. Do you pray? I’ve occasionally been asked, or Do you think I ... Continue Reading
Think Nothing of It
A moment of life occurs. You're doing something, or observing or listening, your senses engaged. A split second later, at a subtle distance from the experience itself, you assign it meaning. These two ... Continue Reading
Practical and Spiritual Wisdom, in a Single Gesture
How can you take care of yourself in a difficult moment (including this one), and at the same time come to know — and rest in — your essential nature?
- Focus ... Continue Reading
The Great Teacher
Here it is, the teacher of them all. Every blessed one of us at “school” nowadays, morning-noon-and-night.
How might it be possible to orient to the coronavirus and its widespread disruptions, ... Continue Reading
What Happens at Awakening?
When a person wakes up, what is it they awaken to? And what do they awaken from?
Awakening is about discovering the nature of what is real — what inside you ... Continue Reading
Finding Peace in Hard Times
Unconditional Love and the Surrender to Fear
We ache all our lives to be loved unconditionally. To be seen through and through as we truly are, without judgment or any attempt to alter. To be entirely held in that vast ... Continue Reading
The Blessings of Surrender
When you allow yourself to sink into the reality of something challenging, or to grant a painful feeling its necessary space, in that moment you are really and truly alive. Because you're no ... Continue Reading
A Healthy Lifestyle
What Is It to Really Live?
A Good Day to Die
Estrangement
A Healthy Sense of Self
Living in the Now
Mind Suffering vs. Life Pain
The Value and Limitation of Religion
No Separation
The Gold Within Us
Attention is gold, a commodity of priceless value. For it is via attention that we come to know reality, to sense what we deeply are. That “knowing” is not of the mind. It ... Continue Reading
Being a Parent
Being Judgmental
Taking a Fresh Look at Hope
What You Are
Spiritual Fertility
The Breakthrough Shift: Lost and Found
So much seeking is misguided. Many get hopelessly lost in the impression that somebody else “has it” while they do not. Awakeness is made into something extraordinary — something outside the one longing ... Continue Reading
A Life Not Wasted
The Divine Piñata
The Disappearing Act of the Self
The Secret Room Where Peace Lives
The Thief in the Night
Interview on Spiritual Teachers Podcast
Timeless Presence
Audio of The Freedom of Being: At Ease with What Is
Discovering Jesus
What Is Real? What Are You?
Spiritual Vigilance: Give It a Rest
The Unfolding of Awakening
It’s a rich thing to contemplate: what it’s like to no longer identify with body, history, opinions, thoughts — and yet to still be a person. To live a life, love people, do ... Continue Reading
Kindness to Self
Living in the Constantly-Dying Moment
The Embodied Expression of Consciousness
Without Boundaries
Rock, Sand, Air
“It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.” There is ... Continue Reading
Consciousness and Chronic Pain
Life Without Definition
Force of Nature
The Drunk Carpenter and Life Without a Map
Being Born Again
What I Wish for You
What Happens at Awakening?
Suffering: That Extra Something
The Line Dividing Fear from Love
Transformative Suffering
Life on the Tongue
Watch What Really Happens
The Truest, Realest You
A Child Again
Meditating All Day Long
Why does a person meditate? What does that mean, to meditate? When someone sits for meditation, on a given occasion or as a practice, what expectations are in the picture?
... Continue ReadingThe Ultimate Betrayal
The Moment the Lord Has Made
What Am I?
Being a Smart Animal
Resting from Mind-Caused Suffering
You Are Not Precious
An Encyclopedia of a Peach
Talking to God
What You Can Do to Wake Up: Not This
A Locked Door
Looking at Thought
Looking at thought . . .
... Continue ReadingBeing Conscious
Joy in the Face of Suffering
Anger as a Pointer
Life Untainted by Thought
Degrees of Consciousness
To see "Degrees of Consciousness" click here.
... Continue Reading