“The starting place for a radical re-imagining of love is mindfulness,” according to renowned author and pioneering meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg. These days, both mindfulness and love, as in compassion or loving kindness, receive significant attention....
I've been thinking lately about how practicing mindful awareness supports me in handling the many complexities of modern living. In a way, this might sound like a mental leap, to consider how mindfulness practice – the cultivation of awareness that arises from paying...
Recently, at the end of a mindful yoga session, a student stopped on her way out of class to tell me that directly feeling the relationships between her different muscles and how they moved was really helping her. Curious about what exactly she was finding beneficial,...
What is mindful yoga (or any kind of mindful movement) all about? I have been contemplating this question through practice and in discussions with fellow practitioners for years. Folks in MBSR classes, for example, often ask why they are being encouraged to pay...
Perhaps many in this forum can recall the “Communications Calendar” from the MBSR course in which participants write a few words each day for a week about their experiences of difficulties in ordinary communications. Then, in class, we explore ways that mindfulness...
Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time at the computer, working on projects that depend on the many amazing powers of modern technology. A week or so ago, after many hours of peering at words and images on the screen, I noticed my heart feeling hard and stiff, my...
During the cold winter months, our woodstove becomes the focal point of our daily rhythms. We stack and carry logs, feed the stove throughout the day, and frequently clean up debris from the kindling. Today, while sweeping, the taste of contentment visited my heart....
Recently, I spent some time in silent retreat and, as is often the case for me, came away with a phrase that encapsulates the theme life seemed to be teaching me there. “Always a choice; never in control,” are the words ringing in mind. Perhaps vignettes of a couple...
Years ago, a wise teacher shared with me that what she found herself most appreciating through her decades of mindfulness practice was the paradoxical nature of the human situation. At the time, this seemed rather obvious to me and not particularly helpful. A little...
Today I’d like to exhale long and offer you all a poem. It’s one that I wrote, which is the reason for that long out-breath. Sharing from the heart feels vulnerable, and breathing out helps me with that. I’ve been writing poems for years. I absolutely love writing...