After our sitting meditation to start the evening, we moved into an exploration of patience as a practice. Zen teacher Norman Fischer writes the following about working with difficulty in our lives:
- When difficult things happen in our lives, we have to turn toward the difficult thing, whatever i...
In his recent book, The World Could be Otherwise, Zen teacher Norman Fischer writes:
You can give the gift of happiness to others by being happy in a generous and inclusive way. This seems odd - how can my being happy be a gift to someone else? But it can be. If I experience my happiness in a...
Our topic was The Five Powers of Mind, a look at the mental qualities that support and deepen our meditation practice. Here's an excerpt from Simple Meditation & Relaxation by Joel and Michelle Levey:
There are five qualities of mind that are crucial for supporting the continuity of your med...
Our topic was a Thich Nhat Hahn article titled, When Light Shines, Darkness Becomes the Light, on Awakin.org. It begins:
From time to time you may become restless, and the restlessness will not go away. At such times, just sit quietly, follow your breathing, smile a half-smile, and shine your...
Our topic this week, after meditation, is inspired by a Joanna Macy essay titled The Greening the Self. It is taken from Ordinary Magic, a collection edited by John Wellwood. Macy writes:
Something important is happening in our world that you are not going to read about in the newspapers. I...
We followed our sitting and walking meditation with a Sharon Salzberg audio interview. In it, she discusses the movie Dan in Real Life and how it inspirted her to write the book, Real Love. Salzberg says:
...That was a moment when I was practicing, and I realized that up until a certain ti...
The topic for our first Tuesday after the summer break was a Ten Percent Happier blog post titled Enjoy the View - Not the Commentary. In it, psychologist Arnie Kozak looked at how our internal storytelling takes over or masks our experience. For example:
Our lives are almost always accompanie...
This week we meditated as usual and then read an article by Zen priest and business coach Marc Lesser. In it, he writes:
There is an old story of a man riding very fast. As he rushes past his friend who is standing by the side of the road, the friend yells out, "Where are you going?". The man sh...
This week, after sitting and walking meditation, we explored the theme of Ethan Nichtern's book, The Road Home. Here's a taste:
So often our idea of home is whatever we hope will magically be waiting for us after the current disruption....We experience our past as a collection of lost opportun...
Knowing light
and staying dark,
Be a pattern to the world.
Being the world's pattern of unerring power
is to go back again to boundlessness.
So reads the Tao Te Ching as translated by Ursula Le Guin. This week, we used VOICE (Voice Of Innate Clarity Exercise) to work with these ideas of know...