Meditation https://www.thesunmagazine.org/rss en-us Practicing Taking piano lessons, learning to speak Russian, seeking enlightenment

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28975 Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/605-practicing 605-30-anzorena-preview.jpg 605 - Anzorena - Practicing Tassajara The abbot declared your beloved pit bull had Buddha nature, / so you carried her sixty muscled pounds to the mountain // monastery, where we sat sesshin and she ate wool socks, / a box of chocolates, and eight pages of Robert Aitken.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28893 Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/601-tassajara Avium You don’t know what’s with Marjorie, // but you almost love her as you gird your loins for a cure / worse than the disease. Imagining two years of drugs / in your still-able body that climbs hills and sings, // you can’t stop wondering how you got this thing. Yet / it must be said avium blesses you with a meaning hardly / to be believed. . .

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28832 Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/avium-kathryn-jordan-poem-597 Eight Tenets This morning I tell myself, Everything is possible—the first tenet of qigong, the Chinese practice where you stand or sit and start scooping energy out of the air like it’s invisible ice cream. Reaching out and scooping, pulling back and placing energy on your heart, energy that allows good things to happen in all situations. This makes me feel super ninja and ready to meet the day.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28825 Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/eight-tenets-elizabeth-hawes-incarceration-spirituality-597 597-14-povenz-preview.jpg 597 - Povenz - Hawes The Healer He was riding the train to his teaching job when he heard about Skimmer’s bike accident in a post from another college friend. It was noon in Tokyo, where he was an English instructor; his conversation school opened in thirty minutes. Skimmer had been one of his closest friends in college. They’d lived on the same floor for two years and had shared an off-campus house with others for three years after that. Skimmer had started mountain biking their first semester in the house. Sometimes he would have accidents, and his blood would smear the bathtub while he dressed his wounds. But then he would clean, and when Skimmer cleaned, he scrubbed and wiped and penetrated each corner, calling upon a small orchestra of sprays and rags, brushes and solutions. It was like watching Leonard Bernstein scour a tub.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28757 Wed, 30 Apr 2025 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/593-the-healer 593-20-watanabe-preview.jpg 593-watanabe-keast.jpg The Loneliest Monk Listens rick.chess@gmail.com The first step is to imagine. / No, before that: breathe. Breathe, and know / breath. That’s where it begins.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28737 Mon, 31 Mar 2025 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/592-the-loneliest-monk-listens 592-22-druart-preview.jpg 592-Druart-Chess Nectar It was an old tradition he had once told her about: When there was a death in the household, the beekeeper would go out to tell the bees about it. The thought was that, if the bees were not told, they would abscond. They were members of the family. Their feelings would be hurt if they were overlooked.

So he was doing it. Telling them. Romantic fool.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28714 Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/591-nectar 591-14-bronsan-preview.jpg 591-Brosnan-Wood Flower People jholman0099@gmail.com There was a rumor the NAACP would call for a boycott of white-owned businesses. Eugene’s mother said it wasn’t clear what the objective would be, except to piss off white people and make Black people feel in control of something. “A show of Black power,” she said, holding up a fist from the living-room sofa, but she was worried more people would be killed.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28598 Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/587-flower-people 587-16-whiteman-preview.jpg 587 - Whiteman - Holman August at Forty-Three For six years we’ve taken no precautions / and my body has made no / third baby, nor have we plotted / to create another life, content / to let nature do what it would

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/28536 Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/584-august-at-forty-three Become A Friend Of <em>The Sun</em> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27495 Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27495-become-a-friend-of-em-the-sun-em He Arrived In A Hollowed-Out Studebaker Lark We also had eyes for his car. You had to give up / all possessions to live here, George fine with that — / he’d just spent two cross-country months in the thing, / its front bucket seat removed for sleeping purposes — / and now an actual Lark was our newest town-runner.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27956 Mon, 31 Oct 2022 04:10:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27956-he-arrived-in-a-hollowed-out-studebaker-lark Sunbeams

Silence is something that comes naturally when you are watching, when you are watching without motive, without any kind of demand, just to watch, and see the beauty of a single star in the sky, or to watch a single tree in a field, or to watch your wife or husband, or whatever you watch. To watch with a great silence and space. Then in that watching, in that alertness, there is something that is beyond words, beyond all measure.

J. Krishnamurti

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24635 Fri, 31 Dec 2021 05:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24635-sunbeams The Desert Within leathtonino@gmail.com There was a value placed on listening as closely as possible to the mysterious silence that supports existence, which is both the actual silence of the desert landscape and the silence of the self in contemplation.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24232 Fri, 31 Dec 2021 05:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/24232-the-desert-within A Thousand Cups Of Coffee It’s like arriving at your destination after a long drive, only to realize your mind has been elsewhere the entire time and you have no memory of the lights you stopped at, the turns you made, the glide in and out of traffic. Morning arrives again, and I stand in the kitchen, startled to exist.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26781 Thu, 26 Aug 2021 04:10:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26781-a-thousand-cups-of-coffee Sitting On My Mother The scar in the turf in front of her headstone has long since healed. Her death date was blank at her funeral, reflecting our disbelief. It now reads, Sept. 11, 2010. Beside that is another blank for my father.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25790 Fri, 18 Sep 2020 16:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25790-sitting-on-my-mother Just This Breath heatherellesellers@gmail.com I can’t see the virus, but I feel its seeds in me. I can’t see my faith, but I feel its seeds in me, too.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23431 Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23431-just-this-breath Fear Of Rest In the stillness there are forces and voices and hands and nourishment that arise, that take our breath away, but we can never know this, know this, until we rest.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21236 Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/21236-fear-of-rest Sparrow’s Guide To Meditation Meditation teaches that change is constant. You fool yourself into believing that you are a fixed entity, but you are not. You are a river of transforming whims.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23892 Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23892-sparrow-s-guide-to-meditation It’s All Happening To All Of Us, All Of The Time It is impossible to be a human being connected by affection to others and not be vulnerable to pains beyond our own.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27881 Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27881-it-s-all-happening-to-all-of-us-all-of-the-time August 2018 Featuring Pema Chödrön, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield, and more.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25742 Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25742-august-2018 Two Mirrors Facing Each Other One does not sit in order to become enlightened. One sits because, as the Buddha exclaimed at the moment of his awakening, one is enlightened as one is. The practice is simply a means of realizing this fact, which the ordinary, dualistic mind obscures.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26672 Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/26672-two-mirrors-facing-each-other Our Grand Delusion We are paradoxical. We are beings who are limited and who will always create a world of suffering, and we’re beings who have the capacity to understand that and, in some way, go beyond it.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23499 Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23499-our-grand-delusion Intimacy With Fear If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25433 Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25433-intimacy-with-fear Mindfulness I practice a very special / form of mindfulness / called not-minding-ness. / This has brought me peace and purified / my soul to the point that it is almost / possible to live with me.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23505 Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23505-mindfulness Selected Poems — from “Too Busy” | Have ambition and ego ruined my life? / Where have my easy days gone?

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22431 Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22431-selected-poems Transforming The Heart Of Suffering In fact, one’s whole attitude toward pain can change. Instead of fending it off and hiding from it, one could open one’s heart and allow oneself to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us far more loving and kind.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27660 Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/27660-transforming-the-heart-of-suffering Nobody Fails At Meditation mbazzett@blakeschool.org Nobody fails at meditation / like I do. / They say, / Note the arrival of thoughts / and allow them to pass through / like clouds crossing a summer sky.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22931 Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22931-nobody-fails-at-meditation The Genuine Heart Of Sadness Basic goodness is good because it is unconditional, or fundamental. It is there already, in the same way that heaven and earth are there already.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25975 Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/25975-the-genuine-heart-of-sadness <em>excerpted from</em><br />What Took You So Long? In India, old, old stories still are told of a Hindu holy man named Narada who devoted his life to attaining the spiri­tual liberation of nirvana.

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22211 Sat, 01 Feb 2014 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/22211-em-excerpted-from-em-br-what-took-you-so-long Sunbeams

They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.

Emily Dickinson

]]> http://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23049 Tue, 01 Oct 2013 16:48:00 -0400 https://www.thesunmagazine.org/articles/23049-sunbeams