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Meditation
February 2005
It’s not just Norma I’m married to, after all. I’m married to loneliness. I’m married to fear. I’m married to desire. I’m a devoted husband. I treat each of my wives with respect.
February 2005Sitting In The Fire
Pema Chödrön On Turning Toward Pain
The first noble truth of the Buddha is that people experience dukka, a feeling of dissatisfaction or suffering, a feeling that something is wrong. . . . only in the West is this dissatisfaction articulated as “Something is wrong with me.”
January 2005
Many Thanks
Gregg Krech On The Revolutionary Practice Of Gratitude
To me, grace comes from an examination of one’s life in which you realize that you don’t deserve what you’re getting, yet you’re getting it anyway. That is the experience of grace, both practically and spiritually. If you want to put it in secular terms, it’s the difference between seeing life as an entitlement and seeing it as a gift.
December 2004
Fighting In The Zendo
When the doctors told us Jeff was dying of leukemia, he and I began to fight. Jeff was twenty-nine, I was twenty-eight, and we’d been building a sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot timber-frame cabin on a small hill of hard ground in Vermont’s Green Mountains.
September 2003
Sunbeams
July 2002The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.
The Greatest Obstacle To Enlightenment
The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form.
July 2002
July 2001
The Titantic is split in two; it sinks. That’s the story of the Titanic. That’s my story, too, hitting the same iceberg again and again, and never quite believing it.
July 2001Getting Free
Escaping The Prisons Of Our Own Making — An Interview With Bo Lozoff
Those three years of retreat were the hardest of my life. I’d been doing prison work for almost twenty years, but that one incident in Louisiana popped my balloon, and everything deflated. I had no energy. Had I been in a mainstream career, people would have pushed me to take Prozac. But I recognized that a very important spiritual development was occurring, and I needed to follow it to its conclusion.
December 2000
