2000 Years of Kindness
"'Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now,' Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful 1957 letter to his first wife turned lifelong friend. 'Kindness, kindness, kindness,' Susan Sontag resolved in her diary on New Year's Day in 1972. Half a century later, the Dalai Lama placed a single exhortation at the center of his ethical and ecological philosophy: 'Be ... posted on Mar 18 2023, 4,366 reads

The Sounds of Silence
"When I was a sixteen-year-old naturalist in training, we were instructed to sit in the forest and wait for the return of something called the baseline symphony. The baseline symphony was the music of a landscape at ease--the confluence of insect, bird, and animal song, underscored by wind and water. The dynamics of that symphony shifted as day progressed into night. There were brief caesuras, but... posted on Mar 17 2023, 1,797 reads

Shay Beider: Resilience is Rooted in Source
Over the last two decades Shay Beider has done pioneering work in integrative medicine through her non-profit organization, Integrative Touch, that enhances well-being, minimizes suffering and facilitates healing for children with special medical needs and their families."Essentially, our entire role as a team is to listen with every little bit of our capacity. And so that's not just listening wit... posted on Mar 16 2023, 2,573 reads

Separation Without Separateness: A Day That Changed My Life
"I had been living in London. It was Sunday, July 27, 1980...a day that changed my life forever. I got up before dawn and went for a long, slow, easy run in Hyde Park. When I returned, I picked up the Sunday Times and went into my flat. After showering, I was thumbing through the newspaper, and when I got to page fourteen, I saw a headline in the education section: "How the Universe Hangs Together... posted on Mar 15 2023, 3,754 reads

On Writing More Clearly
"Here, in short, is what I want to tell you.

Know what each sentence says,

What it doesn't say,

And what it implies.

Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says."

Verlyn Klinkenborg teaches creative writing at Yale and is a former member of the editorial board of the New York Times, he shares more in ... posted on Mar 14 2023, 2,465 reads

What Happens in Mindfulness
"Like mom and apple pie, mindfulness has an unassailable reputation for virtue and wholesomeness. But what actually goes on in the brain and the psyche to deliver the goods? What are we actually signing up for when we embrace a path of mindfulness? In this important new book John Teasdale deftly weaves a course between the Scylla of cognitive science and the Charybdis of classic spiritual teaching... posted on Mar 13 2023, 3,366 reads

Zen TV
"How many of you know how to watch television?" I asked my class one day. After a few bewildered and silent moments, slowly, one by one, everyone haltingly raised their hands. We soon acknowledged that we were all 'experts,' as Harold Garfinkle would say, in the practice of 'watching television.'"This short excerpt by Bernard McGrane provides a profound thought experiment that can help us "wake up... posted on Mar 12 2023, 23,701 reads

Why Do We Not Sing These Things as Miracles?
"You will say to me that time passeth, that What Was is now only memory, that we cannot reclaim or resurrect that which is inarguably past, but I am going to quibble about this, and quiz and question you hard and close, for I dont even have to shut my eyes and it is six in the morning, long ago and right now, far away and right here, and it is snowing heavily, and there is a silvery shiver to the ... posted on Mar 11 2023, 2,093 reads

IntraConnected: Discovering MWe (Me + We)
"We may have a mental understanding that all of life is one inseparable whole, yet how do we actually feel into this reality? And how do we relate to others and the world from this felt awareness? Dr. Daniel J. Siegel is a visionary creative thinker, professor, and founder of the field of interpersonal neurobiology. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Siegel about his book IntraConnected: ... posted on Mar 10 2023, 2,278 reads

Amishi Jha: Pay Attention to Your Attention
Amishi P. Jha came to her pathbreaking work studying the neuroscience of mindfulness and attention when, as a young professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, she lost feeling in her teeth. She had been grinding them as a profound stress response to burnout from her responsibilities as a wife, mother, and tenure-track professor. Knowing from her academic work that the b... posted on Mar 09 2023, 4,713 reads