From over fifteen years of sharing her understanding of Buddhist concepts
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Compassion is life loving itself
Part of mindfulness practice is cultivating compassion for ourselves. For example, when we are meditating and we get lost in thought, our habituated reaction may be to give ourselves a hard time. This just throws us into another tangle of thoughts and emotions about past ‘failures’ and/or future hopelessness. But if we cultivate compassion for…
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Walking with the monastics of Plum Village
I have always been curious about Plum Village in France, especially since founder Thich Nhat Hanh is a teacher whose writing I deeply appreciate. So the film ‘Walk with Me’, documenting life there, called to me. Thich Nhat Hanh appears in the film and his words are a presence, but the focus is on…
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Moment by moment
With the regular practice of meditation there is a subtle but profound shift of mind state into a spacious sense of infinite ease and compassionate awareness. Thoughts and emotions still arise, but we are better able to see them as objects of awareness passing through. When our attention wavers and the mind slips back to…
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The Practice Put to the Test
In recent weeks my meditation practice was put to the test. Together with my husband and five visiting family members, I hosted my brother’s hospice care in our home. While I won’t go into detail about our experience, I do want to share the ways in which the regular practice of meditation supported me throughout…
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Sniff, sniff. What’s cooking?
One of the Buddha’s most handy-dandy teachings is called the Noble Eightfold Path. It’s a practical tool for sorting out what’s going on in our lives and to see exactly where we’re making ourselves unhappy. Like so many of the Buddha’s lists, it’s challenging to remember. So I developed a visual metaphor that my students…
