A few weeks before the presidential election in 2004, I was in Ohio attending a conference. One of the university staff who had helped organize it came to the closing on Sunday, apparently with some reluctance. She was crying, and said, "I couldn't decide whether to come or not, since...

I've spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion. So many times people have approached me and said something along the lines of, "I don't know about developing greater love and compassion. Surely that will consign me to...

From the beginning of my meditation practice in 1971, I was very moved by a sense of the Buddha as an integrated being. Most of us can easily experience our lives as somehow fragmented, split apart. We might feel perfectly filled with complete lovingkindness, strongly in touch with the radiant...

As surely everyone knows, a few days ago President Barack Obama released to the press the long form copy of his birth certificate. The long form had the same information as the short form, which he had released years ago, and reiterated the same truth. Anyone who comprehends that Hawaii...

I've always said that lovingkindness and compassion are inevitably woven throughout meditation practice even if the words are never used or implied, no matter what technique or method we are using. Everyone's mind wanders, without doubt, and we always have to start over. Everyone resists or dislikes the thought of...

My earliest experiences in meditation were in a context of intensive retreats. It happened to be in India, but it could have been anywhere: a group of people gathered with an instructor in a place we didn't leave for 10 days or two weeks, with someone cooking our meals and...

A few years ago I went to the Walter Reed Army hospital to do an afternoon of teaching meditation for the nursing staff. Just before the class, my friend, a nurse there, took me on a tour of one of the wards. Of course it was extremely intense, even in...

As I look forward to co-leading this retreat, People Who Care for People: Tools for Resiliency at the Garrison Institute, I find myself reflecting on caregivers I know. Some practice caregiving professionally, as nurses, first responders, chaplains, non-profit attorneys; others in their personal lives, as parents, children, siblings,...

Last week the Dalai Lama was at Emory University, where he holds a Presidential Distinguished Professorship. Amongst the offerings were a teaching on compassion and an exploration of scientific research into compassion meditation. There was also a discussion with Alice Walker and Richard Gere called "The Creative Journey: Artists in...

When the retreat center I co-founded, the Insight Meditation Society, first opened, someone created a mock brochure describing a retreat there, with sayings like, "Come to IMS and have all the tea you could ever drink." It also featured a wonderful made up motto for us: "It is better to...

When I did a CD kit called Unplug, a few of my friends chuckled. "You have to plug it in to get directions on how to unplug," one witty pal pointed out. True enough, and perhaps somewhat ironic, but also not a problem.

Sometimes our issue seems...

The Buddha spoke of five ways that we can nurture and protect the seeds of truth that we have planted: first through morality, and then through understanding and studying the teachings, as we described in the previous post.

The next protection comes through having the support of spiritual...

The Buddha spoke about five ways to protect ourselves and our practice. He used the example of a plot of land to symbolize how to relate more skillfully to our bodies and minds. We want to use the land well, to protect it, to treasure it. He said that the...

There is a saying, "One who protects the dhamma, the truth, will be protected by it." Sometimes this concept of protection is a little difficult for us to understand. It can seem an awful lot like defensiveness, or fear.

Protection, as we use the word in Buddhism, is actually...

The path of the Buddha is called the middle path because, as well as avoiding extremes of behavior, it avoids two extreme views. One view holds that somewhere in this world of appearance and presentation, this glittering world of sense pleasure, of fleeting phenomena, there is something, somewhere that we...

It is said that the Buddha did not inform or instruct others about the dharma, the truth, but rather he proclaimed the truth, or more exactly, he revealed it. We can't give the truth to someone as an object, we can only point to it, inviting inspection. It is in...

My teacher Dipa Ma came to meditation practice out of great suffering. Dipa Ma went through so much suffering in her life. In accordance with the Indian custom of that time, she was put into an arranged marriage when she was twelve years old. She left her parents and joined...

I had a strange experience the other day. The landline in my NYC sublet had intermittently stopped working, for days on end. No dial tone, or a strange sound of static, or a faint message about a receiver being off the hook (I only have one.) I made many calls...

It's the end of daylight savings time on the east coast, and it just about always seems to be dim. Each day is largely dark, and cold, hinting at the uselessness of endeavor and the insubstantiality of what we ordinarily run around seeking. It's a good time to be depressed....

I was just at netroots nation, a convention bringing together progressive activists, bloggers and politicians. I went to a panel one afternoon called Organizing as a Healing Process: A fresh Perspective on PTSD. I've done a little bit of work with soldiers returning from Iraq and have worked with...