Blog

How fortunate that we who have a chronic condition need not be deprived of this brilliant tool the Buddha honed to perfection for us. The health benefits of this form of meditation are considerable. Health challenges such as long COVID play havoc with our nervous system. While meditating, our beleaguered nervous system has an opportunity to calm down. Obsessive thoughts and fears born of shifting body symptoms that arise, dissolve into the present moment instead of growing louder in the echo chamber of our consciousness. Anxiety becomes just another passing sensation. Since we don’t follow the anxiety blindly it slowly dissolves for lack of attention. We can finally rest. Body and mind settle down and the body begins to repair itself.

Read More

In the morning I go out to the backyard in my slippers and bathrobe with a mug of coffee to sit with my garden in the cool morning air. Any serious gardener would look at this one raised bed and four tubs of corn and squash and wonder at its meager offerings. Still, this modest harvest requires canning and drying and preserving in sterilized jars. This amount of responsibility is just about as much as I can handle. When the peaches come ripe I make peach jam. Now there is an abundance of tomatoes so I’m drying, canning, and preparing to give these juicy red fruits, plucked in their prime and packed in olive oil, to friends and neighbors come the holidays. Thinking about sharing this bounty on a cold winter day brings feelings of delight in this early morning summer garden. Come the holidays my friends will enjoy this summer garden with me in the form of pasta tossed in rosy red olive oil infused with dried tomatoes- real tomatoes not those mealy market ones- to brighten their winter repast.

Read More

When people hear that Buddhism speaks in great detail about suffering and impermanence and that our practice involves sitting in silence and just being with whatever arises they think Buddhism is dry and dusty. And there are some teachers who reflect a sense of dryness. Yet there are other teachers, such as the Dalai Lama, who radiate the radical glow lying beneath that dry exterior. He is someone who has had his country taken from him and seen his beloved county men and women tortured, killed and forced to flee with almost nothing to build a life a foreign land. Yet the Dalai Lama’s joy radiates unconditionally warming all in his presence. The Chinese powers that be cannot take away the Dalai Lama’s joy, and no one can take away your bedrock joy.

Read More

When I was a little girl my older brother had a trick he liked to play on me. He’d put both my index fingers into a tight straw container called a Chinese finger trap and tell me to pull them out. The initial reaction to the finger trap is to panic and yank your fingers outward, which makes the trap tighter. The way to escape the trap is to relax and push the ends toward the middle, which enlarges the opening and frees the fingers. The harder I pulled the tighter the straw trap bound my hands together. The only way to get the thing off me was to relax and gently let it slip off, no mean feat, especially given the element of panic. It’s a cruel trick, but it did teach me something I keep learning over and over again in different forms. The harder I struggle the greater my suffering. The antidote is relaxing when I most want to tense up.

Read More

Whatever training we’re going to engage in, we must first have a strong motivation to continue the training through the many challenges we will encounter. The athlete may be motivated by a competition they want to win, a dancer may be motivated by a dream of joining a professional dance troupe. In order to circumvent resistance we need to take an honest look at the question, why do we meditate? The seductive call of the senses is strong. If we do not have a burning desire for awakening, or a desperate need to make it through challenging circumstances, it’s difficult to keep walking the path when we’d rather stay in bed or talk with a friend or just start our day.

Read More

I never thought about the connection between being a refugee and the Buddhist rite of taking refuge until recently. Watching Ukrainians flee from their homes, bringing with them only what they can physically carry, makes the idea of refuge much more immediate and real to me. In the morning the Ukrainian mother made her coffee, just the way she likes it, fed her family breakfast, bundled her kids up for school and got ready for the day. It’s the simplest things that make life feel safe. How quickly all of that can devolve into survival. How fragile we are.

Read More

There are books on how to cut and piece rags together to make quilts, we can see how other artists pick up stones at a creek, or discarded items at the dump to make sculpture, but how do we take something as abstract as a broken heart and transform it into compassion? Thankfully, we are not left on our own to figure this out. Explorers before us have developed practices that show us how to pick up and rearrange the pieces. One such practice is Lojong training, developed by the Bengali meditation master Atisha in the 11th century CE. This practice takes us through a series of 59 sayings designed to help us recycle uncomfortable and painful feelings into spiritual power.

Read More

Zen has valuable wisdom to offer us for hard times such as these. The first bit of wisdom is the bed rock practice of not knowing. The Zen teacher, Roshi Bernie Glassman, wrote, “Knowing is a snapshot, the idea of how things are; therefore, it’s not deep wisdom. The perfection of wisdom is the functioning of things as they are. We say, not knowing is most intimate. If we can really see this basic point of life, we can function with no limitations or restrictions; we can do everything!” While meditating we don’t judge or comment on our thoughts, we just watch them arise and pass. We focus on the vital field that the thoughts arise and pass in and out of. Resting in not knowing allows us the space to let go of tension and viewpoints if only for a few minutes. We feel the positive emotions alongside the challenges without judging either.

Read More

In line waiting for my cup of ayahuasca, the drums beating a rhythm, I sway to the music ready to enter into the unknown. At last evening’s ceremony I was filled with fear. I asked mother ayahuasca to be gentle with me and she was. My father danced with me the entire evening. Nobody loved dancing more than him. His visitation reminded me to express joy and playfulness through my body, that my body is an expression of delight. Tonight I was ready for ayahuasca to bring it on, open to experience whatever I needed to experience in order to open up any clogged channels of my psyche. I wanted to be free. With steely determination I was now ready to enter whatever gate led to release of core suffering.

Read More

In Zen intimate is another word for awakened. When we experience things directly, without added judgements and classifications, our knowing is as close as the pillow is to our head at night. We don’t lie in bed thinking, “This is my head and this is my pillow. My pillow is made of cotton. It’s from Bed Bath and Beyond.” We just sink into the experience of comfort and ease. Intimacy is experiencing everything directly, whether the sensation is pleasant or painful-no matter. We put aside those definitions and the sensation is just a sensation, the feeling is just a feeling, the thought is just a thought. We are not separate from our experience. From that place we can lay down fear and see the world around us more clearly.

Read More

The metaphor of a bull and whip is decidedly masculine, even militaristic. It is a metaphor about a struggle to control our experience- a hero’s plight. This is one way to go, might there be other ways? How might awakening be depicted using more feminine metaphors? Is a feminine path of awakening fundamentally different than a masculine path, and if so, what does it look like? Feminine or masculine, awakening requires rigor and solid, consistent effort as in the taming metaphor. But maybe struggling with the ego need not always be central to the process of awakening, struggling being the operative word.

Read More

With whatever is going on; the heartaches, the triumphs, the friends and family, the state of the world, there is always room for gratitude. I turn to gratitude as an immediate source of happiness, especially during challenging times. November, thanksgiving month, is a perfect time to count blessings and release cravings for something other than what is right here. Early winter offers the inspiration to cozy in and count the blessings of being alive on a planet that offers orange squash, green grass, clouds and water. As each unfulfilled longing drops from the tree it becomes compost for tomorrow’s harvest.

Read More

We love the sweetness of spring and the openness of summer, what about the closing in of autumn and containment of winter? When we meditate we love the freedom offered by the release of obsessive thoughts but can we embrace the death of our cherished identity that has been held up by these thoughts? If we can, even for a single thought, the golden wind moves through our lives altering everything, if only for a moment.

Read More

Our world is at a turning point and it is not clear which will prevail, the evils or hope. When a dragon is fatally pierced in the heart it flails about in pain and outrage creating a radius of damage before plummeting to its death. The results are inevitably bloody and horrible. Our Earth has been in the clutches of a greedy dragon who would not hesitate to continue ripping open it’s fragile skin in order to mine for more gold. The dragon persists even when faced with the demise of its own home and the future home of its children. These are the desperate acts of a dying monster.

Read More

The quest for happiness is an essential driving force for each one of us, yet few of us take the time to really consider what happiness is and how to best create it. It’s astonishing how many of us think, if only I were wealthier, more beautiful, more respected in our field, had more friends, had more time, had the perfect mate, yadda yadda yadda, then we’d be happy-all evidence to the contrary. We try to find our way into happiness through relationships, adventures and beautiful things. Although our attempts may bring some temporary satisfaction, we are not on solid ground. It seems reasonable to take some time to reflect on the question, what is happiness? Where is its source and how it is created?

Read More

As Juneteenth becomes a national holiday Americans have the opportunity each year to celebrate those courageous citizens who put their lives on the line for freedom, and to follow their lead. My culture also celebrates freedom from slavery each year at Passover. Fighting for freedom is intrinsic to the Jewish culture. During Passover we remember the struggle of our ancestors who freed us from slavery thousands of years ago.

Read More

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring — these are some of the rewards of the simple life. – John Burroughs

Read More

Awakening at Home is happy to announce that it has just become an affiliate of Zen Peacemakers International https://zenpeacemakers.org/ ZPI was founded in 1994 by Roshi Bernie Glassman, a dharma heir of the Soto Zen Master Taizan Maezumi Roshi of the White Plum Flower lineage, his wife and friends. ZPI emanated from Roshi Glassman’s question, “How can I best serve?” This is a question that is primary to me so this form of Buddhism is a good fit.

Read More

It’s a year into the COVID 19 lock down, there is a new president and the vaccine distribution is starting to enable us to cautiously re-enter the world beyond necessity. The first stirrings of spring and the opening up of our communities are inspiring reflections on the past year for some of us. The stories of this past year’s experiences vary widely. For some it has been hell, for some not so much. As we tell our stories we honor one another’s experience. Each story has value and each story is as real as any other.

Read More

Fortunate is the person who can live simply in the midst of whatever life they find themselves in, who takes each moment, one by one-the heartache, the smile from a loved one, the illness or the bird at the window. The heartache leaves its patina on our soul, the bird at the window delights us. Delight at the bird in the window sustains us, how we integrate our heartaches make the patinas on our life either confused and bitter or deep, warm and inclusive.

Read More