I’m sharing this to invite you to write your own “bad” haiku. The idea is to take pen in hand and let it fly. Being precious or exacting at the start of any art project is a killer. Let go of self-judgement or feelings of inadequacy. These poems are for your eyes only, tools to help you fully inhabit the moment. Here are some guidelines to get you started:
Read MoreIn this time of great challenges coming at us each news cycle, I offer this wonderfully insightful poem by the Brazilian theologian Rubem Alves:
Read MoreLojong teachings are, at their core, designed to develop compassion. When we stop projecting our unhappiness onto others we are free to see them as they are. Then we can love them with all their mishigosha. Then we can love ourselves with all our mishigosha.
Read MoreWhile sitting in the sand by the ocean a young mom with a toddler walked up and parked her stroller beside me. I watched as the mom diapered her child while standing up. I wanted to applaud her dexterity but thought that might freak her out so I just watched her and the other beach goers from a place of stillness and contentment on this beautiful day by the ocean. Her little boy toddled to the shore and put his feet into the vast rolling ocean. All the boy could see in front of him was the dark blue green ocean expanding to the blue sky, all he could hear was the roar of the waves and all he could feel was the warm, salty water. A less confident mother might have swooped him up from the ocean’s dangers and brought him safely to shore. This mother stood behind her boy, not in front of him. If he needed her she was there but she didn’t get in the way of his experiencing this limitless world.
Read MoreWe’re all called to different tasks, different acts of loving kindness, different populations. One person is called to take a leadership role in climate change issues, one is feeding the hungry, another housing the homeless, another ending war. We each find our niche, our passion, in all the good work that needs to be done. How lovely to relax back into our calling and act fully with confidence that our efforts are important-even when we can’t see the results. When seeds are planted in the ground the farmer doesn’t stand over them to see if they will grow. She lets the seed go into the loamy soil knowing she’s done her part. Some of the seeds will be eaten by animals, some will die in the ground and some will grow to be lush beautiful plants. Some of the seeds will even endure and propagate throughout the land. This is none of her affair. She just plants the seeds and lets them go.
Read MoreShort of meditation, this gratitude practice has been one of the most powerful tools I’ve found. For years I’ve been using it to get out of funks, victimhood (you want to spend as little time as possible in this hood), pits of sorrow. Like meditation, it’s not something you do for a while, get good at, and store on the shelf. It’s more like gas for the car. The mind is prone to negativity and needs to be set straight again and again. Best to refuel before it runs on empty. Making a gratitude list is like getting free gasoline whenever you want it-- Such a great deal!
Read MoreHow 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 MoreIn 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 MoreWhen 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 MoreWhen 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 MoreWhatever 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 MoreI 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 MoreThere 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 MoreZen 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 MoreIn 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 MoreIn 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 MoreThe 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 MoreWith 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 MoreWe 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 MoreOur 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.
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