There is an underbelly to our most intimate relationships: the dark side of love. When people announce they are getting married, we might give our condolences along with our congratulations to offer a more holistic picture of the institution. Until then, let’s work out some of the awful kinks. […]
This could be a book. But right now I don’t have time to write it, and you might not have time to read it, so I’ll just send out postcards, aka blog posts, for now. I’ve been seeing families, couples and individuals for almost 25 years now, and I am sure of a few things, [...]
In the ongoing quest to mend our anxious minds, many of us are drawn to meditation. Once we begin, we find that we fidget, we get sleepy, we get bored. We don’t do it right, we fail, we quit, we start again only to quit again. Our expectations of finding peace are not met and [...]
A voice arises often in my meditation. And when the same phrase is repeated, quietly, periodically, urgently, I pause and write it down. I don’t ignore my Muse. “There is a screaming child in the body of America,” she told me. […]
In the movie Harvey, starring James Stewart, he has an invisible friend, a puka, who is a 6-foot-tall rabbit. In college, it was one of my favorite old films to watch. […]
I’m reading the web through different eyes. I’m thinking (which isn’t always such a good idea) that I’m not using the right words to get Jizo into the mainstream of American consciousness. I just visited a site I was almost afraid to see: cabinporn.com. I thought it might be real porn, shot in cabins. Who [...]
A funny thing happened when I decided to write a memoir of my journey of photographing, meditating and knowing Jizo. For years, I was on what I guess you would call a spiritual path, a seeking kind of thing. It started when I was 8 years old but heated up in my late 20’s. [...]
A funny thing happens after sitting in meditation for a long time, gazing at my Jizos, who are gazing back at the not-me — my mind becomes at ease. I promise it only took around 20 years for me to stop controlling my breath and just let it be. For years, my mind would always [...]
The other morning in yoga, my instructor, Dakota Lupo, said something that made me laugh out loud. I am a little careful now about when I laugh aloud in yoga because once I laughed at something a new instructor said — she was funny — and she glared at me. She said, “Yoga is serious.” [...]
What? Aw, crap. In meditation this morning Chibi fell off the shrine and on to the sketch pad: “Oh, no!” Chibi cried, like the 1950s-style comics that used to run on Sunset Boulevard in the ’80’s that read “I forgot to have children!” My Chibi cried, “I forgot to use keywords! Key. Words! I heard [...]
