In my understanding of Buddhism, hell is being stuck in a state of desire, of craving, of wanting anything other than what is right here, right now. Jizo is the bodhisattva whose role it is to help us out of these realms, making a vow to evolve to a higher state. […]
I know you have heard that we meditate to improve cognitive functioning, to bring peace, to cope with anxiety, and for myriad other reasons — just fill in the blanks. Bottom line: the consensus is that meditating is good for you. Kind of like broccoli. And yet, most of us quit. Eventually. And still, many [...]
I was an active kid. Not hyper-active, just spirited. Playful. Funny. In meditation, this part of me arises. Sometimes it is a whisper. Sometimes a volcano. Mostly, it’s just me being fidgety. Around age six, I attended Sunday church services with my mom. I remember her whispering, “Sit still.” She would promise me a root [...]
I know a group of people who are trying not to overwork, but rather to pace themselves. They have some wonderful tools including a meditation on prioritizing. Here’s what they have to say, “We decide which are the most important things to do first. Sometimes that may mean doing nothing. We strive to stay flexible [...]
It has been a month since the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. The punch of the news took days to even begin to metabolize. […]
I could never “successfully” meditate until finding my Jizo. Maybe I was too young, maybe my ego could not surrender to the process (likely it really hasn’t even now but there has been some progress). What I have found is that the grounding aspect of Jizo, whose Sanskrit name – Ksitigarbha – means Earth Womb, [...]
When I Google “Idea Horse” nothing much shows up. The first hit is the Ideal Horse in Aristotle’s concepts of the Ideal-Fill-in-the-Blank. When I search for The Monkey Mind and The Idea Horse, I begin to find small mentions. […]
In all my years on the path, no one introduced me to the Idea Horse. He is a close relative to the Monkey Mind, a term most American Buddhists and yogis are familiar with. Both represent the racing thoughts, the distracted mind, the things people wish they could silence with meditation. The problem is, it [...]
Say “Hello, monkey.” Whatever the chatter is — no matter how harsh, silly, irrelevant or distracting — you must learn how to handle the monkey mind: that endless chatter of fear, restlessness, distraction and other voices in our heads that Buddha described as monkeys clamoring for our attention. If you hate the monkey mind , [...]
I always plan to meditate in the morning before going onto my phone, laptop or iPad. That way, I find the middle before being pulled in any of the other four directions. I once heard someone say that they had never met a day that could not start 20 minutes earlier — which is to [...]
