Life sometimes takes such surprising twists and turns that we can either be thrown off balance and never recover, or we can be led to new and exciting adventures and possibilities, especially if we are awake enough to notice and brave enough to take advantage. My life is now entering a new phase of wonder [...]
The smell of cotton candy brings to mind amusement parks and the thrill of being a child. The smell of wet, fallen leaves brings the sad memory of summer’s end and the happy one for some of us of school’s beginning. For most of us, our sense of smell is rather strong and peculiar to [...]
Your daily shower is a perfect opportunity to practice mindfulness. Alone, quiet and away from the normal distractions of your life — even if only for a brief period — it can be a time to observe your habitual patterns of thinking. If you want to develop or deepen a meditation practice, the shower [...]
"Superficially there is negligence, but deep down in people there is love and craving for the beautiful. There is a past, present and future in the fall of a dress. Don’t arrange it.Keep up the work. Try to reduce everything you see to the utmost simplicity. It is harder to see a landscape than [...]
Expect nothing. It cannot be stressed too strongly or expressed too often. Expect nothing. If you can simply contemplate these two words and practice them day and night, there’s no need to say or do more. Expect nothing. Morning on the Hudson Something as simple and innocuous as waiting for a promised [...]
"Do not require of your work the finish that anyone may demand of you, but insist on the finish which you demand. It will not do to have your fine thought yesterday, and paint your picture today. Good painting is a result of effort to obtain order, and the order must go to all the [...]
…continued from There Are No Coincidences In this section we have seen how desire can cause so much pain. One of the reasons for this is because when we crave something that we do not yet have, we project ourselves into a future state, imagining what it would be like to have this object [...]
Letting Go 3:5 …continued from Put It On the Shelf Practicing mindfulness tools during times when we're free of stress and overwhelming feelings, helps us to utilize them when we're under pressure. Right now, as you read this, experiment with putting something on the shelf (see this blog post), even if you’re not particularly [...]
The dictionary offers a simple definition of meditation, but our minds tend to embellish the definition and make it into something mysterious and esoteric. There are many different types of meditation, and the external form of any one of them may be the image we carry in our minds of what meditation is. This [...]
Indeed, we all have suffered frustration, and sometimes we let it carry us into a state of anxiety and depression. From experience, we know that that state of mind never relieves the frustration; it only aggravates it. Let’s take a moment to look at the most common source of frustration and then how we might [...]
