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 [...]
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 [...]
Letting Go 3:3 …continued from Learn to Listen, Listen to Learn Letting go is probably the most difficult concept to grasp and the most challenging action to perform on the Quiet Corner path. Yet without this in our repertoire, all else is for naught. I continue to learn valuable lessons about myself and my world [...]
The holidays, the election, and the uncertainty ahead have many of us worried and out of sorts: I know no better way to return to the center and maintain serenity than meditation. In my case it takes the form of Zazen – “sitting meditation” – and below is a beautiful paean for this practice [...]
Life is inherently risky. There is only one big risk you should avoid at all costs, and that is the risk of doing nothing. Dennis Waitley Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security. John Allen Paulos The future is completely open, and [...]
When I, a student of Dharma, Look at the real form of the universe, All is the never-failing manifestation Of the mysterious truth of Tathagata. In any event, in any moment, and in any place, None can be other than the marvelous revelation Of its glorious light. This realization made our ancestral teachers and [...]
Since moving to the country a year and a half ago, I’ve been engaged and busy with so many exciting new things that I put teaching my meditation classes and workshops on the shelf as I adjusted to my new lifestyle. On Monday this week I led my first meditation workshop up here in Hudson. [...]
So Easy, Yet So Hard You need no special skills to face a quiet corner—no special talents, no special brainpower. Each one of us has the raw material necessary. Desire is a requirement, but if you’re reading this, you already have that. Simply set some time aside, choose a spot, get comfortable, breathe, and voilà—a [...]
Just getting through a typical day without ending up exhausted or embittered can sometimes be so daunting that when faced with some of the larger challenges of life we seem to have no energy resources left for the fight. So we let the major events take control and toss us to and fro, all the [...]
