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Mindfulness Matters

In any given moment our attention can be in any one of ten places. Nine of them of can be visualized on a grid, like a tic-tac-toe board. There are three locations attention can be — future, past, and present (but here it is commentary about the present; that is, opinions, about what is happening…

There’s an old Zen saying, “Fall down seven times, get up eight times.” In Wild Chickens and Petty Tyrants I shared the image of a young children learning to walk. Just at that point where they are getting it, they don’t mind falling. They get up with exuberance in the pursuit of mastery. A few…

It’s Stress Reduction Sunday. Read my weekly post in the Connecticut Watchdog. Here is my CT Watchdog posts from last week: Navigating Valentine’s Day and Other Capitalistic Tyrannies What do Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day have in common? They are holidays that legislate feelings and encourage (require) us to spend lots of money. In the case of…

How’s the weather by you? It’s snowing here again in my home of Northern Vermont. This is not too unusual. It also snowed in Irving Texas, sight of the Super Bowl tomorrow. That is unusual. Last week much of the country was under snow.  The weather is a great teacher of what the Buddha called…

In this series of entries, we are exploring the Buddha’s basic teaching of the Noble Eight-Fold Path. In a previous entry, we focused on Right Effort, today, we’ll focus on Right Speech. Again, the use of the term “right” suggests the right-wrong dichotomy. This is not exactly what is meant. I prefer the term skillful…

The New York Times and the Boston Globe have recently written about a forthcoming study on the brain changes associated with mindfulness meditation. This is great news and is not really new. Researches such as Britta Holzl, Sarah Lazar, and others have been conducting and publishing studies for years documenting the brain-changing effects of meditation.…

Watch some vintage footage of Victor Frankl, author of the classic Man’s Search for Meaning. A book that has inspired generations of healers and other courageous individuals by his example  to persist in the face of humanity’s worst. He even throws in his own metaphor. 

The other day I discussed metaphors for the self, how the idea of a self-contained individual is misleading (see the entry called “The Self is not and Island: Finding Our Place in the Natural World.” Carl Safina offered the metaphor of a whirlpool and this is very consistent with the Buddha’s understanding of self.  When…

It’s Stress Reduction Sunday. Read my weekly post in the Connecticut Watchdog. Here is my CT Watchdog posts from last week: Hot Buddha Sweats; Cold Buddha Shivers: Enjoying the Conditions of Now It’s cold outside. Here in Northern Vermont the temperatures dipped well below 0 degrees Fahrenheit last night and will again tonight. It’s probably very…

I was captivated listening to the NPR program, On Point with Tom Ashbrook, yesterday. His guest was Carl Safina, ecologist and author of The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World. You can read excerpts and listen to the program from the On Point website.  What struck me most in the…
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