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Mindfulness Matters

Ani Pema Chödrön is an American Buddhist nun and author whose teachings and writings on meditation have helped make Buddhism accessible to a broad Western audience. She currently directs the Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, Canada, the first Tibetan monastery in North America for Western monastics and lay practitioners. Pema Chodron is the author of…

Over Labor Day Weekend, I found myself waiting for a train at Newark Airport. I arrived about 15 minutes late for the train I wanted to catch, the 9:30. I grumbled to myself with a complaint about having to wait. Before that thought could finish echoing through my tired mind another thought arose. “45 minutes?…

Continuing with the Charter for Compassion talks. Rev. Jams Forbes presents a refreshing and everyday perspective on compassion, including sympathetic joy — rejoicing in successes of others. He grew up in a family asking, “Are all the children in?”

This metaphor comes from the Star Trek Next Generation (STNG) episode, “Deja Q.” In this episode Q arrives freshly kicked out of the “Q Continuum” stripped of his omnipotent powers. He’s now merely human. He’s reluctantly trying to help the Enterprise crew solve a problem. An asteroid is veering dangerously close to a planet and…

It’s Stress Reduction Sunday. Read my weekly post in the Connecticut Watchdog, This week’s entry, Mindfulness: An Ancient Remedy for a Modern Problem: Mindfulness is an ancient technology that has relevance to today’s problem of chronic stress overload. Part of the reason we are chronically stressed is because there is a mismatch between the environments our…

It’s Sport Saturday. This entry continues an essay on using sport to awaken. Click here to read part one. Non-gravity sports such as road running, road biking, and swimming offer a ready opportunity to full body awareness. Instead of a gravity-induced absorption, the immersion in the present moment includes the entire body.  Take running, for…

Kalyanamitra (Sanskrit) or kalyanamitta (Pali) refers to the “spiritual friend.” This friend can be a spiritual teacher that guides on the path and also refers to peers that travel the path along with you. The sangha (community of people who follow the teachings of the Buddha, that is, dharma) would then be comprised of spiritual friends,…

Thursdays will be a day to feature teachers and talks that I have sat with or are familiar with through their writings. As I think back over my 27 years of spiritual practice I’ve had the honor, pleasure, and good fortune to learn the dharma in many different ways from many different teachers. Before I…

It’s Wisdom Wednesday. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant recounts the story of a wounded Siberian tiger that tracks and kills the poacher, Vladimir Markov who had previously wounded him. After being shot in the paw the tiger went to Markov’s cabin, killed his dogs and destroyed everything with…

Starting with Karen Armstrong’s introduction of the Charter for Compassion, TED presents a series of talks from multiple religious perspectives on the issue of compassion. Watch Swami Dayananda Saraswati here speak about compassion from a developmental perspective. Be big, be whole he urges to open the gates of compassion. Until then, “fake it until you…
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