“The ultimate expression of meditation comes when we can feel all the pains of the world, experience them with mindfulness and equanimity so they dissolve into energy, and then recolor that energy and radiate it out as unconditional love, moment by moment, through every pore of our being.” — Shinzen Young

I have discovered that the religious quest is not about discovering “The Truth” or “The Meaning of Life” but about living as intensely as possible in the here and now. The idea is not to latch on to some superhuman personality or to “get to heaven” but to discover how to be fully human –…

Valarie Kaur is a Sikh activist and civil rights lawyer who writes about the “revolutionary love” of “seeing no stranger.” Though René Girard believed the Gospel could transform our impulse to scapegoat, people of the Sikh faith have been more faithful to practices of nonviolence and compassion than many Christians. Valarie writes:  See no stranger has…

Sit. Feast on your life. — Derek Walcott When we are able to access our life at its deepest, it really is one big party.

Written by Rainer Maria Rilke Translated and read by Joanna Macy God speaks to each of us as he makes us,then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall,go to the limits of your longing.Embody me. Flare up like a flameand make big shadows…

“Enlightenment is the ego’s ultimate disappointment.” — Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche Out of the Cell

We were all children once January 20, 2021 It is Inauguration Day in America.  President Biden, in his speech, invoked St. Augustine’s writing that a people is a multitude defined by the common objects of their love.   As I write this, I am in Harper Lee’s hometown in Alabama, on which she based the fictional town of Maycomb in her book To Kill a Mockingbird, a favorite.  Lee begins the book with an epigraph by…

All of us want to be better humans. Especially at the start of the year, we make all these resolutions — to eat better, exercise more, meditate, attend classes, all with a view to better ourselves, which is a worthy aim of course. What I have found and getting to understand more and more is…