Meditation and Beyond

Send us Fan Mail For a young child, prior to psychological development, the world is experienced through an innocent present moment awareness.  As adults, our world is experienced through memory, concepts, interpretations, and perceptual patterns. We no longer experience what is as is.  We seek to re-experience this lost self in the transient and perishable objects of mind. The personal mind jumps...

Send us Fan Mail Born with a mind and body, we are destined to develop a personal identity as a vehicle for living human life. It can be no other way. It’s an acquired mental structure that assists us in navigating daily life.  As we gain greater consciousness, we recognize the limitations and pitfalls of identifying exclusively with our acquired self. We are not born with a personal self. We are...

Send us Fan Mail I first heard Francis Thompson poem, Hound of Heaven, years ago. His words touched me deeply and have since taken residence in my mind. I sense it’s because they touch a very basic human. That call to truth is likely familiar to you as well I now realize that Thompson’s hound is a poetic metaphor for the irrepressible urge that quickens soul and spirit toward a recognition and reu...

Send us Fan Mail What more noble experience can there be than walking each other home to the center of our being – to peace, happiness, and freedom. The journey home has never been solely an individual journey. Even the most solitary monk, nun, or seminarian takes their journey in the context of a community, teacher, and spiritual friends. It's only the ego that perceives this journey as a so...

Send us Fan Mail “Humankind can not bear very much reality.” These words, words of the poet T.S. Eliot, have echoed in my mind for many years like a persistent Zen Koan. What is this fundamental reality he speaks of? Why can’t humans bear it? If we cannot base our life on a realistic understanding, how can we live an authentic and meaningful life. It is not easy, convenient, or socially rewarding...

Send us Fan Mail The primary aim of meditation is to go beyond the narrow confines of our ordinary self and experience the immensity of life’s possibilities. We aim to free ourself from the tenacious grip of individualism and to awaken to our full humanity. Individualism, with its accompanying habitual and limiting patterns of perception, and perpetual mind traffice imprisons us in a narrow and co...

Send us Fan Mail In the East they speak of the early stages of meditation as a raging waterfall. We have finally stopped long enough to actually hear the cacophony we live with every day. With practice we experience our innerness as a rushing stream, quieter but still active. Then we come to the heart of meditation which is experienced as a gentle and still river flowing through the flat plains. F...

Send us Fan Mail What is a knowable? It’s any experience, outer or inner, that can be observed and known through our sensory organs or mental capacity. Our sensory system is oriented to “physical” experiences that appear as outer events. Our inner capacity for observation is oriented towards thoughts, feelings, and images that appear as mental events. In contrast, there are also unknowables . What...

Send us Fan Mail There are two ways that we gain knowledge of our self and world. As adults, our default approach is “memory knowledge.” From childhood on we accumulate experiences, learning from parents, schooling, and culture. We store all this knowledge in our mental file called memory. We draw upon this acquired memory-based knowledge, bounded by the reach and character of our life experience,...

Send us Fan Mail The phrase “effortless meditation” may sound to you like an oxymoron or perhaps a clever marketing tease, but it’s neither. This immediate reaction arises from the experience many beginners have when they approach meditation as a process of subduing the mind. That certainly feels like effort, and it is. Let me share with you a natural and effortless way to experience your true inn...

Send us Fan Mail The pediatrician and psychotherapist D.W. Winnicott coined the expression a “good enough mother” or perhaps one might say “good enough parenting.” It refers to the manner in which a mother responds to her infant child with age-related sensitivity and care, allowing the infant to successfully transition to an autonomous and well-functioning adult. But is this accomplishment all we...

Send us Fan Mail Awareness is the essence of our meditation practice.  It can neither be perceived by the senses nor known by thought. It is not a “thing” in the usual sense. It has no identifiable location, shape, form, texture, color, or weight. In a sense it is nothing. However, that nothing is the ever-present basis of all we experience. It is everything. Without awareness we would not know we...

Send us Fan Mail Looking back, the first "self" that I lost was in medical training. It  was the loss of a healthy personal self.  Entangled  in the mechanics and pressures of my medical education, I forgot my most basic human needs. I forgot to take time for the simple joys of life and the basics of self-care.  I was to discover years later that, unknown to me at the time, my deeper tru...

Send us Fan Mail Early in practice I realized the limitations of a medical model that reduces health and disease solely to biological factors. It seems quite obvious that we are not mere physical bodies. We are inter-connect beings – our biology, psychology, social relations, and spiritual essence are inseparable.  It is the mind that remains the most undervalued and unexplored frontier in health...

Send us Fan Mail There are two paths to an awakened and vital life. Each are based on a different premise. The first, the direct path, asserts that the awakened state, is already and always within us. We don’t see our true nature because it’s obscured by our acquired personal self with its opaque mental activity and personal dramas.  Now let’s consider the second, the gradual path. It is based on...

Send us Fan Mail The clarity we will speak of here is not the clarity that results from mentally studying a particular issue until there is a conclusive sense of understanding. That is intellectual clarity. And it is important in its place.  However, here we are speaking about a very different type of clarity – the clarity which spontaneously arises from a spacious, pure, and unconditioned awarene...

Send us Fan Mail  For those who are only familiar with their ordinary self the phrase “self-remembering” may be a bit confusing. However, for others, who have explored further, it is apparent that there are two distinct “selves.” The first is our ordinary day-to-day self and the second is our natural, fundamental, and essential Self. We are not born with our personal self. This day-to day self is...

Send us Fan Mail There is an underlying and troublesome hollowness in the Western psyche. That’s the result of an inability to access our fundamental, natural, and unchanging well-being, an ever-present wholeness in each of us. In response to this loss of our essential self and its well-being, we are mistakenly taught by an ill-informed culture to seek from the outer world that which is missing in...

Send us Fan Mail We can speak about two kinds of love – love with an object and love without an object. Object-based love involves another person, a physical object, or any experience that is a source of pleasure. We say I love this or that, referring to the object of love. In contrast, love without an object is an experience that is unrelated to any object. It is somewhat like the perfume that em...

Send us Fan Mail It is certain that each of us will experience loss. It may come in one of many forms - loss of a loved one, loss of mental or physical capacities, loss of material possessions, or future possibilities. Significant loss often heralds a time of sadness, emotional pain, or perhaps a sense of hopelessness or despair. It can be an inconsolable time. Loss is real. Fear, despair, anxiety...

Send us Fan Mail There are some experiences that naturally evolve over time. The meeting with our true self and the awakening to a larger life is not one of those experiences. It is here, right now, already, and always. It requires no preparation, no preliminaries, no putting off until another day. What we are seeking is there at the beginning – complete, finished, whole. Support the show Welcome...

Send us Fan Mail Thank you for joining me again. Today we will discuss the two aspects of creativity: ordinary creativity and ultimate creativity. We will then share a practice that expands our discussion. Most creativity has its origins in our day-to-day ego structure. We draw upon our past experience, capacities, and skills to formulate a "creative" project. This project may have previ...

Send us Fan Mail To create a world of inner and outer sanity, a world free of the limitations and consequences of the mentally fabricated personal self, we must return home to our true self. In the words of the poet Derek Walcott:  “The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror. And each will smile at the other's welcome, and say s...

Send us Fan Mail Life will confront each of us with challenging circumstances. I am often asked how to best meet life's challenges. Perhaps a better question would be from where do meet these challenges. Do we relate to them from our usual personal "I," its habits of perception, interpretation, and reactivity or do we relate to them from our deeper self? When dwelling in our usual m...

Send us Fan Mail Meditating smarter rather than harder requires that we take a closer look at the personal self, which obscures our true Self. We are so closely identified with our day-to-day sense of self that we rarely give consideration to its origins, limitations, or the possibility that it’s only a fraction of our possibilities, a fragment of who we are.  Understanding how our personal identi...