Brad4d Savasana

When you lose someone you love, the suffering is immense. We can’t race through the grief. Although there’s no proof of heaven, the idea of heaven can carry us through the grief process. The idea of heaven allows us to savor the love and the memories.

We feel happiness usually as a result of an event or intimate episode. But pure joy is uncaused, that is, it emerges when the mind isn’t searching for it. You don’t seek it—instead, you discover it’s there all along when the mind no longer clings.

How often we spend time and effort with words! We use them to both comfort and accuse. However, they can’t replace the experience of the present moment. The word “bird” can’t tell us much about hearing birdsong. When we speak less and experience more, we’re living in mindfulness.

Many religious texts describe people who have lived chaotic lives. They’ve turned down a dark road that only leads to more chaos. Then someone tells them that there is a different way—one that has living water. Who are these people today that inspires us to live differently?

At one time or another in our lives, we’re presented with an ethical dilemma—truth or loyalty? Sometimes our desire to live honestly or seek justice interferes with our desire for community. Most spiritual traditions uphold honesty and justice above loyalty. If all of us lived with integrity, we wouldn’t have to choose. We would know that if a person, political group, or work situation acts dishon...

We can look at the various trials of life as a running race. We know we’re not the only one going through this. Just the community of those suffering as we do reminds us we’re not alone. To get through our trials, we move at the pace that is uniquely our own. We take in the positive vibes around us and believe we will endure.

I laugh every time a yoga practitioner—especially a yoga instructor—says, “I used to think yoga was about the pose.” A simple study of the yoga sutras will tell you that’s not the case. When we arrive at a place in our lives where we are stuck, yoga helps us to rewire the patterns in our consciousness. That is where the practice of yoga begins.

Long gone are days of blue laws. We no longer hold one day a week apart from the others for proper rest. Our lives can easy erupt in frenzy because we don’t hold a Sabbath Day holy. The Sabbath is that one day of “not-doing” or “undoing” that reminds us of what is most important. How we spend our Sabbath is telling of what we hold sacred in our lives. What do you make time for?

We spend a lot of time thinking or feeling or daydreaming. When do we let our minds relax? When do we pause and experience the newness that exists in this moment? Meditation cultivates the quiet mind. It takes time and patience, but it’s a worthy investment.

We often get stuck in patterns and attachments without recognizing how they keep us stuck. Removing the bandage hurts, but joy comes after the pain. This Easter morning, let us taste what freedom feels like by focusing on what gives eternal life.

Too often we’re told to surrender and find ourselves swallowed instead. Love can quickly morph into codependency when the person we love suffers from addiction or mental illness. We want to help, but our help only enables and feeds the illness. Surrender to the transcendent—be it God or the Universe or whatever. But surrender wisely, discerning when your help harms or truly heals.

In a culture that loves goals and success, we don’t deal well when uncertainty strikes us. We don’t like chaos, so we seek patterns—sometimes unhealthy ones—to give us order. Uncertainty reminds us that change is inevitable. It tells us that we’ve become too comfortable with old ways. Uncertainty calls for us to remain alert, which opens up possibilities we might not have considered.

Although optimistic thinking has the power to open our minds to different paths in the road, it isn’t the same as positive thinking. When we tell ourselves (and others) to “think positive,” it’s negating and bypassing the necessity of suffering. Suffering prepares us and strengthens us for a new road that lies ahead—one that we might not necessarily see. If we bypass it, we might not have the wisd...

When we feel separate or alone, a smell or a picture can bring forth the memory of what “home” might be to us. In this sense, we can always feel connected to “home” if we choose. If we have a relationship or affinity to the transcendent, to the infinite, we can move about the world seeing all things to be “home.”

We sometimes arrive at a dead end. We try to fight through it, but it often takes too much energy to remain at this dead end, this stuck place. This is a call for us to make a decision—do we keep fighting, or do we turn towards something different? Whatever our decision, we should always be moving towards things that make us larger than where we are now.

This parable from the Gospel of Luke is well known. Let’s walk into this parable using our imagination. We picture ourselves as the prodigal son, the father, and the elder son. See which resonates with you. Sorry my girl dog decided to rattle her food toy while I was recording this!

In a world of chaos, we look for certainty. We like order. But things are always changing. Because we are always evolving, we mustn’t be so fixed in our ideas that we can’t be open to the possibility that what we believe is no longer true. We might have ideas and beliefs about things based on our observations or experiences, but that’s not the entirety of the issue. Instead, we accept that many th...

During a long winter of our lives, we might feel that nothing is happening. Although we feel stuck, we’re told to endure the ennui. At times, yes, as long as we’re shedding the patterns that led to craving or aversion. But sometimes our current path might be leading nowhere, too. In fixing our eyes down a straight path, we’ve become too rigid, and we might have missed a turn. This is a call for us...

This poem by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows) really spoke to me. Let’s use them as part of a meditation practice called Lectio Divina. Let the words bring peace to your day—and peace to the world.

Our emotions can easily take over in times of stress. They build and build to the point that they trump our ability to reason. Our emotions can fuel us into positive action when we learn to regulate them. Otherwise, we walk around in a continual state of fight or flight.

Ignatian Contemplation is an imaginative prayer where we engage our mind into a story in scripture. This episode guides us through the practice using visualization with the help of the Holy Spirit. We experience the Transfiguration on the mountain and let the experience speak to us in a unique way.

The practice of Lectio Divina, or “divine reading,” has been handed down through centuries in the Catholic Church. Although prayerful reading of scriptures date as early as Origen and St. Benedict, the four stages in Lectio Divina were described by Guigo II. However, he was describing the four stages of a monk’s life, NOT a specific prayer practice. It’s rare to achieve a contemplative state the f...

Streaks can be good because they keep a discipline at the top of our minds. We make the practice more important so its fruit can benefit our life. But we must be careful not to let the streak become the goal. Although the streak might keep us coming back and help us discipline ourselves, sometimes the streak takes on a life in itself. The streak becomes a means of competition rather than helping u...

We tend to trust our “sixth sense,” our intuition, when our bodies react to something in our physical environment. Psychologically, this is a cue to something from our unhealed past. It’s something we should investigate because it distracts us from spiritual work. The Cloud of Unknowing says if we describe our experience of God by our senses, it’s not God. God is not experienced through our physic...

We might demand peace in the world, but how much hostility do we hold in our own hearts? Peace starts within. We can’t wait for the external world to have peace before we take on the work of peace within us. This Prayer of St. Francis recognizes that effort of dropping our sword. We might not have started the fight, but we can be the bigger, stronger person by ending it not by winning, but by lovi...