Experiencing the Journey to Live Our Dreams
“People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.” –Paolo Coehol, The Alchemist So many times we hear commonly shared wisdom like “Happiness is not a destination, it’s a way of traveling.” But what does that mean? Like many things, in theory it sounds great, but it’s not quite […]
The Transformation of Time
‘Everything on earth is being continuously transformed, because the earth is alive… and it has a soul. We are part of that soul, so we rarely recognize that it is working for us.” –The Alchemist So often we hear that we live in a world of “me.” We are taught to fend for ourselves, fiercely clutch […]
The Issue of Aging
How many times have we heard someone told to act his or her age? It has become such a common phrase in our society; we rarely stop to think what it really means. This morning, while meditating, a thought came into my head; that I was 10 years younger than I am. Suddenly, I felt […]
Finding Our Personal Freedom
“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns…We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices […]
Embracing Impermanence
“We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing — our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can’t hold on to anything — a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self […]
Believing in Your Own Truth
I recently had a rather heated discussion with a friend who was trying to convince me that she was right and I was wrong about something. She was quite irritated that I would not agree with her. I wasn’t trying as hard to convince her of my ‘rightness’ as she was in insisting that I […]
Magnificent Mantras Part 3: Do Good, Avoid Evil, Appreciate Your Lunacy.
This last installment of Magnificent Mantras, ties it all together. Its purpose is to allow our practice to “oscillate between two levels, the profound and the mundane.” Meaning, if we’re too full of wonder in our practice, it does us no good because we allow our thoughts to be too existential; we’re not able to […]
Magnificent Mantras to Awaken Your Best Self: Part 2
2. Be Grateful to Everyone “If you feel grateful for what is possible for you in this moment, no matter what your challenges are, if you feel grateful that you are alive at all, that you can think, that you can feel, that you can stand, sit, walk, talk—if you feel grateful, you are happy […]
Magnificent Mantras to Awaken Your Best Self: Part 1
Shambahla Sun recently explored ‘an ancient set of Buddhist slogans’ and paired six of them with powerful techniques to ‘transform life’s difficulties into awakening and benefit’ with guidance from Zen teacher Norman Fischer. Taking these magnificent mantras and the lessons that can be pulled from them—we’ve highlighted three to explore and examine— sharing how to implement their […]
Making Peace with Uncertainty
Recently, Pema Chödrön posted an excerpt to her Facebook page from Three Methods for Working with Uncertainty, in Shambhala Sun, March 1997. Although the article itself is nearly two decades old, it’s advice that is remarkably relevant for the digital age. Today, in a world so full of ever-present distractions, we lose some of our […]