We are living a societal crisis. Our survival instincts threaten our better nature. Hoarding, profiteering, getting a gun—these might help you individually in the short term, but at the cost of our collective wellbeing. Just as violence does not solve violence, nor will our survival instincts help society survive. We live in community, because we aspire to something far greater than survival. More than ever, we have to lead with love in all our decisions and actions. Love is an individual and collective imperative, if we are to get through this moment with grace, compassion and a flourishing society. A key tool is the practice of embodied mindfulness—tuning into all five channels of intelligence available to us, instead of the…

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I invited Fear to speak her mind today during my daily meditation, a practice I’ve been developing for some time now and have written about elsewhere. She started in on a pretty standard list: Fear of injury (a few weeks earlier an acquaintance had fallen 40-feet and shattered his feet and ankle bones, so I feel more vulnerable than usual, and mindful of my luck) Fear that my new workshop venture will fail Fear of irrelevance (which surprised me, because I don’t think of myself as particularly relevant anyhow) Fear of death Then Fear went wild. I’d never heard her this animated. She started chanting, death and failure, death and failure, death and failure, over and over. I was disconcerted,…

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This whole business of consuming, then putting off using what we’ve consumed is weighing on me. We get hot for some new thing, that we need-want, and then we don’t even use it right away. The first weekend of February, I was in Springfield, Missouri with an afternoon to myself. A sunny day. A new downtown to explore. I considered whether I wanted to roam around looking in shops. Then I realized, oh, it’s February 1st and I’m taking no-shopping pauses in the even months. My realization was followed closely by relief. I wasn’t going to visit the shops, because I wasn’t going to shop. Instead, I did what I really wanted to do. All afternoon, I read my novel…

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Yesterday marked my 365th consecutive day of meditation. Yes, I aimed for that goal. Yes, that’s a paradox. Throughout the year, I’ve shared my noticings along the way. As I close out this chapter of my streak, here are some last noticings. Their lastness does not bestow on them any added importance compared to all the other noticings of the year. They are, as the dishes before and after enlightenment, more moments accumulated over the course of a year of consecutive days of meditation: The past year has not been bliss, despite my daily sit. I have gone through low periods. I’m in one now. Roaming the desert of not knowing what my next creative project is. Plus, a pinched…

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Use it, don’t think about it. Our bodies are gifts.  Partake of all the marvelous things we can do with our bodies—run, jump, skip, dance, leap, walk, swim, cartwheel, sing…you name it.  How much more fun it is to use our bodies, than it is to think about our bodies.  How much more energizing it is to engage with our bodies, instead of draining away our life force with petty obsessing over the slope of our stomach, the size of our breasts, the shape of our arms, and…you get the picture. Know the why of why you use it. Unfortunately, just getting out there and using our bodies is not the magic bullet.  Why?—because too often we are “using it”…

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Remember that moment when you were trying to learn how to ride a bike, the moment when your parent let go and you had to trust that the wheels would roll and the center would hold and you’d stay upright. You probably didn’t even realize that you needed the center to hold. You probably weren’t aware of gathering your energy into your core; of the fine balance between your effort and the need to let the bicycle do what it wanted to do. You trusted. Yourself. You trusted, even though you’d probably fallen a number of times before the whole trick of simultaneous balance and forward motion worked out.  Even if you’ve never ridden a bicycle, you know what I’m…

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These last six months, running and I have been on a rollercoaster ride together—queasy stomachs and screams of joy. In March, I agreed to do a half-marathon with a friend on her April birthday and immediately started dreading it. I swore off road races about a decade ago. The running events I participate in once or twice a year are off-road. Runs on forest trails or in the mountains. To compound my dread (or perhaps because of), I trained poorly and my race result was disappointing; actually, extremely so. I wish I’d read these wise insights right after, it would have helped me process: So You Had a Crappy Race … Now What? I don’t want you to notice that crappy…

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Last week I read Tea and Cake With Demons, by Adreanna Limbach, a clear round up and explanation of the fundamental principles of Buddhist thought on suffering and the relief of suffering. The author’s voice is sensible and compassionate. Yet, as I read about how worthy I was, just by virtue of being me, I felt less and less so. So that, the day after I learned that I was on the cover of a Florida magazine, Healthy Living, for my own recently published book, I sank into a massive sinkhole of self-hate. Snippet of internal dialogue between my I-Am-Worthy mind and my Who-Are-You-Kidding? mind as I swam desperately toward the sinkhole shores to pull myself out: IAW: I’m a…

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Functional fitness (aka functional movement) is a thing now. That’s exercises that train our muscles for regular life activities, like squatting to pick up something we’ve dropped, or reaching for something on a high shelf (or even climbing onto the kitchen counter to reach something, as I did a few days ago). But, do our regular life activities support our workouts? Can movement with a function substitute for a workout? I asked myself this question a couple of weeks ago, when a cord of wood was dumped in our driveway at 8 a.m. Just looking at it was pretty daunting. Even though I knew from previous years the stacking wouldn’t take more than an hour (for two of us), all those…

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Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and/leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the/thieves of time. (from Joy Harjo’spoem, For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet, in her collection Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings) I’ve been watching my mind for the last 225+ days straight. Despite the immense human feast, I have agreed to be present on the cushion at least once a day. The thieves of time are held at bay, even if only for ten minutes. This is the longest meditation streak of my life by a long shot. My last and only other streak was 100 days after my father died in 2015. The experience…

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