Guest blog: Radical Acceptance

I don’t tend to be a stressed out person, but like anyone else I’ve had moments of apprehension, anxiety and all out panic.  During a particularly difficult few months of my life I was not offered the job on which I’d been counting, the baby, who had been sleeping through the night, began waking and [...]

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Guest blog: Embodying Our Practice – including the body in meditation

In his book ‘Touching Enlightenment’, the Buddhist teacher Reggie Ray makes the point that many western meditation students spend a lot of time in their heads and very little in their body. Meditation practice is all too often seen as a mind practice with very little to do with somatic sensations. He goes [...]

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Is the practice great or small?

For Saturday’s  webinar we were asked to reflect on the question,  “Is the body great or small?”. I noticed the frustration I felt with the way the question was formulated and my internal resistance toward setting a label, defining the body in terms of it’s size. As soon as I said something about the size, [...]

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Telling love from dependency

I received a few comments to my previous post, some of them not on this page. What they had in common was the idea that we need others because we love them and needing people was in fact not so bad. In short: we need to need people.  I believe that the idea that some [...]

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On comparison, life, death and moments.

How much is this moment worth to me? To get a sense of worth of something I need to compare it to something else, something on the same scale. I would probably value the moment I take a step into the emptiness of the open sky with a parachute on my back more than a [...]

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On compassion

I thought this month I would focus on exploring the notion of compassion: how do I define it, why bother with it, my own hang ups around it, the techniques for cultivating compassion (what works for me). This seems like a good place to start:

more about “Talking about compassion“, posted with vodpod

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If it’s not about them pants, what is it about?

Returning to the earlier post on reactivity and pants. For starters, I believe it is never  really about them pants or whatever becomes a trigger for our reactivity, although in the situation when it actually occurs it can be very hard to see it.  We so much want to believe that the root of our [...]

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Kindness of strangers (1)

It was one of the tough days that call for a treat. On that particular evening it was the bar of  rather expensive dark chocolate with cherry and chilli pepper that had the task of saving my evening. I had a gnawing headache that was so subtle it was hard to notice. When it was [...]

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When doing one thing, is there anything else?

So back to Dosho’s question inspired by the passage from Genjōkoan on firewod and ashes:
When doing one thing, is there anything else? (i.e., is today just today?)

My answer to the question is:  No.

When I sit today I just sit.  Now is the only reality that exists.
My answer to the question is: Yes.

I sit with me [...]

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How non-violent is Non-Vilolent Communication model?

Listened to the show with Alissa Kriteman on Just for Women, on which she shared about using the NVC model in daily communication because she now could make sure her meets were met. As an example Alissa gave a not entirely unusual situation in which the partner leaves his pants lying on the floor. She [...]

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