Tonight, if you can find a place without too many streetlights and the sky is fairly clear, look up in the northeast and take note of the largest shining object you can see. What you see is a planet: Venus, an extremely reliable point of light in the sky. Usually when I point out a …
The other day, I opened the kitchen drawer to grab a sheet of leftover newspaper that I use to cover my kitchen counter from splatters and noticed I was down to my last sheet. I can’t get an actual newspaper delivered to my home anymore. There are no carriers in my neighborhood. I remember spreading …
Sometimes this is how the day goes. All organized, ready to teach, ready to travel. My suitcase is packed and my schedule is tight, but it’s going to work. I’m planning to leave for the airport directly after teaching my Zoom class, board a flight to Chicago where I’ll meet my son, daughter-in-law and four-month-old …
We create our stories, we repeat our stories, we believe our stories. Joel told me he’s not the kind of person to punch his fist through a wall when he’s aggravated. He’s a department chair at a university and if you’ve ever met a university department chair, they’re pretty accustomed to wading around in politically …
I’ve been a patient about a million times. There are so many dehumanizing aspects to being immersed in a medical system, but one thing that torques me off quite a bit is the dreaded medical intake form. It’s not for reasons you might expect. It’s relatively easy for me to zip through name, address, social …
In the latter part of the last century, there was a story going around about a woman law student in the graduating class before me who was asked whether she knew how to type in a job interview. Back in the days before we had computers, the internet and ChatGPT, there were typewriters, machines with …
I’ve been thinking a lot about my memories —the silly ones I retain, the important ones I don’t have access to any longer. It haunts me. The memories wash up like unremarkable and practically identical seashells on the shore, cluttered together with no apparent rhyme or reason. I can’t distinguish one from another or where …
Here’s a line I often hear when I’m in a conversation with someone about the benefits of a mindfulness meditation practice: “Of course, I should learn to meditate but my spouse/family member/friend/co-worker is the one who really needs it.” Sure. We all want to be involved with people who meditate because people who meditate, generally …
There’s a technique for teaching mindfulness meditation to children that involves shaking up a snow globe and then watching it slowly slowly settle down. There are lots of variations on this exercise which include having the kids jump up and down like crazy, notice, sit still, notice again. The metaphor of the snow globe is …
It used to be when I taught meditation, I taught the way I’d been taught: sit in stillness for twenty minutes every day. I teach differently now. Too many people have sheepishly told me they manage to sit for five or six minutes and that’s all they can tolerate. I feel the same way about …
