PICK UP ONE SMALL STONE

Sympathetic Joy, or taking delight in other's happiness, is one of the four Brahmaviharas along with compassion, loving-kindness, and equanimity. All four require a psychological expansion of self. Sympathetic Joy is said to be the hardest to practice -- maybe because of our natural negativity bias, maybe because of a scarcity mindset. But, when we practice it, we get to experience more joy! And, the practice of sympathetic joy also feeds into the other Brahmaviharas, increas

Both of these meditations incorporate James A. Pearson's poem, "Meanwhile," which landed like a gift in my inbox at a particular time in my life. It was a time when something so big was happening in my own life that, at first, I didn't understand how the world kept obliviously spinning. Have you ever had that feeling? Maybe with a birth, a death, some big life event -- your world is forever changed and you can't believe that everyone else doesn't also recognize the enormous

A gratitude practice for Earth Month. Go to 2:55 to skip the intro and get right into the 16.5-minute meditation .

For more of a written explanation, please see here .

An old Buddhist teaching says that speech should pass through 3 gates before it leaves our mouths: Is it true? Is it necessary ? Is it kind ? I have started seeing these questions as a sort of Rorschach test.   👉  Which appears: a shrinking violet or a tall sunflower? Here’s what I mean: The questions can be cautionary. Careful not to hurt anyone's feelings! Don’t speak when you’re not sure. Or, they can encourage us to speak up when truth, need, and kindness align. Be an up

What can we do to stop climate change? Talk about it.

From the April 2026 issue of Mamaroneck Living

Two meditations honoring the transitions of Spring: Wednesday, 3/25's Meditation: This 17-minute meditation uses the James Pearson poem " This Spring ." Go to 2:07 to skip the intro and get right into the meditation, which is an invitation to rest in the "both/and" reality of this spring -- its beauty and its ugliness, the excitement and the fear, whatever it is we are feeling. Friday, 3/27's Meditation: 16-minute meditation  Spring puts change front and center. Shorts one

I got to facilitate (this does circle back to explaining my gratitude for your donations) a Spring Equinox Mini-Retreat this past Sunday with my friend, Kat Palmieri. I usually think of the Spring Equinox as all daffodils, sunshine and rainbows. Yay, Spring!🤸🤸🤸 What was interesting to me in this Spring Equinox celebration was how much I felt the heavy truth of constant change. As in: even a change as welcome as the beginning of Spring, also inherently means that something

The Spring Equinox is an invitation to pause and reflect. It invites balance. (The sun rises due east and sets due west on two days a year, the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes. Day and night are equal length on the Equinox.) It also invites connection to the wider web of life - to nature and to all the people who have celebrated the Spring Equinox for thousands of years, from Macchu Pichu to Cambodia to Ireland and more. This 17-minute contemplation practice is an invitation to

"You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf." - Jon Kabat-Zinn Thank you for being here!   Today is a New Moon, punctuating the start of a fresh cycle – during what feels to me like an interminable season of uncertainty and fear. Maybe, like me, you find comfort in the moon cycle's reliable invitation to look up, to look out beyond ourselves, and into the broader rhythm of life. In that spirit, please enjoy this invitation to Buddhist equanimity: 💭 Imagine 4 people

In honor of Women's History Month, I wanted to pass on this proverb. Kathy Casey shared it with me. I think there is something lovely about the chain. Feel free to also share it. "When sleeping women wake, mountains move." - Chinese Proverb Meditation is a practice of waking up, of seeing reality clearly without the interface of our identities, our opinions, our fixed ideas. As we wake up, mountains move. Please enjoy this 17-minute meditation recorded Friday morning (3/13)

"You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection." — Buddha Before I had back surgery two years ago, I would have tried anything, ANYTHING to avoid surgery. Now, with 20/20 hindsight, I'm SO grateful to have had the surgery. But, the fact is I was a nervous wreck anticipating the surgery. As part of my panicked attempt to do anything other than surgery, I got on the phone and called around to every acupuncturist in the area. One acupun

Go to 1:58 to skip the intro. A loving-kindness practice for equanimity during scary times. When we are scared or threatened, our human instinct is often to retreat back to "our group" - to close the castle gates and to increase our "othering" of those outside our group. Loving-Kindness helps us expand our sense of who is "in" our group, so that we have a broader, more stable base. Operating from a sense of "me, myself, and I" can be a very narrow, reactive place to be. Broad

Thank you to Mamaroneck Living magazine for publishing this article in their March issue. (And you can find a related guided meditation here .) .

" You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day, unless you're too busy; then you should sit for an hour ." - Zen Proverb Modern science is proving this ancient proverb to be true. When we carve out time for meditation, we are more productive and perform better . I'm not a big proponent of pushing for more productivity and performance (enough already!) -- but I can confirm that I have a feeling of spaciousness and calm when I make time to meditate. It's as if, when I med

Do you know awe, gratitude's lesser known cousin? Gratitude has been written about a lot: it reduces depression, anxiety, and stress, while improving sleep, relationships, and heart health. All so good! And, you can find recorded gratitude meditations - as well as non-meditation (!) ideas for gratitude practice - on the blog . Awe hasn’t gotten the same publicity yet . But I think it will.  Awe has been the subject of a lot of research in the past few years and it's been fou

There is an idea that we can't feel physical sensations (like feeling the body breathing, feet on the floor, etc) at the same time we are thinking. Like the gas and break pedals on our car, we can toggle quickly between the two, but they are discrete and perform different functions. This 16-minute meditation is an invitation to explore feeling vs. thinking in our own body using Alan Fogel 's guidance for a diffuse awareness of the body -- letting awareness travel wherever it

These meditation practices are designed to help us become an observer of our thoughts, rather than identifying AS our thoughts. Both practices use the technique of labeling our thoughts as "thinking" and then returning back to the breath. In this 16.5-minute practice , go to 1:38 to skip the intro and get right into the practice. In this 24-minute practice , go to 2:00 to skip the intro and get right to the meditation.

These two (2) Mindfulness of Emotions practices can help us be better listeners. By building self-awareness, we can better understand the "baggage" and perspectives that we're bringing into a conversation. This self-awareness can help us be better at listening to understand, rather than listening to soothe our own ego or justify our own POV. Both meditations use the RAIN (recognize, allow, investigate, nurture/non-identify) framework. 16-minute Mindfulness of Emotion  Go to 1