PICK UP ONE SMALL STONE

Meditation instruction is so simple to say: notice when your mind wanders and come back. Meditation is can also be tricky to practice. Sometimes the place our mind wanders is very alluring. Maybe something big (positive or negative) is happening in our lives. Or, maybe, the place our mind wanders is just very familiar - and in its familiarity, it may be a very comfortable place to hang out. In fact, they might even seem part of our identity, so that to let them go would be to

A Shamatha (or peaceful abiding) meditation. Go to 2:11 to skip the intro and get right into the practice.

MEDITATION 1 FROM FRIDAY, 1/16/26 “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." - Martin Luther King, Jr, from a Letter from Birmingham, Alabama jail, April 16, 1963 The idea of mutuality is inline with the Buddhist concept of interdependence -- that we are not as separate as we think we are. In fact, we are all deeply connected. Because we are "tied in a single garment of de

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." - Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Psychologists who study the climate change movement – and social justice broadly – think that one reason we don’t do more to make things better is that we, as humans, are incredibly uncomfortable with uncertainty. We’d rather “know” that things are going to be bad, than be unsure that they could be good.  A little crazy, right? And, I can also see it.  Uncert

A meditation for taking our seat, standing our ground, and being compassionate, wise warriors. Bodhisattvas are open-hearted warriors who transform the world through compassionate wisdom. For many Buddhists, the ultimate goal is to become a fully enlightened Bodhisattva -- a Buddha. Fortunately, we don't need to be fully enlightened to be Bodhisattvas. All of us can practice becoming open-hearted warriors in our own lives. I love the image of being a baby Bodhisattva! In this

Meditation builds the habit of being present -- literally builds new neural pathways. When we practice with gentleness, we can also build the habit of kindness. Two-for-one! And who doesn't love a bargain? 22-minute practice recorded 1/6/26: Go to 3:05 to skip the intro. 16-minute practice recorded 1/7/26: Stringed instruments need to be adjusted so that the strings are at the "goldilocks" of tightness -- not so tight that they snap and not so loose that they can't be played.

Over the holidays, I got to chat with family and friends that I don't see very much and often in the catch-up, my work as a meditation teacher came up. When it did, I often heard something like, "oh, I'd love to start meditating so I can be calmer." Amazing! Meditation does help us be calmer. But, it doesn't take away the external stressors and it also doesn't turn us into unfeeling zombies. So, how does it make us calmer? In my experience, it helps us find space. As Viktor

Meditation is a practice of coming home to ourselves. It's not about fixing ourselves -- because we aren't broken. In meditation we shed the layers of habitual reactions and stories so that we can live more fully, as ourselves, in the present. This meditation starts with a poem by May Aygun: This New Year,  don't make resolutions. Instead,  take something apart. A habit, a belief,  let it crumble. Live without it for a while.  Feel the quiet it'll bring, how raw, how open. Th

A meditation for the period of transition between 2025 and 2026.

"The way out is in." - Zen proverb

For some writing on karma, please visit yesterday's blog post . To practice shifting our karma, please check out: This 17-minute meditation And, this 26-minute meditation And, this 16.5-minute meditation that uses both of these great quotes: "Of course our families press our buttons; they are the ones that installed them." (In fairness to Adreanna, this might be a paraphrase and she might have said it more eleqountly.) And, Viktor Frankl's quote: "Between stimulus and respo

There is a saying that “the hysterical is historical.” The things that really strike a nerve – that get us going from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds flat – are rarely fresh wounds. More often, the things that feel the most overwhelming, the most painful, are chronic emotional injuries, bruises that keep getting pressed, cuts that never fully scar over. Karma, that old Buddhist concept, is a system for taking charge of the things that we can control to stop the reruns of historical pain

The Buddhist story of "The Second Arrow" is a metaphor for the way in which we add on to our own suffering by piling assumptions and stories on top of whatever actually happened. Listen to the (short) story and then practice it for yourself. If you want to skip the story, go to 3:27 and you'll get right to the meditation.

Our natural human tendency is to fragment things. We push away things that are "bad" and we cling to things that are "good." This isn't a modern phenomena but you can see it in the way we organize information by labeling, sorting and filing. The mandala is an older way of organizing information that encourages us to make space for all over reality -- to more clearly see everything in our life rather than putting up walls against some things and desperately grasping at others.

Meditation is a practice of non-judgment. Meditation is also a practice that leads to discernment, which is defined as "the ability to judge well." How does the practice of non-judgment lead to "the ability to judge well"? An analogy that is often used in meditation can help to square these two, seemingly opposing concepts of non-judgment and discernment: A cup of water is scooped up from the edge of a pond. The water is muddy, containing sediment, twigs, leaves, maybe a bott

"Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand their shining." - Anne Lamott // Can we be like the lighthouse Anne Lamott references? Grounded and of benefit? This meditation uses a traditional Tibetan Buddhist practice to encourage us to embody the lighthouse.

Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of a rider galloping by on a horse. A person standing at the side of the road yells out "where are you...

"You can't stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf." - Jon Kabat-Zinn // This blog posts includes 3 different meditations around...

Meditation builds the habit of being present. The practice of noticing our thoughts and then returning to the present moment literally...

Danusha Laméris' poem "Nothing Wants to Suffer" is a beautiful introduction to the Loving-Kindness practice. Loving-Kindess is a...