PICK UP ONE SMALL STONE

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

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.

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

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

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

Thank you. Really: thank YOU for meditating! It's not always easy or convenient. There are 100 other things you could do -- and probably feel like you should do. I personally appreciate you being here (really, really!) and also I do believe that self-care is community care. The more rooted we are in our own basic goodness, the more we can move through the world in alignment with our own values. The more we are able to see clearly -- and release our habitual reactions -- the m

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

One Small Stone is rooted in 3 beliefs:  We all make a difference...  “You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you... You have to decide what kind of difference you want to make." - Jane Goodall …because we are all interconnected.  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. Mindfulness is key to making a hea

One Small Stone - this community, YOU - have donated over $4,500 to helping halt climate change and to propelling climate solutions...

"One of the best things you can do to prepare for a disaster is to bring your neighbor a basket of muffins, because you have to get to know them before the storm." - Dr. Samantha Montano "It turns out that communities are the most important force that allows humans to weather great storms, literally and metaphorically." - Christine E. Nieves Rodriguez "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf." - Jon Kabat-Zinn I don't know about you, but life feels a little

“If we walked around all the time with our bodies leaning forward, can you imagine the kind of aching we would experience? Our backs, our...

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

As Rebecca Solnit defines Mutual Aid: “It’s a deep belief in and commitment to inseparability: that my well-being is inseparable from yours and that, in caring for yours, I care for myself and, more than that, for the larger whole that is us, because we are in this together.” This definition of mutual aid is similar to the Zen concept of "interbeing" and to the idea that no one is an island (to paraphrase John Donne) and that we are all better, stronger, richer together.  Go

"Sympathetic Joy" allows us to multiply our happiness. Go to 3:42 to skip the intro and get right into the 15-minute meditation.

Dear community, “In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single...

Yesterday was Juneteenth, which commemorates the day the last group of enslaved people in the United States found out they'd been freed....

Community is one of the "3 Jewels" in Buddhism. This meditation leans into the idea that community (or a "Sangha" to use the Buddhist term) helps us. Go to 2:17 to skip the intro and get right into the meditation.

👋 👋 Hi, hi! I'm so appreciative of all of you and I'm so excited to get to start to make more connections. Thanks for being her and...