Blog

Recently, while working on the Oliver Sacks piece, I found myself browsing through Maria Popova’s fantastic website: www.brainpickings.org. For a trove of material on the meaningful life, one need not look any further. […]

Over the last few months, I have tried to explore a gentle critique of one modern, popular definition of mindfulness. While formulating this critique (here, here, and here), I’ve been wrestling […]

Over the last two entries, here and here, I began to look at the potential ways in which a popular definition of mindfulness can lead to mis-application and/or confusion within the actual practice. […]

Last post, I began a gentle critique of a definition of mindfulness that comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn: “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present […]

As you undoubtedly are aware, mindfulness is gaining in popularity; it’s seemingly everywhere now. So much so that it has its own name: The Mindfulness Movement. And as with any […]

Last week, I attended a public conversation between Sam Harris, author and neuroscientist, and Greg Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University. Watch the highlights here and the full video here. Harris has […]

In the final installment on Wise Stillness (and also the final installment on these short reflections on the Noble Eightfold Path), I want to try and draw some themes together, […]

In the first two segments of this short series on Wise Stillness, I tried to emphasize two complementary attitudes that support the experience of stillness. The first, as beautifully articulated by […]

Essentialism.  I recently came across a fantastic book by Greg McKeown with lots of ‘dharmic’ themes. The book is: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. One of McKeown’s basic ideas is […]

Stillness. And so we come to the final spoke of the Eightfold Path: Samadhi. Often, Samadhi is translated as ‘concentration’, but as Ajahn Brahm suggests in the clip below, it might […]

Balance. It’s a word we hear a lot about. Work-Life Balance. Fiscal Balance. Spiritual Balance. Protein-Carb-Fat Balance. And like so many of the spiritual faculties we read or hear about, balance, in […]

For this Minute, I wanted to address some of the misconceptions that tend to crop up around the popularized understanding of mindfulness. And these misconceptions are what I’m referring to when I say: Mickey […]

In these next few Minutes, I’ll be reflecting on, of all things, Mindfulness (Sati). Imagine that. Sati is the seventh aspect of the eight-fold path. Many previous newsletters (now archived on […]

Last week I tried something different. At the end of the summer, I often sit a retreat at the Insight Meditation Society. But this year, the center’s schedule and my own […]

Continuing with the theme of Wise Effort in meditation, I wanted to pick up on a thread from Ajahn Sucitto. He writes: “Energy has to be sustainable. For this reason, […]

Last week, I was visiting with a friend who is passionately involved with a project to bring sustainable energy to the millions of people on the planet without adequate energy […]

The theme of Wise Livelihood is something that I think about, a lot. Again and again, it raises its head, like a koan. What does a life of integrity and […]