Give Me Strength
Strength always radiates from the inside out. It comes from the center. That’s a core principle of all inner work, and it doesn’t really matter how you find that center, as long as you get there.
Managing Desire
Well-managed, directed desire is a powerful ally – a force that can inspire us to action and help us shape our lives. Unmanaged desire – well, distraction is the least of it.
Making Peace with Perfection
Our culture’s obsession with excellence keeps us toiling under the tyranny of perfectionism. Yet perfection itself is not the tyrant it’s our notions about it that rule us.
Making Peace with Perfection Read More »
What is Love?
If love is real, why doesn’t it feel the way I’ve always heard it was supposed to feel? Why can’t I feel it all the time? And why does love so often feel lacking, or painful, or both?
Think Pieces
The Tantras invite us instead to turn our gaze around and investigate the energetic material inside a thought. To do this, we need to take our attention away from the content of the thought, to stop following where it leads, and instead look into the energy that the thought is made of, the actual substance of the thought itself.
Joy Story
In Sanskrit, there are basically four different words for happiness-sukha, santosha, mudita, and ananda. Each of these points to a different level of happiness. Together, they can actually constitute a path that leads us to the kind of happiness that really can’t be shaken.
Judgment Calls
How can we discern when something is wrong without being judgmental, without disliking the perpetrators, without filling our own mind with negativity? On the inner level, how can we change our own difficult personality traits, our fears and tensions and resistances, without judging them or judging ourselves for having them? Is it even possible to eliminate the ‘bad’ kind of judgment, without losing the good kind?
Light up your Life
This is the beauty of the path of consciousness. If you take responsibility for your own experience, and try giving some attention to your own part in the process, it has an amazing way of freeing your capacity for creative response.
Light up your Life Read More »
Bless from the Heart
The wish-fulfilling tree is a mythical flowering shrub, said to grow in one of the many Hindu and Buddhist heavens. When you sit underneath it, the story goes, all your wishes come true. That’s the mythic version. There’s another, more sophisticated way to read the tale, though: as a metaphor. In that version, the wish-fulfilling
Bless from the Heart Read More »
Change for Good
There’s nothing more radical than the moment you realize that it is actually possible to change your life. I am not talking about the changes you can make on the outside–moving from Iowa to California or leaving your job to work for Doctors Without Borders. I’m talking about reconfiguring your mental and emotional attitudes—the kind
