Imagine that you are an actor and the director calls with a new assignment. It goes something like this: “We’re sending you into a new theatre for the role of a lifetime.” So far, so good. “But be forewarned you are joining a hostile cast and some of the other actors may not be welcoming [...]

Two pregnant women, close friends, are overjoyed to learn they will be delivering their babies on the same day at the same hospital. Taking this as a sign, they determine that the babies – both of them boys – are destined to be lifelong friends and in the ensuing months the new mothers do everything [...]

A bit of a departure today, maybe because it's rainy and gray out, maybe because it seems to me a lot of us need a bit more music and joy in our lives and a lot less anger and division. When I was a child there was a lot of music in the home and [...]

No doubt because I have participated in a handful of sweat lodges, a number of friends recently have forwarded me media articles pertaining to the recent sweat lodge deaths at a "spiritual" retreat in Sedona, Arizona. These emails also are understandably implying that sweat lodges are dangerous affairs, especially for something ostensibly designed as a [...]

Every human being has a favorite subject: him or herself. This is only natural since it is the “I” who experiences the world and there is no subject that any of us know so well as ourselves. Right? But what if this conceit is, in fact, wrong? What if we know absolutely nothing about ourselves [...]

Rather than kick things off with the usual navel-gazing, let’s be more interactive and get you involved. This only takes a moment and can be an eye-opening experience depending on how deep you want to go. It starts with the following question: What happens when you awaken each morning? Literally, what happens during that very [...]

As a healthy 46-year-old the question occasionally arises, why the constant focus on spiritual development? This usually is expressed along the lines of, “Life is generally good so why not just focus on the good stuff and avoid the bad.” Who has the time anyway? It’s a good question. Why not simply immerse oneself in [...]

It is said that each of us is offered an endless number of opportunities to "awaken." That life is filled with these mini-alarm clocks, each tolling at different times and frequencies and each affording us an opportunity to stop, if only for a moment, and reconsider everything we believe to be true about ourselves and [...]

People can really drive you crazy, can’t they? The jerk who won’t let you merge into traffic, the neighbor who lets his dog bark incessantly, the spouse who refuses to acknowledge or discuss marital problems, even the U.S. president whose policies and intentions scare half the population to death (replacing the previous president who scared [...]

Virtually all of us exist in a state of chronic, low-grade suffering or, as Thoreau put it, we while away our days in “quiet desperation.” It is the first and perhaps most important of the Buddha’s four noble truths, this idea of life as suffering. Yet most who read these words will say something to [...]