I sat cross-legged in meditation for several hours in pain. And I liked it. I was staying at a forest monastery and wanted to better understand how I perceived and reacted to pain in the body, so I decided to spend my entire afternoon sitting through whatever aching arose. In the process, a strange feeling […]
meditation
Let It Rain
I heard the crack of thunder as it whipped across the sky and prepared myself for the downpour to come. I was sitting cross-legged in a tiny wooden kuti that was nestled among the tall trees and rugged rocks on land that was part of a remote forest monastery in Northern Thailand. As I sat […]
How to Dry Feet
“Don’t pat the feet! We need them to be dry!” Those were the stern words that the abbot of a forest monastery said to me as I was drying his feet and the feet of monks who had just cleansed them with water before entering the meditation hall. Drying the feet of monastics was the […]
Delusions and Diversions
A direct experience of death speaks to the heart in a way that philosophical musings never can. There was a time when I was struggling with my meditation during a stay at a forest monastery on the East Coast of the United States. I was experimenting with a wide assortment of techniques to calm my […]
A Graveyard Meditation
I know the forests are burningto the charnel ground, and probably, there is little that can be done about it now Yet sometimes the best medicine is a mind of not knowing, all that has been writtenon those silken scrolls, the inner alchemy of illicit love Or why the Nasamonians required brides to have intercoursewith many men […]
After Meditating On My Front Porch
I again realize that mindfulness is noticingstillness, how the ink on my paper has more than one color of black and feels fluid as silk. And how the hard plastic wheelsof a stroller across the street, scraps the gravel, making soundslike crackling embers. It’s noticing the stillness of a solitary pine needle pulsing in the sighing wind. An […]
Chi
It felt like cupping a shapelessbubble, delicate as a stolen Robin’s egg,yet weightless and resting in nothingness. I should have known it was within me.
96 Hours In
I’m no ******* Buddha,that’s for sure. Legend has it that he meditated and fasted for months at a time. After one moment he stopped.For me, a meager four days in, that feat might as well be like going to Marsin a paraglider. And my seatbelt is too tight.
An Offering
It’s 6:30 pm, on a SeptemberSunday, too late to be calledsummer and the clouds are suddenly transformed into bands of energy, like a vulva, and the sky gods begin to birth,cinematically slow, an egg of fire,oozing from the space thatseparates the temporary fromendless beauty. A long time ago, people- not sodifferent than you and I- awaited this hour, as […]
Is Buddhism the Problem?
I have recently been recommending Sam Harris’ meditation app. Waking Up to some of my atheist friends who would not go near anything that smacked of religion. I like this app more than some other secular meditation apps I have come across, mainly because it doesn’t simply aim to help people to become less stressed. […]