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When Words Become Bigger Than What Happened – The Language of Our Inner World
I used to be a perfectionist. For years, a small mistake could ruin my whole day, not because the mistake itself was ever that big, most of them weren’t, but because of what I told myself right after. A message I could have worded better. A task I didn’t finish quite as well as I…
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The Art of Gratitude
If you have read my earlier articles and you are practicing meditation, then you may be wondering how to be more meditative, when you don’t get time for a meditation sitting or how to bring more peace into your current lifestyle. Gratitude is the answer I keep coming back to. Not gratitude as a mood…
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The Body as a Doorway
We often say, “I know my body.” But do we? We may know what our body looks like, what food we should eat, how many hours we should sleep, how much exercise we should do. But do we actually notice what’s happening in the body? Or are we constantly telling the body what it should…
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When We Don’t Know What to Do With Our Emotions
There are times when we don’t know what to do with what we are feeling. We feel angry, hurt, jealous, anxious, or sad, and our first instinct is to make the feeling go away. We try to distract ourselves. We try to control it. Sometimes we take it out on someone else. Sometimes we suppress…
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FEAR
Fear exists in our mind and is expressed everywhere in our behavior subconsciously. There was a period in my life when anything that changed the course of my planned life would send me into panic. And in that panic, I would make impulsive decisions, decisions that weren’t really mine, they were fear’s. When I began…
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Forgiveness: Do We Really Need to Forgive?
As a human being, I’ve been heartbroken and hurt more times than I can count. At an early age, I was taught to get rid of pain as quickly as possible, that was simply what I understood was expected. Whenever I went through something difficult, I turned to books for guidance. Many of them said…
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Humming Meditation: A Step-by-Step Beginner’s Guide
There are days when a mantra feels like too much to hold onto. On those days, I skip it altogether and just hum, nothing to remember, just breath and sound. What Is Humming Meditation? As the name suggests, humming meditation involves producing a continuous, closed-mouth hum, a simple “mmm” sound, sustained on the breath….
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Mantra Meditation: A Step-by-Step Beginner’s Guide
Before I ever learned to just sit in silence, mantra chanting was where I started. Giving the mind a word to hold onto makes those first few sessions a little easier, which is probably why it’s still where I point most beginners first. What is Mantra Meditation? As the name suggests, in mantra meditation you…
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1-Minute Meditation: A Quick Practice for a Busy Day
Use this short and simple meditation practice to bring more peace into your everyday life. (Not for beginners)
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The Silence Before Silence
Spirituality has its own kind of disguise, quieter and harder to catch than the everyday kind. It rarely looks like telling yourself you tried your best when you didn’t. It looks like awareness itself, observation, silence, surrender, dressed up convincingly enough that you don’t think to question it.
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Reasons Why You Should Embrace Sensuousness Along with Meditation
One question comes up more than almost any other, usually right around the point someone’s seriously considering meditation or a deeper spiritual practice for the first time. It doesn’t always get asked out loud, but it’s there, underneath the hesitation: do I have to give up my ambitions, my career, the things I want, in…
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What to Notice Before You Sit to Meditate
I wrote an early version of this piece years ago, back when I still thought meditation was something you got right or wrong, like a technique to master. If you’ve read Meditation for Beginners and started practicing, you may have run into the same wall I did: doing everything “correctly” and still feeling like nothing…
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Reasons Why You Should Embrace Sensuousness Along with Meditation
One question comes up more than almost any other, usually right around the point someone’s seriously considering meditation or a deeper spiritual practice for the first time. It doesn’t always get asked out loud, but it’s there, underneath the hesitation: do I have to give up my ambitions, my career, the things I want, in…
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Suffering – The Right Question to Ask When Suffering Appears
When Buddha talks about suffering, he talks about the impermanence of everything in existence, desire, and so on. That teaching tends to reach people who’ve already gone through some shift in their lives and started a spiritual journey. What about those who simply want to live well? They aren’t chasing enlightenment. They just want a…
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What Does It Actually Mean to Be Present?
“Be present” is something we hear everywhere, from teachers, coaches, books, friends offering advice. But most explanations stay vague. What does it actually mean, to be present? It’s not that presence is impossible to explain. It’s that it’s an experience first, and words arrive second, always a little late. There are two words worth taking…
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Living consciously – Seven days of Awareness
Bringing awareness to daily tasks can feel like hard work in the beginning, mostly because we try to apply it everywhere at once. This is a smaller starting point: three ordinary moments, already part of your day, held with a little more attention than usual, for seven days. If Conscious Living is about why this…
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Conscious living
Most of the day runs on a mind trained since childhood, sometimes to quickly analyse a situation and resolve it, sometimes simply through habits repeated so often they no longer need any thought at all. It starts small. The tea or coffee made the same way each morning isn’t a decision, it’s a habit, formed…
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The Purpose of Life
This question, “what is the purpose of my life,” never really started inside me. It showed up in social settings, in books on self-improvement, in spiritual books. Many teachers insist on finding your purpose before you take a single step, as though the journey can’t begin without a destination named first. That turns living itself…
