Meditation and Beyond

Born with a mind and body, we are destined to develop a personal identity as a vehicle for living human life. It can be no other way. It’s an acquired mental structure that assists us in navigating d…

I first heard Francis Thompson poem, Hound of Heaven, years ago. His words touched me deeply and have since taken residence in my mind. I sense it’s because they touch a very basic human. That call t…

What more noble experience can there be than walking each other home to the center of our being – to peace, happiness, and freedom. The journey home has never been solely an individual journey. Even …

“Humankind can not bear very much reality.” These words, words of the poet T.S. Eliot, have echoed in my mind for many years like a persistent Zen Koan. What is this fundamental reality he speaks of?…

The primary aim of meditation is to go beyond the narrow confines of our ordinary self and experience the immensity of life’s possibilities. We aim to free ourself from the tenacious grip of individu…

In the East they speak of the early stages of meditation as a raging waterfall. We have finally stopped long enough to actually hear the cacophony we live with every day. With practice we experience …

What is a knowable? It’s any experience, outer or inner, that can be observed and known through our sensory organs or mental capacity. Our sensory system is oriented to “physical” experiences that ap…

There are two ways that we gain knowledge of our self and world. As adults, our default approach is “memory knowledge.” From childhood on we accumulate experiences, learning from parents, schooling, …

The phrase “effortless meditation” may sound to you like an oxymoron or perhaps a clever marketing tease, but it’s neither. This immediate reaction arises from the experience many beginners have when…

The pediatrician and psychotherapist D.W. Winnicott coined the expression a “good enough mother” or perhaps one might say “good enough parenting.” It refers to the manner in which a mother responds t…

Awareness is the essence of our meditation practice.  It can neither be perceived by the senses nor known by thought. It is not a “thing” in the usual sense. It has no identifiable location, shape, f…

Looking back, the first "self" that I lost was in medical training. It  was the loss of a healthy personal self.  Entangled  in the mechanics and pressures of my medical education, I forgot my most b…

Early in practice I realized the limitations of a medical model that reduces health and disease solely to biological factors. It seems quite obvious that we are not mere physical bodies. We are inter…

There are two paths to an awakened and vital life. Each are based on a different premise. The first, the direct path, asserts that the awakened state, is already and always within us. We don’t see ou…

The clarity we will speak of here is not the clarity that results from mentally studying a particular issue until there is a conclusive sense of understanding. That is intellectual clarity. And it is…

 For those who are only familiar with their ordinary self the phrase “self-remembering” may be a bit confusing. However, for others, who have explored further, it is apparent that there are two disti…

There is an underlying and troublesome hollowness in the Western psyche. That’s the result of an inability to access our fundamental, natural, and unchanging well-being, an ever-present wholeness in …

We can speak about two kinds of love – love with an object and love without an object. Object-based love involves another person, a physical object, or any experience that is a source of pleasure. We…

It is certain that each of us will experience loss. It may come in one of many forms - loss of a loved one, loss of mental or physical capacities, loss of material possessions, or future possibilitie…

There are some experiences that naturally evolve over time. The meeting with our true self and the awakening to a larger life is not one of those experiences. It is here, right now, already, and alwa…