A few years ago, we were walking our dog to the local dog park when we heard helicopters overhead. The streets were strangely empty. When we arrived at the park, people had gotten the news: there was a shootout taking place nearby. Devi recognized the street and wondered about a…

There’s a hot spring Devi and I love to visit in Northern California. There’s one bath that’s hot enough to boil an egg. When I first step into the molten water, I cringe. When I’m up to my knees, my nervous system is shouting “Get out of here!” That’s what it’s like when you’re moving deeper into your life. Everything heats…

There are two factors that influence the depth of your meditations: Intensity and Duration. Duration is how long you practice. If you’re using guided meditations — the duration is fixed by the length of the recording. If you’re guiding your own practice, you determine how long you’ll practice. As you may know, it’s more important to…

Strengthen relationships with your eyes closed I live in the surf town of Encinitas, California. When the waves are big, the surfers’ boards can be snapped into pieces by the pounding surf. On the outside the boards look different. But, broken open, they all have a foam core. Regardless of their surface design, on the inside the boards are…

Most of us haven’t learned how to sit in a way that cultivates meditative awareness. We slouch. We lean. We twist. All these physical patterns correspond to slouchy, leaning, twisty mind states. Assuming a posture of full-attention-without-tension facilitates the meditative state of mind. The key factor is to allow your spine to be straight but not stiff. Here’s how: Feel your sit bones lightly pressing down into the cushion or chair.

Every meditator notices this: the mind wanders. In the ancient days, the wandering mind was called the monkey mind. The monkey mind can’t sit still. It jumps from thought to thought. Many meditators, when they notice this jumping, get discouraged. But, they’re missing something wonderful. When you NOTICE the monkey mind, the mediation is working! You’re making progress. Here’s why: Before practice, you weren’t (as) aware of…

It’s so easy to get lost in thought. It’s what the mind does best! The mind: Generates thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. Looks out at the world through these thoughts/emotions/beliefs Builds thick veils of language that separates us from direct communion with life. Words upon words thicken into a fog of thought. It’s hard to navigate — much less live…

I was in my twenties, recently married, when my father-in-law invited me to join him for a Sunday morning golf game. I’d never played a round of real golf, only the miniature kind. But given that I was the hippy new son-in-law, how could I say no? I stepped up to the first tee. I swung. The…

One of the points that people take away from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, and many others, is that mastery is a matter of putting in the time . . . 10,000 hours and such. But, just putting in the time isn’t enough. …