Reading Archive (Awareness)
The Difficult People In Your Life
Sally Kempton
We don’t always know why difficult people show up in our lives. There are some good theories about it, of course. Jungians, along with most contemporary spiritual teachers, tell us that AL...
From Being Driven To Being Drawn
Richard Rohr
When I was a young man, I liked ideas and books quite a lot, and I still read a great deal. But each time I come back from a long hermitage retreat, I have no desire to read a book for the next few we...
Hard Times Require Furious Dancing
Alice Walker
I am the youngest of eight siblings. Five of us have died. I share losses, health concerns, and other challenges common to the human condition, especially in these times of war, poverty, environmental...
Touching the Earth
Tracy Cochran
In the great myth of the Buddha’s journey, there came a point when he is completely overwhelmed. As he sits meditating under the Bodhi tree, the devil Mara sends temptations to distract him from...
When Light Shines, Darkness Becomes The Light
Thich Nhat Hanh
From time to time you may become restless, and the restlessness will not go away. At such times, just sit quietly, follow your breathing, smile a half-smile, and shine your awareness on the restlessne...
The Positivity Ratio
Barbara Fredrickson
Imagine you’re a water lily. It’s early dawn and your petals are closed in around your face. If you can see anything at all, it’s just a little spot of sunlight. But as the sun rises...
You Are Saved By Your Love
Michael Damian
Love is the power that reveals truth and drives our search for it. You may have noticed that if you study something deeply - an animal, a face, a piece of music - you begin to love it. You become one ...
Turning Ourselves Toward Stability And Hospitality
David Mckee
The Benedictine-Camaldolese monk, Bruno Barnhart says it very well: “We humans prefer a manageable complexity to an unmanageable simplicity.” A complex instability is our typical ...
Deep Ecological Awareness Is Spiritual Awareness
Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi
The sense in which we use the term "ecological" is associated with a specific philosophical school, founded in the early 1970s by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1912-2009) with the di...
Zen Of Archery
James Clear
In the 1920s, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel moved to Japan and began training in the martial art of archery, with a legendary archer named Awa Kenzo. Kenzo was convinced that beginners shoul...
Spiritual Life Begins Within The Heart
Joan Chittister
The truth is that we spend our lives in the centrifuge of paradox. What seems certainly true on the one hand seems just as false on the other. Life is made up of incongruities: Life ends in death; wha...
Unconditioned Stillness
Rick Hanson
Stillness, a sense of the unchanging, is all around. For example, it’s not the ultimate stillness, but there is that lovely feeling when the house is quiet and you’re sitting in p...
Inclining Toward Freedom, Even Through Imperfections
Larry Yang
If we focus only on awakening, we miss most of the spiritual practice. I’m much more interested in how we practice with not awakening, with not being enlightened, because, frankly, those states ...
Attention Is Inseparable From Interrogation
Michel de Salzmann
Our attention is much more than we generally think. It is much more than a simple mental or cerebral mechanism. It concerns our whole being. If its potentialities are far from being fully actualized i...
Meditation: A Process Of Retraining The Mind
Bhante Gunaratna
Gently, but firmly, without getting upset or judging yourself for straying, simply return to the simple physical sensation of the breath. Then do it again the next time, and again, and again, and agai...