The Dalai Lama: Why I Laugh
The Dalai Lama
I have been confronted with many difficulties throughout the course of my life, and my country is going through a critical period. But I laugh often, and my laughter is contagious. When people ask me ...
Your Life Cannot Go Wrong
Jeff Foster
In reality, your world is set up so that nothing happens to you, but everything happens for you - for your awakening, for your growth, for your inspiration, for your exploration - even if you forget t...
The Power of Patience
Sharon Salzberg
If we can be quieter, more in the moment with what is actually happening, a world of perception opens up for us based on where we are, not on where we one day hope to be. "Nobody sees a flower, r...
Fearlessness can Coexist with Fear
Gil Fronsdal
In meditation and in mindfulness practice, we are learning to replace fear with trust, not as an ideal or abstraction, but as a sense of self-confidence that arises from coming to know fear well. Many...
What You See Is What You Get
Annie Dillard
When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been s...
Deep Inquiry: Not for the Faint of Heart
Gangaji
Authentic spiritual inquiry reveals the joy of fresh insights and revelation, just as artistic or scientific inquiry does, but if we cling to the latest insight as a thing we know, that thing grows st...
Attachment is Habitual Thinking
Miao Tsan
We all judge our experiences through the filter of habitual thinking. In other words, we are unconsciously driven by how we think, and how we think determines the feelings and opinions we develop...
Aliveness and Harmony
Christopher Alexander
A man is alive when he is wholehearted, true to himself, true to his own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations he is in. [...] To be happy, and to be alive,...
What to Remember When Waking
David Whyte
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening...
Honoring the Gill Inside You
Mark Nepo
A simple fish nosing its way along the bottom is in itself a profound teacher, and like the deepest teachers, it doesn't even know it is teaching. Yet in its tiny, efficient gill lives the mystery...
Beauty Harmonizes Law and Liberty
Rabindranath Tagore
A great poem, when analyzed, is a set of detached sounds. The reader who finds out the meaning, which is the inner medium that connects these outer sounds, discovers a perfect law all through, which i...
Pablo Neruda's Greatest Lesson from Childhood
Lewis Hyde
Playing in the lot behind the house one day when he was still a little boy, Neruda discovered a hole in a fence board. "I looked through the hole and saw a landscape like that behind our house, u...