Shinzen Young on the most basic principle of mindfulness meditation: the cultivation of focus that can be practiced at any moment of the day, during any activity.
Tag: Silence
Pandemic Snow
BY JONATHAN H. MARKS A few years ago, when I was on an international fellowship in Geneva, some friends asked me to go to the mountains for the afternoon.
You Have To Say Something: Dainin Katagiri on What To Say When There Is Nothing To Say
According to Katagiri, it can be difficult to find the words or modality to enter back into the world from a place of silence, but it is something we ultimately have to do.
Keeping Silence of the Heart: Cultivating Attention and Sobriety According to the Philokalia
Philokalia means 'love of the beautiful and the good', and the writings that were added to this collection were mostly concerned with the importance of awakening and developing attention and consciousness.
La Mar, El Mar: Ernest Hemingway’s Kind, Beautiful, Cruel Ocean
Ernest Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea', has to be one of the most accomplished accounts of a lifetime's intimacy with the sea.
Billy Collins – The Dead
Billy Collins runs with the folkloric notion that the dead are watching us and pushes the image all the way to a reverie of the departed 'rowing themselves slowly through eternity' in glass-bottomed boats.
Their Love of Life Should Never Weaken
Pursuing our vocations and allowing our children the space to develop their own, are, according to Natalia Ginzburg, paramount in raising healthy children and developing healthy relationships with them as they grow.
Seamus Heaney – The Peninsula
Seamus Heaney's beautiful poem about where we go when we leave our heads and dig into something more fundamental.
Elizabeth Alexander – Equinox
Alexander's poem Equinox is about life and energy, and how it slowly disappears, sometimes the force leaving the body still living, but an empty shell.
Erich von Hungen – The Moment
The pinpoint perspective of the present moment can feel so sharp but ultimately always impossible to fathom and out of our reach. As Erich von Hungen writes, it is simultaneously hard and soft, early and late, tiny and all-encompassing 'like a pocket-sized Big Bang.'