After having lived and practiced full-time in retreat for seven years, my wish has been to continue retreat life in our normal everyday world as much as possible. How can I maintain key elements while working and living in busy and distracting normal circumstances? By now I’ve been experimenting on this project for another seven years. If I view daily life…
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Self-Compassion
The Power of Vulnerability and Compassion “Vulnerability is the birthplace of joy, creativity, love, and belonging!” – Brene Brown Maybe you can relate: If you can allow yourself to feel vulnerable, and if you can respond with compassion towards yourself, then your joy, creativity, love, and belonging can flow again. And if you respond with self-judgment or worse, then you might experience…
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Compassion
During my university years on one icy morning I fell with my bike and had to make my way to a doctor’s office with an injured knee. I felt the physician to be lacking sensitivity as he worked on my wound. But his nurse noticed my discomfort and held me in her loving gaze. My memory of this whole experience…
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Relaxation
Many years ago one of my Tibetan teachers answered my question about the meaning of profound emptiness (shunyata) by looking at me with a sly twinkle and saying, “Shunyata is relax!” Relaxation Stress and overwhelm seem as ever-present as our longing for effective relaxation. Many habits and methods promise to lead to relaxation, and some really do. Sometimes we are…
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Deepening
While compared to many past generations, most of us have a plethora of options to choose from and diverse comforts, at the same time we experience an unpleasant challenge specific to our current way of life: We seem to have confidence and interest in the new; at the same time many of us are exhausted by it. Within this overall…
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