What rests upon the altar of your life? What are you making sacred with your presence? Each morning I light a candle and I pray. I fill the kettle and meditate while the water heats. After time on the bench, I prepare hot water and lemon for my first drink of the day. Someone gifted me with a cup last year. It is simple. Elegant. White on the inside, black outside. No handle. It is meant to be cradled. Inside the rim is written “Rituals…”. The name of a shop in Holland, this

. Liberation is a process, not an end. We don’t just reach a point when we feel free. We keep getting the chance to enact this formula: Notice. Engage. Release. Notice. Release. Engage. Notice. Engage. Release. Notice. Release. Engage. We cannot control our lives. What we can do – by noticing, engaging, and releasing –  is stay in active engagement with our lives and the process we are in. We can adjust attitudes, habits, actions, thoughts. We can come into right relationship

. Sometimes teaching is right in front of us and we are ignoring it. Sometimes we even actively avoid it. Case in point: I was coming home from a meeting on Sunday and had just missed the BART train. When you miss a train on a Sunday it is an automatic 20 minute wait. I planned to settle into a book. A man came rushing onto the platform, realized he, too, had just missed the train, and ended up near me. We commiserated about the Sunday schedule, chatted for a bit, and then I

What are you waiting for? Now is the time of presence. Now is the time of rest. Now is the time of working. Now is the time of some bright thing of your choosing. Take up the banner of your longing and march. Curl up into your weariness and slumber. There is nothing you cannot do…once you give up your wish to control the future. Be present with this moment. Drop deep into your center. Open your feet to the earth and your skin to the sky. What is next? What is now? We can plan

Yesterday was blazing hot in San Francisco. By this I mean, close to 90 degrees farenheit, a temperature many of you would scoff at, but in our little water bounded hamlet that rarely gets below 40 or above 80, we notice when we sweat. I was at the soup kitchen, scrubbing the twelve burner stove, which was hot work because of the pilot lights and hot water. Some serving dishes had piled up in the industrial sink near me, so I took a break to attend to those. People were comme

“I have gone beyond vision into many of the experiences described in Eastern and Western literature– the transcendence of the subject-object relationship, the sense of solidarity with all the world so that one actually knows by experience what “God is love” means: the sense that, in spite of death and suffering, everything is somehow ultimately All Right: the sense of boundless gratitude at being privileged to inhabit this universe. Blake says, ‘Gratitude is heaven itself’ –

Someone asked me this week if I have people sign waivers for my classes that include physical activity. When I said, “No” she naturally wanted to know why. My answer was this: “Most of the danger is within.” In my life, I have long been running toward danger. Running toward that which I fear, that which will force me to expand, will challenge me, will bust up my life and reshape it in a new way. Over time I grew strong enough, and supple enough, that the reshaping looked gent