After ten years of committed Zen practice, I decided to do a rigorous weeklong retreat with a senior Zen teacher. I had to arrive two days before the retreat began for protocol training so that I would be in sync with the retreat’s highly choreographed practice...
This 10-minute morning yoga flow is a short yet fairly challenging sequence of poses that includes a balance of stretching, strengthening, breathing, and balancing. There’s a special emphasis on getting into the hips with unexpected movements in familiar poses to help...
Andrea Miller: What is consciousness? In what way is the soul a good definition for it, and in what way is it not? Michael Pollan: Consciousness and the soul have an old relationship. The people who talk about the soul are often doing it in a religious context, and it...
To bend or not to bend? The post Do You Really Need to Bend Your Knees in Certain Poses? Here’s What to Know. appeared first on Yoga Journal.
A few months ago, despite all that was going on in America vis-à-vis politics and our usual preoccupations with sports and entertainment, it was a group of Buddhist monks that captured the country’s attention. Starting from Texas, the monks of Huong Dao Vipassana...
With red faces and steaming breath, more than two hundred faith leaders from across the country climbed back onto the buses. Dressed in brightly colored regalia, they’d just completed a forty-minute patrol monitoring ICE in ten-below-zero weather on Lake Street in...
As a young woman, I found the peacefulness of Buddhist teachings deeply attractive. But I felt myself stumble psychologically when they were called the “middle way.” I believed life was a bold and daring adventure, whereas the middle way sounded conservative and...
I was ten years sober when, in 1996, I first checked out the California Diamond Sangha at the urging of several AA friends. Early on, when I told its leader, John Tarrant Roshi, that I was sober and in AA, he replied that the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous “was a...
The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote: “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Among the many stories that shape the human experience, those involving panic add a particular disorientation, intensity, and unpredictability to the narrative of any moment. ...
I am standing on a vast expanse of palm-lined sand on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica; a hundred baby sea turtles claw their way out of the safety of their nest. Inch by inch, these tiny beings wriggle across the runway of sand toward the ocean. I watch in wonder as...