When I was eighteen, I studied in Paris and lived at the Cité Universitaire where I met my French boyfriend, Daniel. Sometimes we’d reverse roles to dress up and go out to gender-bender clubs and dance. My hair was so short I looked like a boy – and it was fun to kiss Daniel looking… Continue reading →

Jack and I recently led meditations for Tristan Harris’s Humane Technology conference. Tristan, a meditator and celebrated technology reformer, opened his talk with a quote from E.O.Wilson. When he was asked if we will be able to solve the crises of the next hundred years. Wilson said, “Yes if we are honest and smart. The… Continue reading →

Most of us live in a busy, goal-directed culture. In our meditation life, that same goal-directed energy is always searching for a special experience, attainable only in the future; a state that’s higher, better, different from where we are right now. Fortunately, mindfulness of what’s happening in the present is both the path and the… Continue reading →

Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;
 Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
 Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream. So is all conditioned existence to be seen.—Buddha One morning, I slowly stretch and wake up, refreshed from dreaming I’m in Hawaii… Continue reading →

Last night the moon rose huge and round, the third Supermoon of the year, coinciding with the Spring Equinox and Purim. The Book of Esther in the Old Testament tells the tale of this Jewish holiday. In a nutshell, the anti-Semitic Prime Minister decrees that all the Jews in the Persian King Asuerus’s kingdom are… Continue reading →

I’m spending this month at Jack’s house on a writing retreat. Yesterday I finished a piece I’d been working on and, I had to admit, it’s not very good. This is the opinion of the inner critic, my own personal editor who looks over my shoulder and remarks, “No one would want to read this,… Continue reading →

Teaching our Deepening Your Practice class a couple weeks ago, Elizabeth Rice shared an inspiring Ted talk on climate change by a then 15-year-old Swedish girl named Greta Thunberg. Incredulous and outraged that adults are doing nothing to stop the warming of our planet, Greta went on a school strike for the climate! Now 16… Continue reading →

Last night I came home from teaching an unplanned retreat with my godson, Will Kabat-Zinn, filling in for my dear friend Sharon who got sick at the last minute and couldn’t go. One of the participants wheeled himself into the meditation hall in a wheelchair. His name is Leon Ford, a 25 year old African-American… Continue reading →

As long as my mother was alive, she sent her children a Valentine’s Day card. The envelope was adorned with red heart stickers and on the back, in increasingly tremulous handwriting, she would write S-W-A-K (sealed with a kiss). The sweet wishes didn’t vary from when we were children to my being a grandmother. It… Continue reading →

The Buddha encouraged his community to meditate in the forest at the foot of a tree, beginning a long tradition of reverence for nature in Buddhism. Spending time in nature, we can sense the intimate connection between the natural world and our own nature. There’s a circuitry between the health of the environment and our… Continue reading →