I’m about to enter a meditation retreat at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in rural central Massachusetts with one of my dharma heroes, Bhikkhu Analayo. Since 1975, the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) with its Retreat Center, the Study Center and the Forest Refuge, was my loving home away from home when I lived in… Continue reading →

This is a week of spiritual streams converging in the autumnal equinox and the Jewish New Year beginning Sunday eve. Monday was the time in the earth’s annual cycle around the sun when day and night are equal in length, a moment of perfect balance where the tilt of the earth allows the sun to… Continue reading →

This week, I’m in the beautiful high desert of Lucerne Valley, co-teaching our 7-night fall InsightLA meditation retreat at Royal Way ranch with Celeste Young, Lienchi Tran, and Justine Dawson, with Vince Perata as retreat manager. The ranch is an oasis of waterfalls, walking paths, carefully tended orchards and gardens, poised at 3800 feet at… Continue reading →

It’s my last day at Ram Dass’s house. There’s a little card table set on the balcony outside his room and a chair ready for me. As I sit down, Ram Dass sweeps his arm across the landscape in a gesture of welcome and appreciation. The balcony outside his room looks out over a rolling… Continue reading →

For many years, I secretly identified with a plant in my Cambridge psychotherapy office called “Mother of Thousands.” This kalanchoe plant has the amazing capacity to generate countless babies – her offspring grow as a delicate fringe of baby plantlets hanging along the edge of each leaf. Then a little bit of fringe drops off… Continue reading →

The waves and currents at Venice Beach are wild today. The ocean is gleaming in the bright sunlight while the wind whips the water into whitecaps out to the horizon. After getting tossed around on the boogie board, my mouth feels full of sand. Like you, I’ve felt shaken in other ways this week. Sunday… Continue reading →

In the course of this long life that glides by so swiftly, I’ve learned from different traditions and practices. Last Saturday, insight and inspiration appeared at the Venice Beach Music Fest – Free! Outside! At the beach! where I went to hear the Ace of Cups, the first all-girl rock ‘n’ roll band, founded in… Continue reading →

When I first came to LA to help my mother and daughter, I knew no one; it was a lonesome, sad time. I’d left my 30-year community of friends and colleagues. I said my farewells to my home at the Cambridge Buddhist Association, to our marriage and my wasband. I truly didn’t know, what will… Continue reading →

This morning at dawn I brought cushions outside on the little cement stoop in front of my house to sit. I felt peaceful but tired, lackluster, needing to be refreshed by the cool air of early morning and the spaciousness of being outdoors. In the midst of jetlag and the busyness of coming home, I… Continue reading →

Jack [Kornfield] and I just finished teaching a retreat at the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria de Montserrat in Spain, known to the Catalans as Montsagrat, “Sacred Mountain.” In pre-Christian times, the Romans built a temple here to honor their goddess Venus. A sense of reverence blesses our retreat as we sit on this mountain… Continue reading →