“Just as the physical world is comprised of integrally related particles, so too, we are integrally related to one another and to (nonhuman) creation. We live in a web of relationships. As we affect this web by our actions, so too are we affected by it. Conversion is accepting interdependence as the definition of life in the universe.” —Ilia Delio,…
Every story has a beginning. Mine begins, too, with silence—with being silenced. My voice was smothered and squashed for years by a violent mother whose anger and bitterness consumed her, whose anger and bitterness very nearly consumed me. As a young girl, my only desire was to vanish from the world, and I did by disappearing into the stories printed in books. I devoured books.
Years ago, in Arizona, scientists embarked on an experiment to learn how to replicate the Earth’s ecosystems in a closed ecological system. In the Biosphere experiment, a huge glass dome was constructed with everything needed to sustain life within the structure. The scientists lived inside the Bio-dome for two years and, for a number of reasons, the experiment didn’t work…
I recently coached a senior executive I’ll call Stephanie, who was grappling with a pretty common dilemma in the business world: her organization’s profits were nowhere near where they had been projected to be, and her impatient CEO wasn’t happy about it. She and her colleagues were feeling intense pressure to perform and feared that they would lose their jobs…
Cultivating self-control through mindfulness practice can help us become more compassionate people.
The remedy for loneliness is in learning to admit solitude as one admits the bayonet: gracefully, now that already it pierces the heart. —Denis Johnson, “The White Fires of Venus” (1975) In dark times, we often turn to literature to help us understand the turmoil raging within ourselves and our worlds. During the 1850s, for example, American readers looked to…
Our love affair with digital is over. It seems like forever, but it’s been only 10 years since the iPhone first seduced us. Can we remember a time when we didn’t have the sleek, delicious feel of a device in the palm of our hand and instant gratification at our fingertips? Can we remember a time when “app” wasn’t even…
The Buddha said that the origin of all suffering is craving — we either don’t get what we want or we get what we don’t want. But what is the origin of our craving? In his recent New York Times best-selling book, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, Robert Wright argues that the process of…