Renowned teachers and authors Ethan Nichtern and Sharon Salzberg will be leading a retreat on “Real Change” at the Garrison Institute on December 14-16, 2018. We talked with them recently about the nature of both personal and social change, and how creating supportive communities is essential to the practice of Real Change. Nora Boxer: Why do we paradoxically both want change…
Leading up to his retreat “Lucid Dreaming and Dream Yoga” at the Garrison Institute on September 18-25, 2018, Alan Wallace discusses how dream yoga can help one wake up from delusion. In the first moment when our consciousness shifts from dreamless sleep to an ordinary, nonlucid dream, we are unaware that we are dreaming and fail to recognize the nature of…
When doing research for my latest book Real Love, I had the opportunity to talk to hundreds of my students around the world about what love meant to them—self-love, love for friends and family, romantic love, parental love, love in all contexts. In many of these conversations, the topic of “letting go” came up. In all facets of life, we…
Even in the confusion and complexity of our times, there is still wisdom that underlies our experience from generation to generation. One of these aphorisms state: “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.” Without integrity, mindfulness is morally meaningless. Without integrity, metta is either wishful thinking or a spiritual bypass. Both mindfulness and metta require…
The Universe has a wicked sense of humor. That was my first thought when asked to review Mark Matousek’s new book, Writing to Awaken. I’d been avoiding my own writing demons for months and trying various tactics to get the juices flowing again. I enlisted a writing partner, committed to journaling daily, and set a deadline for the completion of…
Gregory Pardlo is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Totem and Digest, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He is also the author of Air Traffic, a memoir in essays to be released next year. His writing challenges the borders of identity and form, deftly blending the personal and familial with pop culture, history, literary allusion,…
Seventy-two million people were watching game six of the 1998 NBA Championship Finals between the Chicago Bulls and the Utah Jazz. With only eighteen seconds left in the game and the Jazz ahead by one point, an invisible shift seemed to occur: Michael Jordan stripped the ball from Karl Malone, slipped away from Bryon Russell so deftly that Russell careened…
“In the beginning nothing comes, in the middle nothing stays, in the end nothing goes.” That enigmatic riddle comes from Jetsun Milarepa, Tibet’s eminent twelfth-century poet, yogi, and sage. Matthieu Ricard unpacks Milarepa’s puzzle this way: at the start of contemplative practice, little or nothing seems to change in us. After continued practice, we notice some changes in our way…