“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.
Many of us are aware of the mindfulness revolution currently happening in corporate America, but perhaps less of us know about the interest in empathy that’s coming on its heels. Over the past few years, I’ve received requests to teach empathy at a social media giant, a large healthcare company, and a worldwide leader in hospitality. These companies have been…
At winter twilight in canyon country, deer materialize and vanish at dusk and dawn, as if they step through a lavender veil between worlds. One moment, the field reveals only dark boulders and shadowed clumps of chamisa; the next moment, the shadows move, shape-shifting into leggy, soft-lipped foragers. And then, they shape-shift again and are gone, invisible, as if traveling…
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…
Buddhism shares with science the task of examining the mind empirically; it has pursued, for two millennia, direct investigation of the mind through penetrating introspection. Neuroscience, on the other hand, relies on third-person knowledge in the form of scientific observation. In this conversation, which appears in the recent book Beyond the Self: Conversations Between Buddhism and Neuroscience, Matthieu Ricard, a…
For four billion years, life on this planet has been ascending to higher and higher levels of organization. First there were just bare, self-replicating strands of information; then they encased themselves in cells; then some of these cells got together and formed multicellular organisms; then some of those organisms developed complex brains, and some species of brainy organisms became highly…
Moral disgust is currently the default emotion in our politically-divided country and it has profound toxic social and emotional effects on all of us. Moral disgust can be thought of as the universal repugnance people feel toward extremely bad conduct, like abuse of the vulnerable, cruelty, corruption, and so on. Moral disgust in a relationship is toxic because, like physical…