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.
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…
Q: What is Zen? A: Food in the pot, water in the pail. (Zen Koan) The creative moment appears inside the things of the world. When we stop grabbing at things, they seem to approach us and our connection with them is something we feel and know. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke said that an angel wouldn’t be impressed by our…
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…