During his recent retreat at the Garrison Institute, we spoke with scholar and meditation teacher Alan Wallace about how to cultivate stillness, increase productivity, and determine whether an activity is worth doing. Many people have the sense that they are too busy or distracted in their daily lives. What’s on the other side of that? If a person practices meditation regularly, do…
Composer, singer, filmmaker, choreographer, and director Meredith Monk recently led a workshop at the Garrison Institute entitled “Voice as Practice: Instrument of the Heart.” We caught up with her before the workshop to discuss art as a spiritual practice and the pervasive sense of busyness that so many of us seem to feel these days. Monk was in New Mexico when we…
Kids and screen time cause considerable parental angst these days—and for good reason. Research shows children spend on average seven hours a day glued to computer, tablet, smart phone, or television screens. This reality has created such a stir that last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) updated its decade-old recommendation on childhood screen time. Far from a radical…
“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” -Frantz Fanon Last month I wrote about how the modern West has lost its connection to the land and to nature. The challenge is to find ways to reestablish this critical relationship that we once had but lost with the rise of materialism, science, and industry. This disconnection is…
In the wake of last night’s election results, many of us are experiencing feelings of confusion, sadness, doubt, anger, and fear. Whatever we’re feeling, though, it’s important to allow ourselves to fully experience our emotions. As meditation teacher and author Ethan Nichtern says, “The point of meditation is not to suppress your feelings. It is to make friends with yourself.”…
When individuals try to maximize their own benefits, systems collapse. When individuals are committed to optimizing their communities, they thrive. This requires a world view that understands that all of life is part of an interdependent system, and only when we infuse that system with compassion for all life will it progress through the current global trends. At a recent…
Jay Michaelson led a retreat at the Garrison Institute entitled “Jhana Meditation,” on November 12 – 17, 2016. The diversity of our emotional lives—especially difficult emotions like sadness, concern, and even anger—is both the context and the content of liberation. On the one hand, life as it is, not as we might wish it to be, is the place where we…
In the video above, filmed during her recent Garrison Institute retreat, Joanna Macy discusses the poetry and spirituality of Rainer Maria Rilke. She talks about how the young poet found the sacred in ordinary life, how he had an incredible sense of what the 20th century had in store, and how he tells readers to “let everything happen to you, both the…