Training Your Mind and Communicating Genuinely

Discipline: coming back to the practice. 

My neighbor has a great big dog. It's a little smaller than a horse. You can't go outside with a dog like that without training it first. Otherwise, it'll just pull you down the street, terrifying every man, woman and child along the way.

Our minds are kind of like big burly mastiffs. They are strong, energetic and often willful. If we don't train our minds, they'll pull us down the street in any direction they feel like going. It seems odd to think you can steer a course to happiness without training your mind first.

Training your mind requires exertion and discipline as a starting point. When your mind starts to run off,

The Way in is the Way out

An old friend told me he felt like something was missing in his life. He talked about filling a void. He took a new job thinking that would solve it. But the void was still there. He talked about his lack of mindfulness, his habit of over-eating and the way he always feels like having the TV on to fill the silence.

I can relate to feeling like there is something missing. This is what led me to meditation. But what I've come to realize through the practice of meditation, is that this feeling of emptiness, which we might refer to as a void, is not the problem.

Three Reasons I'm Still On the Path

After about 5 years of meditating like my life depended on it, I hit a wall. For the past two months, getting my butt on the cushion has been a struggle and a constant internal negotiation process. Summer felt good. Life felt good. Samsara didn't seem so bad. I started asking myself why was I meditating so much.

I realized I had done most of the things I originally wanted to achieve through meditation. I meditated for a whole month this spring, and that felt like an achievement. I've experienced more

Remembrance of Things Past

Beautiful memories are like comets hurtling through space, dazzlingly brilliant, but growing ever distant. I fear the stories that encapsulate my most beautiful memories will travel so deep into darkness that they will disappear from sight. Eventually they will become imperceptible even to the most powerful telescope, forever lost in the vastness of space.

That's how it feels to think about old friendships, or the feverish days of solidarity and angst in the punk scene, or the glory days on the high school football team, when things seemed intense, alive, maybe even perfect.