A little less trying…

I haven’t been feeling well. Also, I started a new job as a 6th grade teacher – it’s challenging. I feel my days are getting chaotic, that they are speeding by with little time to simply sit and be. I’ve decided to go back to my mediation practice. Nothing fancy – I used to formally sit at a meditation

The Overculture

Hello. It’s been awhile! I started this little blog during the pandemic, as a little project to give to myself to keep busy and feel creative. I was reading a lot of spiritual and self help books and I’d often take a passage that resonated with me and use it as a starting point for

Moving beyond the question ‘why’

I was doing some journaling this morning about what meditation has brought to my life in the past four years that I have been doing it with regularity.  I think one of the biggest things is that I have become a tiny bit less reactive.  I can recognize an emotion and in that recognition, I can take

Fighting the enemy of resistance

I saw a funny Facebook post that said, ‘Today I did something I have been putting off for 6 months.  It took me 20 minutes to do.  I will learn nothing from this.”  This speaks to me of resistance.  We all resist doing pain in the butt things like cleaning or taxes.  But we also resist the harder things –

A healing practice

I want to talk about a wonderful and simple practice you can do whenever you are feeling down or have an uncomfortable emotion you are struggling with.  It comes from the meditation teacher Tara Brach and it is called the RAIN of compassion.  RAIN stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture. Recently I have been struggling with

Asking the right questions

‘The question is the place where the unknown becomes articulate in us.  A good question is something that has incredible grace and light and depth to it.  A good question is something that always, in some way, plows the invisible furrows of absence to find the nourishment and the treasure that we actually need.’ John O’Donohue, Walking

Crossing the threshold

This post is about carrying too much.  Is there a burden you are not able to put down?  In ‘The Book of Awakening’ Mark Nepo tells the story of a friend who was going to paint a room and he had a gallon of paint in each hand, a drop cloth under his arm and a brush

Blessing the messiness of life

I’ve been reading the book ‘Braiding Sweetgrass – Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer.  She is a trained botanist, but also a member of the Potawatomi Nation of indigenous people.  So her book is a blending of the two kinds of knowledge.  She is also a mother and her book touches

Accepting ourselves

I’m re-reading a favorite book of mine, ‘An Intentional Life’ by Lisa Kentgen.  In one chapter she talks about desire traps – how we think fulfilling a desire will satiate us, but really it just perpetuates more craving.  Here she is on one type of desire trap, “There are desires to be something or someone we are

A new manifestation

I have been reading Zen scholar Thich Nhat Hanh’s views on continuation after death.  His mother had died and he mourned her but then he had a dream of her and his thoughts changed.  “The sense that my mother was still with me was very clear….Every time my feet touched the earth, I knew my mother was