Spiritual practice/meditation

Beautiful. Spine-tingling.Inspiring. This is what life is all about. Going with the flow.Keeping your balance, as best you can.Embracing mystery. Love it.  

Here's a good overview of what mindfulness is all about. Nine qualities are listed in the Psychology Today piece by psychologist Melanie Greenberg. Great advice for living. Read the whole article to feast on the full mindfulness meal. Focus on the Present Moment—When your thoughts get lost in thinking about the past or worrying about the future, you bring them back to what you are experiencing right now. Being Fully Present—You are spaciously aware of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment as you go through your daily life.  Openness to Experience—Rather than dreading and shutting out your own…

OK, this isn't a surprising discovery -- that "people differ so widely in their emotional responses to the ups and downs of life." So say psychologist Richard Davidson and science writer Sharon Begley in their recently published book, "The Emotional Life of Your Brain." But in the opening lines of their One Brain Does Not Fit All chapter, Davidson points out how there's a common assumption that people are predictable. If you believe most self-help books, pop-psychology articles, and television therapists, then you probably assume that how people respond to significant life events is pretty predictable.  Most of us, according…

Yesterday some friends and I talked about our New Year's resolutions. The conversation didn't last long. We agreed there wasn't any point to making resolutions, since we never followed them.  That partly explains why my resolution for making spiritual progress in 2012 is pithy: nothing. No resolution, guaranteed success. I'm really great at doing nothing. Some days that's my primary accomplishment. But I also have some semi-serious reasons for recommending nothing as a spiritual goal. See here and here. As quoted in the first-linked "here," this saying on a Japanese Zen scroll makes a lot of non-sensical sense. There is…

I loved "The Matrix." It's an entertaining movie with a compelling plot line. Eventually, Neo finds Morpheus, and is then told that reality is actually very different from what he, and most other people, perceives it to be. Morpheus tells Neo that human existence is merely a facade. In reality, humans are being ‘farmed’ as a source of energy by a race of sentient, malevolent machines. People actually live their entire lives in pods, wtih their brains being fed sensory stimuli which give them the illusion of leading ‘ordinary’ lives. Morpheus explains that, up until then, the “reality” perceived by Neo is…

Having watched "The King's Speech" last night, courtesy of Netflix, I'm fired up about finding our own voices. (It's a great movie; see it, if you haven't already.) What keeps us from saying, doing, or feeling what we want to? Often, nothing but a fear of being different, going against the grain, marching to the beat of our own drummer, defying an authority figure. Yet here's the strange thing: almost everybody adores individualists, people who express themselves creatively, freely, spontaneously, courageously.  So why isn't each of us the person we love from the outside, but may fear to be on…

Over the years, as I've become less and less religious, my take on "spirituality" has become similarly pared down. I used to believe that a being a spiritual person had something to do with rising above or beyond this world into some ethereal realm. Now, I consider that being fully present is most, if not all, of what it means to be spiritual -- which removes supernatural connotations from this word and places it firmly in this world, not the next. The older and more churchless I get (the two qualities being closely tied together in me) the more frequently…

Early in the 1980's I got my first Apple computer, a II Plus. I remember taking it into work (Oregon's state health planning agency) and wowing my fellow employees with how VisiCalc could automate a spreadsheet, showing results on a small green screen. Since, I've owned and enjoyed many other Apple products. So I felt sad, along with countless other people, when I heard that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had died. Watching tributes to him on TV, I was exposed to Jobs' philosophy of life. Until now I hadn't realized how appealing his outlook on life and death was. I…

This morning I found myself wondering what the day would bring as I walked up our long driveway to get the newspapers. I had a feeling, hopefully there will be more... What came after the ellipsis was left unsaid in my mind. I wasn't sure what more I wanted, just that whatever it was, it should be more than what I was doing at the moment: walking up our long driveway to get the newspapers. I've been doing this sort of thing for most of my sixty-two years. Looking for something extra, the frosting on life's bare cake, the final…