Direct Awakenings for the Soul
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How Creativity Stops the Years in their Tracks
Have you ever thought that giving yourself the time to do that sketch or short story might help you stay younger? Studies have shown there indeed is a vital relationship between creative expression and healthy aging. Read More
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Top Stress Triggers: What is Stress and How to Stand up to it
Stress really isn’t in what happens, but in how we react to it. This gives us a good way to beat it: for if know our stress triggers and prepare as best we can, we are standing up to stress before it gets to us. As Hamlet says, “The readiness is all”: so let’s be on the lookout for these six likely stress triggers as the holidays approach. Read More
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The Choice to Age Well: Staying Connected Through Service and Community
If you make the effort to find fulfilling and meaningful ways to spend your time, contributing to the world and making a small difference, you will be valued by everyone you care about. Age will just then just be a number. So here are some things to keep in mind as you choose the ways you can best help to tap into your inner power really to make a difference in life. Read More
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The Choice to Age Well: Refresh Yourself in Spirit
One of the best ways to age well is to refresh ourselves in spirit as often as we can. Every day we live and work, something magical and full of life gives us the sustenance and power to go on, whether we are aware of it or not. We may feel weighed down by thoughts and worries, stuck in our habits and routines, but right before us, unseen but always there, is another way of lightness and ease. Here are five ways you can refresh yourself in spirit. Read More
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The Eight Choices to Reducing Fear and Finding Contentment as You Age
We live in a world that is obsessed with looking beautiful and young, and maintaining perfect health well into our older years. But youth is short. As we gradually age, panic can set in as the increasingly inescapable loss of our physical beauty fills us with fear. Read More
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Change That Event and Be Free
If you had your life to live over, what decisions from the past would you like to do over? Would you choose a different partner or family, or find a new way to handle things better with that childhood bully who picked on you? Psychologists tell us that we can often trace our least desirable patterns of behavior to telling events in the past, where we made up our minds as a child does, without wisdom or experience. Read More
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Winter Doldrums
During the holidays, our lives are filled with doing things for others and family. While hectic, it is a wonderful time filled with purpose and meaning. Then we move into January and February and all that meaning comes to a screeching halt. We feel a loneliness as everyone gets back into their own lives; nothing will be special again for a long, long time. But we can find in our own spirit a way to keep the magic going even amidst obstacles. Read More
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Choosing and Using a Mantram
If you’re like me, with a mind that buzzes so constantly I can’t turn it off, you’ll want to start using a mantram right away. Called “the energizing word,” the mantram puts in our hands enormous energy and power to bring inner peace. Here are some tips on choosing one, using it to help you, and how it can bring lasting peace. Read More
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A Trial Run at New Year’s Resolutions
“Resolutions in December? I thought they were for New Years!” But a few years ago, wrestling with an overeating problem, I pondered this thought: most people, myself included, approach January 1st with more than a little fear, because of the magnitude of some of the changes we want to make in our lives. They are pretty big departures in areas we have shown considerable weakness. So I got this idea: why wait till January? Read More
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Turning Away From the Dark Side of the Force
How do we deal with our own dark side, which can erupt in anger or burn relationships before we even know what hit us? Read More
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Awakening and the Near-death Experience
When the mind closes down and the senses are stilled, mystics describe the sudden effulgence of pure light illuminating consciousness, accompanied by a flood of joy. After this experience, called enlightenment, illumination, or oneness with the Divine, people feel a happiness so unlike and above any other that they try to reach out to those still in the darkness we call everyday life. Read More
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Instructions in Passage Meditation
Why is it so hard to take a single syllable like "Om" and permanently set it as the theme of meditation? There is novelty and excitement at first, but over time the monotony can drive you nuts. With just one word over and over or maybe the effort to make your mind blank, your greater mental faculties feel cheated, even starved. That is not a healthy situation, because in meditation, we must convince the mind, too, to come aboard on our spiritual journey. Read More
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Controlling Your Destiny: How Karma States Operate in Our Daily Lives
Millions of people the world over believe in karma. The law of karma states that as we sow, so shall we reap: everything we do, say, or even think has consequences, good or bad, and sooner or later, these consequences will come back to us. The question is, is karma fatalistic and set in stone, or is there something we can actually do about it? Read More
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Psychological Work and Direct Awakening
I have been a meditator for thirty-five years, thirty of those in residence with Sri Eknath Easwaran, one of the great meditation teachers of the twentieth century. In that time, I have had deep experiences. Some of them, when the mind slowed down to near-complete standstill, are among the most memorable experiences in my life. These I owe to my practice of passage meditation, the best means I know of slowing down the fast lurching thoughts of the mind. Read More
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Beyond Om: Spiritual Passages for Meditation
Memorable passages are intense and powerful words that remain with us. We remember words like, "To be or not to be—that is the question," even if we can’t recall the rest of Hamlet’s soliloquy. A passage jumps out from its context and claims attention—like one smiling face among many dour faces waiting in a line. Read More
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Direct Awakenings for Families
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Taking Care of Our Parents
It is almost a truism to say that, since our parents gave us life and devoted themselves to our care when we were helpless, now as they struggle, physically or mentally, our duty is to give back. If your parents are entering the phase where they need your care or soon will be, here are five ways that will help you make wiser decisions about their care and your involvement with it. Read More
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Easter is the time for Renewal
I have always marveled at Easter's paradox: a time when, after a long death and gestation, new life springs up. With many vacations coming in Easter week, here are some tips for celebrating with your close friends and family. Read More
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The Value of Plays and Spiritual Stories with Kids
I believe that children are as strong and secure as the positive values they have inside to draw from. Today, however, our children have a lot of negative images from the media and few positive, even saintly figures to turn to for inspiration. But spiritual sustenance is there all the time, in stories and plays based on scripture, myth, and modern heroic deeds. Read More
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Give Yourself Permission to Celebrate the Holidays with Joy
With the holidays coming up, let’s look at what we can do to reduce the focus on toys, presents, and exposure to the commercial frenzy and put it back on activities that truly support our children’s spiritual growth and awakening. Read More
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How to Deal with the Hidden Bully
You may have a ”hidden bully” in your family or wider circle, or maybe just someone skilled in wounding others. You will know that the question isn’t whether they will attack, but when. Here are four tips on what to do. Read More
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Honoring Your Child's Unique Gifts:
Keeping Your Dreams for Your Child in Check
Sometimes parents are sure about the path that their kids must take, and they let the kids know it. When we do this, we often set our kids up for failure. Trying to help those we love most in the world to succeed, we actually ferment rebellion in them or doom them to failure. If we can stop trying to use our children as surrogate selves, who will be what we should or could have been, or spoiling them so that they can enjoy what we couldn’t have -- and if we can instead nourish and respect them as the people they really are, the results can be miraculous. Read More
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Teaching Kids to Pray
In these times of uncertainty and tragedy, children can really get upset. But if kids learn to pray, they can channel these powerful feelings into a greater universe of hope, easing their tensions and enabling them feel a greater presence that comforts them and watches over them. Read More
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Direct Awakenings in Difficult Situations and Crises
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How to Handle Resentment
Recently, a friend told me she saw Susan Saint James and her husband on the Oprah Show. Having lost their 14 year old son in a plane crash last year, Susan was asked how she got through the experience without bitter anger. She said, “I have found resentment to be futile. It is like taking poison and hoping the other guy dies.” Read More
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The Five Spiritual Losses: Modern Civilization Comes with a Price
The times we live in are full of wealth and opportunities... but do we feel richer? If anything, it is the pain of loss that gnaws at people, rather than our feeling the fullness of inward contentment. I would like to talk about the five ways in which people most feel the sting of loss, and how all of us can actively effect a remarkable spiritual transformation of such deficits into strength that can build a better world. Read More
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Stop Resisting Your Life
and Embrace ALL of Your Life
Why is it we comfortably class our self as a creative, easy going, and pretty considerate person, but really don’t want to mention also our bad temper or tendency to drink? When T.S. Eliot came face to face with all the things about himself that he had chosen not to own, he said, “How unpleasant, to meet Mr. Eliot.” Read More
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Tsunami – Lessons in Courage and Karma
A friend of mine in Sri Lanka once said that, if we truly believed everything we did had a consequence for us, for better or for worse, life would become a heaven. Karma then would offer hope and not despair, for it gives much weight to our actions. Read More
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Bardo: Using Pain for Spiritual Gain
In the near-death experience, when the heart temporarily stops beating and frozen fear grips every cell of our being, a stream of white light is generated, vast and full, deep in the heart of life. This is the deepest spiritual experience those who have it will ever attain, accompanied by a love so profound and unifying that it comes from a universal presence and nowhere else. For those keenly receptive, the gates opened by this profound experience lead to a complete turnabout in their life. Read More
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Craziness on the Road: How to Stay Calm Under Pressure
A friend of mine recently said that drivers on the road today make a simple trip to the grocery store a frightening experience. Just a few days ago, I myself was traveling on the two lane highway near my home and noticed a large truck hurtling toward me in my lane, evidently passing someone else. Only a slim, rocky shoulder on my side stood between me and the next world. Read More
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Direct Awakenings in Nature
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The Art of Relaxation
Before the struggle to learn and achieve, all of us had moments when we could lie down and watch the clouds passing over the blue sky. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go; we had only to be. I would like to show five ways to remember how to relax and see life not as time to work or make money, but as food for our inmost soul. Read More
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A Place Safe from Heat and Cold
The whole world is enduring great extremes in heat, cold, wet, and dry. This is hard not just on our bodies and our living environments, but on our emotions. So rather than speculating on what truly is behind such wild extremes of weather, I would like to ask, how can we learn to stay calmly centered in ourselves, whether it is bitterly cold or blisteringly hot? Can we stop the feelings of shock and panic and replace them with ease and peace? Here are five things everyone can do. Read More
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Stepping Aside for the Tao
I have been trying all my life to learn from the Chinese sage Lao Tsu that to be really strong, I must seem weak. When I just itch for that promotion at work and want feverishly to look like I deserve it, I am learning instead to appear indifferent, like I don’t need advancement. This natural flow towards something low and humble is, Lao Tsu says, like water: for water seeks the lowest level, yet everyone in the world runs after it and tries to hunt it down. I treasure and try to practice The Taoist way to happiness: to act like you could very easily be content with its opposite, and then just wait, as if it made no difference what the result might be. Read More
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Summer Recreation That Nourishes the Soul
What is happening when we escape from routines and relax into the childish glee of splashing in the waves, or lose our cares cruising on the lake or river? I would suggest most are looking not so much for ways to get far away as to just to gear down the frenetic pace of life and of our mind. For it is the mind, and not our bodies, that shouts commands to work faster and do better. Here are five ways in which we can use summer to leave the fast, furious mind behind and relax into our bodies. Read More
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Spiritual Nurturing in Nature
There is an urgency in all of us to recover what we once had, as kids, when we climbed, ran, danced, and played without thought of anything but the moment. Fortunately we have all around us, at any time, both the place and the spirit of that time we long to. It is time to rediscover how to move our bodies, rhythmically and magically, in the spirit of Nature. Read More
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