My mind is like a tadpole in a cloudy little creek, overhung with trees so the sun barely shines through to the bottom, but the tadpole’s darting here and swishing there, letting you see only where it just was and where it just landed, but never letting you see it.  You… Read full post »

From my "what's the point" meditation last night, to the tears that popped out of my eyes unexpectedly, sourcelessly on the bus this morning, I am coming to suspect that I've got a light depression settling in.  The first frosts of winter.

 This is exactly the time I would stop meditating.… Read full post »

I alternate between finding my breath as soothing as I imagine the womb once was, with tapping into my breath and after a few moments thinking impatiently, “This is it? What’s so great about this?  I’m just supposed to focus on this for 30 minutes?, with finding the experience… Read full post »

What an odd evening.  Martin Aylward, the teacher whose center I lived and worked at this summer in France, Moulin de Chaves, was in London.  I went to sit and hear him teach at the weekly meeting of the London Insight Meditation Group, and felt pleasantly disoriented.  There were a nu… Read full post »

Though I did meditate yesterday, I did not catalogue any observations or reflections about the sit.  Unwisely, I neglected to sit before leaving the flat in the afternoon.  I did not anticipate being gone late into the evening, but so it was.  And I must confess, I had a glass of… Read full post »

Here I sit in St. Helen’s Catholic Church of Brentwood, Essex.  What happened to the cozy hallway, you might ask, with the heater on just to the right degree?  Let me respond first by pointing out that meditating inside the church is a step up from the rickety graveyard outside where… Read full post »

I don't imagine Buddha meditated with a knitted brow, though perhaps he did, before he became Buddha, that is.  Call me crazy, but jacked up shoulders, downturned puckering lips, worry lines, and other manifestations of white knuckling it, well, I just don't think of these things when I thi… Read full post »

Here I am sitting on the floor of this unknown southwestern London apartment, in the tiny hallway, right in front of the mercifully warm radiator.  I haven’t meditated “at home” for over 10 months.  It’s been that long since I’ve had a home, in any typical sens… Read full post »

I am embarrassed to admit that I have been inspired by “Julie and Julia.”  Oh, and is it more debasing to specify that it wasn’t even the book that inspired me, but the movie?  I haven’t read the book.  Why embarrassed?  Not because of the concept or story,… Read full post »