Self-Awareness

What You Do While Meditating (On Emerging from a Month-Long Advance) It’s been a few weeks since I came out of my month-long solitary meditation retreat, which I prefer to call “advances.” What a valuable experience that was, and challenging to describe. Sometimes people imagine that retreat is just sitting still for a month, which may not seem particularly compelling. It’s far more fascinatin Read more

In a few days I’ll begin my first solitary retreat in over twenty years of spiritual practice, for a month. I’ve done month-long retreats before, and usually I was either helping organize or teach. So it’s been a while, or maybe it’s never been. As mentioned in a previous blog, we purchased our retreat center, Clear Sky, ten years ago this month, intending to do more meditating. Ha! We’v Read more

Which would you choose: happiness, or 16 different kinds of bliss? I’m wondering because classic Buddhist teachings don’t address happiness; they do, however address 16 different categories of bliss. That makes me think that some people were really paying attention! Every time I hear about “happiness” studies nowadays, it sounds like a really fat brush stroke by comparison. It still strikes me as awesome that generat Read more

There are three substances we could argue to be the most indispensible and immeasurable commodities on the planet, and they also happen to be free: love, sunlight and air. I’d add a fourth, less obvious one: enlightened consciousness, which could be considered a highly developed form of love. Like sunlight and air, enlightened consciousness affects everything we do and how we do it, such as in the form of the role mo Read more

It’s a billion-dollar question: how can we bring greater awareness to our work and lives? Greater awareness is associated with more satisfaction, improved health, increased empathy and greater satisfaction. And what does “healthy” mean, exactly? Can we be empathic and caring without making others (or ourselves) fidget uncomfortably because it’s too woo-woo? After all, “love” is a f Read more

Continuing this series on consciousness and money: self-awareness a.k.a. mindfulness has enjoyed great success recently within the corporate world, where employees are keen to improve performance, reduce stress, and … grow world peace, as Google’s Chade-Meng Tan so wonderfully extols. One might reasonably ask, how can we make time for self-awareness practices when our modern lives can be so demanding? When we have ki Read more

Money often gets more credit than it deserves, as we chase its limited potential to deliver satisfaction; it can also take a bad rap as the source of, if not all evil, then at least the instigator for a whopping dose of it. What’s the Middle Way of money? Funds are an integral part of the world most of us live and work in, and it occupies a central focus in our society’s attention and its functioning. Tha Read more

Over the last several years I’ve been exploring consciousness and money, as two of the things with the most impact on our planet. How do they relate to one another? How can we get them to work well together? To be frank with you, my interest arose out of my experiences of a widespread lack of financial maturity or integrity in spiritual communities. I didn’t need to look very closely to discover that I, t Read more

I have a theory that true sustainability is dependent on classic spiritual values like empathy, generosity, compassion, love and the like — you know, all the qualities that the world’s wisdom traditions have been encouraging us to adopt for the last several millennia. Both Buddhism and newcomer-to-the-wisdom-block quantum physics espouse, for example, the belief is that there’s no separation between self Read more