Last time, I wrote about practice as a way of return, of recollection, of remembering—coming down out of our thoughts and memories and dreams to experience of being in a living, breathing body here and now. I wrote about how this movement of return can feel like a last resort, something we turn toContinue reading “Pickpocket Sutra”
Tag Archives: Waking Up
The Art of Returning
Dear Noble Friends, I’ve been away a long time. Now it feels good and right to come home. Late yesterday afternoon, a group of us gathered to practice mindfulness meditation and do a bit of yoga and talk in a beautiful yoga studio in Tarrytown (Yogashivaya.com). The yoga studio was filled with the golden naturalContinue reading “The Art of Returning”
Three Marks
Space aliens, robots, and clones don’t have belly buttons—this is a common trope and test of otherness on TV and in the movies. Yet I remember finding this devastatingly clever when I first encountered it on TV as a child. You could be perfectly human in every way, but if you lack this one tiny,Continue reading “Three Marks”
The Sunlight of Awareness
“The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty, “ taught Mother Teresa. “Loneliness is the most terrible poverty.” Every year in Japan, the ancestors are remembered and hungry ghosts are fed in a ritual called Oban. I once experienced a Western Soto Zen version of this practice, including among theContinue reading “The Sunlight of Awareness”
Life Preserver
I dreamed I was being carried along by life like a leaf on a stream. In the dream I was wearing the royal blue dress I wore at my daughter’s wedding in England last November, which seemed strange because moments before I was holding my daughter’s tiny hand as we walked down steep brownstone stepsContinue reading “Life Preserver”
Entering the Temple
Late yesterday afternoon, ten of us sat in a sunset-washed yoga studio, practicing being still together, noting in the barest, sparest way how it feels to be in a body. By noting in a bare and spare way, I mean we practiced gently restraining thought, allowing our sensations and feelings to arise and present themselvesContinue reading “Entering the Temple”
Tracy Cochran 