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2024 April Meditation
This month, we continue with our theme of radiating Love. In this meditation, we focus on radiating love to our communities, however large or small. With an open heart, this meditation invites you to radiate love to the Spirit of the land you live on, love to your neighborhood and all the beings who are part of it, as well as any stores or other contexts you encounter in the course of your daily life.
Please remember never to use guided meditations while driving or operating dangerous machines.
Here’s the audio version of the meditation:
If you’d rather work with the YouTube version with images of nature, here’s the link:
688th Week: The Dynamic Impact of Blessing
One of the great gifts of my life is my relationship with gratitude. As I move through New York City, and most especially in Central Park each morning, I find myself full of gratitude much of the time. Each morning, I fill up with it as I encounter the beautiful trees, birds, and other animals, rock outcroppings, and plants I pass by on the way to my office. Also, when I’m out and about on the busy streets of New York, I find myself feeling gratitude for the fact that such a diverse array of people manages to move through this city with relative grace and I’m always moved to hear so many languages spoken as I walk from here to there.
One of the companions of gratitude has become, for me, another of the great gifts to my life—the ability to offer blessings as I move through the world… Read More “688th Week: The Dynamic Impact of Blessing”
680th Week: What We Radiate Into the World
Walking through Central Park one morning, my usual, meditative state of mind—which emerges naturally when I walk through areas of trees—focused on a small act of kindness that someone had recently done for me. I touched back into the quality of friendliness the person seemed to radiate and I realized that the actual act of kindness offered was only part of what made the interaction meaningful. The other part was the quality of who this person is in the world, and that felt like the most important aspect of the experience.
It reminded me of a conversation I had with an acquaintance one afternoon in Starbuck’s, where she began to speak apologetically about how she didn’t feel like she ever did anything really important or meaningful in her life… Read More “680th Week: What We Radiate Into the World”
861st Week: Honoring Thich Nhat Hanh and the Practices He Taught
As I begin this week’s practice, I’m watching a video of yesterday’s memorial celebration for the beloved Vietnamese teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, in Plum Village, France. For those of you who may not have encountered Thay or his teachings, he was a Buddhist monk who brought important and accessible mindfulness teachings to the West, was also advocate for peace and a supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr., who nominated Thay for a Nobel Peace Prize.
As I listen to the chanting of the people of Plum Village, I am reminded of the importance of accessing practices that allow us to access states of being that touch not only into the presence of the Sacred all around us, but also into those internal states that bring us into a deep inner quiet and settled ease. What I’d like to offer for this week’s practice is an adapted version of a very simple and direct meditation that Thay offered to us early in his teachings. It has stayed with me over the years as one of the most direct and effective ways to settle and find a sense of inner presence. As I weave his teaching into the following practice, I apologize for whatever changes I’ve made in this practice that may inadvertently not accurately reflect Thay’s intention, words or teaching.
Read More “861st Week: Honoring Thich Nhat Hanh and the Practices He Taught”