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How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Break
When I first started going to my teacher Eugene Cash’s meditation group at the Unitarian Church in San Francisco on Sunday nights, back in the late 90s, I did what a lot of enthusiastic young meditators do in groups like that: I skipped the break. Which is to say, after the silent meditation finished, I…
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Gratitude for the Text Transmission
Gratitude to Gotama for speaking the Dhamma,Beloved Ānanda for remembering it all.Gratitude always to the First Council Elders, and Ānanda again, his own path assured. To the monks with no master, for 300 years,committing to memory their teacher’s words,lifetimes pre-literate, sati is memory, gratitude.How many lives given becoming these books? To the scribes, the printmakers,…
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Typing Sanskrit diacritics using OSX press-and-hold
(This is an Apple-only post, because it’s all I know, but if someone wants to write down the process for Windows and post it in the comments, please do). There are a few decent methods for entering Sanskrit (and other languages’) diacritical marks (accents, vowel marks, alternate characters, etc), but if you use them daily,…
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Ditch your meditation timer (use it differently)
If meditation is part of your daily home practice, you probably keep time in some way. Peeking at the clock every 30 seconds is clearly not the point, so you have to have some structure for sitting with your eyes closed, right? Either you set an alarm (crickets seems to be a favorite lately, if…
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A new meditation and yoga retreat format
If you’ve sat a meditation retreat at Spirit Rock, IMS, Insight Retreat Center, or any of the other Insight Meditation spots around, you know the standard retreat schedule well: basically a day of alternating 45 minute sitting and walking meditation periods, dharma talk in the evenings. All in silence except for a 15 minute check-in…
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Authentic Movement as Tandava
For many years, parallel with my training in Buddhism and Yoga, I practiced a contemporary contemplative discipline called Authentic Movement (AM). Developed by dancers and Jungian analysts in the 1970s, AM is rare in both its provenance as a contemplative art created and maintained almost entirely by women, and in its resistance to capitalism and…
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Hatha Yoga Sadhana: The Subtle Dance
Physical movement with the goal of cultivating energy is one of the most dynamic and creative types of liberation practice. It has been part of both Buddhist and Hindu-lineage contemplative work since the earliest centuries of Yoga and asceticism as formal paths in South Asian spiritual life. Resources for this practice: For an online intro to…
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Traces of a past life
[Putting the last few words and videos I have from my brightest years as a performance artist here. How tremendously far away they, this I, feel. Making it a “post” instead of a “page,” date-stamped, scroll-lost, faded even more. I almost just left it off the new site entirely, but this is better. A little…