Eighteen months and a technological era ago, I started a blog on mindfulness and meditation, augmenting my writing and Zen practice, and the classes and talks I give as an instructor at the Zen Life and Meditation Center of Chicago. The blog got a nice response. But the platform wasn't right. Its constrained interface and subscription-driven structure (on a blog meant to be free) were making the...

Recently we celebrated Australia Day with our Australian friend Sam. We festooned our dining nook with Australian flags and set out wine and a spread of snacks that included a small jar of Australia's beloved food spread Vegemite, perhaps best known to Americans from one of the sketchier rhymes in pop music: "I said do you speak-a my language...he just smiled and gave me a Vegemite...

Twenty years ago this month, my first published short story appeared, in a well-regarded, now-defunct fiction journal out of Chicago called Other Voices. I'd originally written the story for an application to a three-week summer fiction intensive at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, taught by the late, great storyteller Frank Conroy, then the director of the program and one of the country's more...

Life is made up of problems. Which is no problem. Without problems, life would be endless vanilla pudding. Figuring out what to do when life doesn’t go as planned is the texture of existence. One of the greater gifts meditative practice offers is an approach to solving problems that makes the problem less problematic even when the solving isn’t going well. Meditation helps to confront problems...

We often hear wellness experts talk about "integration" - how the goal of various health and well-being practices is to be better integrated. Integration is a term that’s been thrown around too much and too loosely, and consequently its popular meaning has become imprecise. “Integrated” has become sort of a blanket word meaning together, with it, not scattered in a million directions. The...

Have you ever gotten to the point of utter despair with a problem, or a project, or life, and said “I give up” – and it felt good? Have you ever been liberated by failure, by what seemed like the worst that could happen?This is not far from the point of meditative practice. When we sit to meditate, we’re giving up. We’re releasing our ambitions, hopes, fears, wants, issues, loves, hates. As they...

For the first few years I practiced Zen, I meditated 12 minutes a day. Why 12 minutes? It took 12 minutes for my pot of morning coffee to perk, there wasn’t much else to do in those 12 minutes, and I had no appetite for sitting longer than that. I would turn restless, feeling I was needed elsewhere, that the day was moving on without me.Later, when I grew out of solo practice and joined a Zen...

Non-thinking is not the aim of meditation. An empty mind, if we could achieve it, would be a vegetative state, not a productive one. But taking up meditation is an acknowledgement that much of our thinking is counterproductive to good living. So what, ideally, should our minds contain when we meditate?In meditation, we’re replacing conscious thoughts with sensory experience. When a thought arises...

After a few decades of daily meditation, in 2024 I became certified as a mindfulness and meditation instructor at my Buddhist home, the Zen Life and Meditation Center of Chicago. Since then I've received plenty of questions about meditation from people who've been paralyzed by the many varieties of meditative practice that appear in a web search. You want to know if I can boil it down to a few...