Recently a close friend suffered a failed adoption of a cat. Our friend liked the cat, but his veteran cat didn’t jibe with the youngster. My husband fell in love with the new cat while I was away at our other home in Mexico. I started getting photos of this love affair, and pleadings for us to take the cat, at least for a trial run, so he didn’t have to go back to the Humane Society shelter....

Plenty of meditators - maybe all - struggle with thoughts of "am I doing this right?" during meditation. Which rings as proof we're not doing this right, that we're thinking rather than meditating. Even the thought "I'm doing this right" can ring as a thought rather than meditation, and proof we're doing it wrong.Many meditation teachers will say not to worry about thinking - that stopping our...

It's a Zen credo that chaos contains opportunity. Baseball included.After Major League Baseball pruned a quarter of its affiliated minor league teams in a swift and some would say brutal contraction five years ago, orphaned fans and cities turned to other brands of baseball for their summer fix. Leagues made up of independent pro players or college players off for the summer got a boost, and...

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...

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-based structure (on a blog meant to be free) were driving the...

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 that means 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...