“We have scrubbed the world of magic.” — Alan Watts “Never lose a holy curiosity.” — Albert Einstein “Awesome” is a word I hear nearly every day. I say it myself when one of my daughters shows me her schoolwork or …
How to find the meaning in your suffering
Let me tell you about Annie. Annie (not her real name) was the girlfriend of someone in my extended family. A few months after the two of them moved in together, her partner (my family member) was killed in a …
On dying early
On March 28, 1942, an elite but untested force of British Commandos conducted one of the most daring raids ever attempted behind enemy lines during World War II. It happened at a critical moment of the war, as France had …
Floating to enlightenment? What I discovered inside a floatation tank
In my eighth grade English class, when we had finished our daily assignment, we were allowed to read until the bell rang. To facilitate this bonus learning opportunity, our teacher kept a small display of paperback books at the back …
10 weird places I’ve meditated in the last week
Life has been kinda nuts lately. No sleepy summer for me…between my day job, freelance work, business travel, vacation, a never-ending bathroom renovation and parenting two fast-growing girls, I’ve been left with almost no time to write, much less meditate. …
The silly reasons why people stop meditating
A couple of months ago I wrote about why I chose Transcendental Meditation (TM) to become more self-aware and to jump-start my spiritual growth. That article was shared quite a bit on social media and still gets lots of traffic …
The healing power of road trips
In On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s classic American beat novel, Dean Moriarty looks out over the chaotic buzz of Chicago’s nightlife and tells his adventurous friend Sal Paradise that it’s time to go. Where? They won’t know till they get …
10 Rumi quotes: Ancient wisdom for today’s happiness
Who is the best-selling poet in the United States? His name is Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, a Persian mystic and Sufi master, whose poems have sold millions of copies around the world. Even if you’re not a poetry fan, you’ve …
5 things I let go of that doubled my happiness
When my oldest daughter was three, I took her shopping with me one day. Our grocery store offers free balloons to kids, which is brilliant, because anything that can keep your preschooler smiling for 15 minutes while you replenish milk …
A 10-minute meditation for healing chronic pain
One of the unfortunate side-effects of our modern world is that we live most of our lives in our heads. We spend so much time thinking, planning, striving, competing and just getting things done that our bodies — the amazing, …