Contemplative psychotherapy for individuals, couples, and groups in New York City.
Meditation |
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28-Day Meditation Challenge: Freeing yourself from corrosive resentment
For almost two years, my closest friend has lived and worked as a community volunteer in Central America. Her experiences there have been more challenging than she had expected, and over time her idealism and positive attitude have slowly seeped away--giving way to a more cynical and unpleasant countenance. The toll that her negativity has taken on our friendship has been dramatic, especially over the course of the past few weeks, as she's sent me unpleseant and sarcastic emails about our mutual friends and the lack of support and interest we have in her life. In the past I've responded to these notes defensively and angrily, which has only widened the rift between us. Several of our friends stopped speaking to her entirely and I began to fear I would have to do the same. Then, last week, I read Sharon's notes on "Lovingkindness for a difficult person" in Real Happines: More » -
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The Weather is Just the Weather: Birth of a Tricycle Article
In late September 2010 I traveled by train to Cambridge, Massachusetts. As I passed through Rhode Island, bored, tired, hungry—all the small negatives that combined make travel a magical experience—I remembered some snippets of history, King Philip's War, William Blackstone leaving Boston on the back of a bull ("The Puritan court ordered his house burned down"), the birthplace of American industry, and so on, and read about it in fragments and snatches on my cellphone. More » -
Real Happiness 28-Day Meditation Challenge, Day 23
After sitting in the office today, I reflected on the past several days as a flurry of anticipations. Rarely do I realize how inundated my day-to-day life is with waiting. I am always in waiting—relentlessly—for the next thing—whatever it might be. These anticipations take all the colors of the rainbow—from desire for a new thing, stress about an upcoming interview, up to the noblest aspirations of helping another or cultivating my own positive qualities. Whatever it is that I’m waiting for, by the time it arrives (if it ever does), there is already another thing for which I sit in waiting.More » -
Real Happiness 28-Day Meditation Challenge, Day 22
I was looking forward to sitting in the office today. But when the time came my thoughts kept circling back to the various sex scandals whose echoes are ricocheting around the Zen community. It is depressing to think that we can't seem to keep sex out of the zendo. Articles like this from the New York Times make it seem like our lives are dominated by the sex instinct, no matter what our preferences are. So however civilized we may seem, we really haven't gone far at all from our days in the caves, the trees, the bottom of the ocean. Thanissaro Bhikkhu said: More » -
The sun and the wind: Day 18 of the challenge
I haven't sat yet today. It's so nice outside I thought that I might just count my pleasant stroll to lunch as some walking meditation. Although, I'm sure that it doesn't qualify—I was somewhere between autopilot and mindful. I definitely wasn't focusing my attention on my feet and legs, as Sharon instructs us to do in Real Happiness when she invites us to walk "as if your consciousness is emanating from the ground up." However, I also wasn't lost in thoughts of future and past, like I so often am. I saw the man with headphones, shouting angrily at his own reflection in a window (impressive, I know, noticing a screaming lunatic). There was also the Dorrito bag in the tree bed on the corner, the incessant honking of a taxicab. In New York, one is always surrounded by more than enough grit and grime to think "This is a dirty world," but today I was thinking more "What a wonderful world" so maybe this meditation is doing something for me. Or maybe it was just the weather. More » -
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It's not a zero-sum game: Day 17 of the 28 Day Meditation Challenge
I visited Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche in Boulder on Monday and before that spent some time reading his books. I particularly enjoyed reading about the folly of jealously in The Light Comes Through: Buddhist Teachings on Awakening Our Natural Intelligence (I highly recommend it). I don't normally think of myself as a jealous person, but reading through the chapter on envy I had to ask myself: Do I always rejoice in others' success? Or do I sometimes feel a twinge of self-judgment? Since we're sitting the 28-day challenge this month, I thought I'd turn to Real Happiness for more guidance. It didn't disappoint—here's what I found: TRY THIS Enough Happiness to Go Around More »
