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What to do with the salt of suffering?
Sometimes when I’m at a loss for words it helps to come across other’s words, and just this morning I came across a treasure trove of poems at, of all places, a website of the Frye Museum, an art museum in Seattle, where they hold a weekly mindfulness meditation session on Wednesdays, and have published some poems and pieces they’ve used at these sessions. Here is one piece that seems particularly illuminating this morning. It’s not a poem, but it’s like a poem—a healing story as short as any...
Report from a Far Place by William Stafford
I’ve never thought about words as snowshoes. I’ve never even walked in snowshoes—or seen them up close—I’ve only ever seen them in pictures—but I do love the connection William Stafford makes here in his poem, “Report from a Far Place.” When I was a kid and we lived in Michigan we used to walk to school often in snow. When the snow was very deep I would walk behind my brothers–they would break the snow first and I would step into their footprints. That memory is very vivid. Following...
Meditation as Housekeeping
In The Peaceful Stillness of the Silent Mind, in a chapter called, “Introduction to Meditation,” which I also wrote about a few weeks ago, Lama Yeshe talks about two kinds of meditation: analytical meditation and concentration meditation. He compares meditation to housekeeping and then talks about how both types are necessary. He writes: By gradually developing your meditation technique, you become more and more familiar with how your mind works, the nature of dissatisfaction and so forth and begin to be able to solve your own problems. For example,...
Good in the Beginning
I came across another piece of advice about meditation that I found useful, and thought I would share it, this from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche, a book that was recommended to me about fifteen years ago and was one of the first books I ever read about meditation. In a chapter on meditation, called “Bringing the Mind Home,” he talks about a method for making meditation more powerful and useful. He calls it, “Good in the Beginning, Good in the Middle, and Good...
Writing and Healing Prompt: Ira Progoff’s Stepping Stones in Three Dimensions
Another useful way to work with stepping stones, building from last week’s prompt, is to take a set of stones and add another layer: What did I want at each stone? What was my motivation? And why did I want that? And why did that matter? And what was beneath that? It’s like taking a two-dimensional map and adding another dimension—the dimension of depth. The dimension of why. You can begin to deepen the map in this way. You can notice threads that emerge—patterns. You can...
Steppingstones as a Way to Examine Your Life
Ira Progoff, a student of Carl Jung, who developed an elaborate process of journaling for self-discovery, one that involved binders and dividers and multiple colors, used the term stepping stones to describe a way of looking back and examining one’s life. I’ve always found his term evocative. I see the stones on a path with spaces between them, the stones stretching back as well as forward. Our lives are a river of moments. The stones are those key moments—often ones we remember vividly—often ones where something of significance turned,...