Category: Zen Power
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The Oxygen Mask Principle: Why Self-Care Matters
We’ve all heard the airplane safety instruction: in case of emergency, put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. It’s practical advice for survival at 30,000 feet. It is also one of the most profound lessons for living a sustainable, compassionate life on the ground. Yet so many of us resist this wisdom. We…
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Simple Mindfulness Techniques for Holiday Balance
The end of the year often brings a whirlwind of activity—holiday gatherings, year-end deadlines, and the pressure to finish strong. Amidst the chaos, mindfulness becomes not just a practice, but a necessity for maintaining balance and inner peace. Why Year-End Mindfulness Matters As we rush toward the new year, it’s easy to lose ourselves in…
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I should have thought
Many years ago, when I was still an undergraduate, I traveled from eastern Iowa to the North of England to study English literature at the University of Leeds, a so-called “redbrick” university in West Yorkshire. There I lived for a year in a village on the outskirts of that soot-laden city in a hall of…
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A peaceable heart
Like the word silly, which once meant “innocent” (“the silly sheep”) but now means “foolish, frivolous, lacking in common sense,” the word contention has a distinctive history. Derived from the Latin contentio, it once meant “striving, struggle, competition.” But sometime in the sixteenth century, contention came to mean “disagreement, argument, fighting.” Unlike silly, contention has…
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The practice of veneration
In the closing line of his poem “Sandstone Keepsake,” the Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney describes himself as “one of the venerators.” That line is striking, not only because the verb venerate has largely disappeared from everyday discourse but also because the spirit of veneration itself, like water in certain parts of the…
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Life is Suffering (Dharma Talk)
In this Dharma talk, I discuss Buddhism’s first noble truth, “Life is Suffering.” At first, this teaching may seem morbid and nihilistic. However, when we look deeper, we find that the first noble truth serves to change our perspective; giving us an “enlightened pessimism” that protects us from suffering. If you enjoyed this Dharma talk,…