Tricycle

When I moved to North Texas several years ago, I began the familiar work of trying to establish an insight meditation community. Like many teachers who relocate, I assumed the greatest challenges would be practical: finding a place to meet, introducing myself to a new community, and inviting people to practice together. Those challenges certainly existed, but they were not wh...

I am in the middle of a busy morning clinic when my pager goes off. A patient needs an airway established, emergently. I stabilize the patient, and for the length of that crisis my nervous system is exactly where years of training had shaped it to be: precise, fast, entirely present to the task, and nothing else. Then, ten minutes later, I am again sitting in a quiet clinic r...

Not long ago, I visited the Harvard Art Museum, which is home to a spectacular self-portrait by Van Gogh. The painting lights up the entire room. As I approached, it captured my attention and seemed to steal the glory from the other paintings that hang there (some of which are masterpieces in their own right by Cézanne, Monet, and Picasso). Van Gogh had originally painted it ...

One morning, I was walking toward the meditation hall for our morning meditation when a flower bud fell from an oleander branch. I had seen flowers fall many times before, but this time, as I walked peacefully and mindfully, the falling bud registered deeply in my mind. A flower doesn’t have to be fully bloomed or withered in order to fall, I remembered. Even a bud—barely ope...

The Pali canon twice quotes the Buddha as saying, Pubbe c’ahaṁ etarahi ca dukkhañ c’eva paññapemi, dukkhassa ca nirodhaṁ. This is usually translated as, “Formerly and now, I teach only suffering and the cessation of suffering,” with the emphasis on the “only.” In other words, this translation emphasizes the fact that