Practice

How to Make Meditation the Best Part of Your Day

I used to hate meditation. Raised with a particular version of by-your-bootstraps Judeo-Christian work ethic that idolized “pioneers” (in quotes because they were actually colonizers), I had a real problem with the idea of just sitting there, doing nothing, for any amount of time. Worse, when I forced myself to do it I kept on …

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Practice Uncategorized

“How you like me now?” – How I Sit

In the “How you like me now?” Series, I take a blog post from the very beginning of Love Life Practice seven years ago and see how well things have held up. This post comes from November of 2011 (so it’s not quite exactly a year) but it is the earliest “practice” post I have …

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Practice

How to Practice Deliberately

This post is a day later than it should be (based on my entirely arbitrary publishing schedule, of course); however, I have a good excuse: I was… (wait for it) …engaged in practice. Ok, now raise your hand if you thought the word I was going to use was "busy". Nope! One of my overarching …

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Love

“Is That So?”

I think, if only for my own peace of mind, it’s time for my own particular retelling of one of my favorite Zen parables: In a small village, there was a young woman who was illicitly seeing a young man without the knowledge of their parents. When she became pregnant her parents demanded to know …

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Practice

Picking Your Practice Priorities

Last Monday I let an opportunity slip through my fingers. I had a chance to visit the Dogen Sangha Los Angeles meditation evening which is led by Brad Warner. I’ve been reading and learning from Brad’s books and columns for well over a decade now, and this would have been a chance to meet him in …

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Practice

How I Sit

I’m a bad Buddhist. And I can prove it, because if I were a good Buddhist, I wouldn’t say I was bad, because one of the more confusing parts of Buddhism is the idea that you are fine just as you are, wherever that is on your journey of personal development. HA! Paradox! No, really, …

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