Envision light from a lantern. What do you see? Perhaps a soft yellow light that feels warm and radiates into the nooks and crannies of the space you are in? Now envision the light from a spotlight. An intense, white light that feels hot and focuses on only a portion of the space. ​ Which might be more life-giving? ​ Think of the light from a lantern as awareness: pervasive, expansive, warm, and illuminating a large space. Think of attention as more like a spotlight: focused, intense, with...

Here’s an interesting coincidence…maybe something to do with fields.   Socrates (740-399 BCE) and Siddartha Gautama (Buddha) (563 or 480 BCE – 483 or 400 BCE) were contemporaries* living 3,581 miles apart. And, yet they landed on a similar truth about reality. They refused to split experience into opposites: good/bad, beautiful/ugly, certainty/uncertainty, wisdom/ignorance—binary thinking. They both embraced uncertainty, convinced of the dynamism and transitory nature of everything. ​...

By Mary V. Gelinas Years before it was used as a filming location for the Star Wars  saga, my husband, Roger James, and I braved the tumultuous seas off the rugged coast of County Kerry, Ireland, to visit the 6th-century monastic retreat on the island of Skellig Michael. After climbing the majestic and daunting stone staircase to where the monks lived, I was drawn to sit inside one of the monks' stone beehive huts. Perched on the hard, cold sleeping bench, I shivered, trying to imagine...