Making Sure I'm Still Here
.... and Life Coaching with Joe
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Right Action in the Face of Hatred I woke up today feeling crushed. It’s odd to wake up in the sweaty arms of defeat. Then I sat for morning meditation and a personal check-in. Feelings are part of our reality—but they are not reality. They are expressions of a part of our being that […]
And the Key to the Kingdom Let’s begin with something radical: what if we’re not fundamentally broken? What if, beneath the static, striving, and self-doubt, we’re already good—innately, luminously, primordially good? This morning, as I was writing, my mind drifted into discursive worry and began rifling through all the ways I was failing—at the moment, […]
The Way In is the Way Out Remember those finger traps? The woven tube that tightens when we pull? The harder we struggle, the more stuck we become. The only way out is to stop resisting and accept where we are. Tibetan yogis compare the wisdom path to a snake moving through a tube—it cannot […]
I lay in bed this morning, unable to get motivated, pondering the deep existential question why bother? And when I get like this the only answer to why bother is … eh, fuck it. In meditation training, we learn that every experience is worthy of investigation. Yet this sense of “why bother” is one I […]
First Thought, Best Thought Commiting to Yes (And…) First Thought, Best Thought was the title of a book of poetry by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and a phrase he used to describe engaging fresh mind in any creative endeavor. Last week, we discussed the idea of a fresh start—how returning to the breath brings us into […]
Good Morning, Everyone We can say this regardless of the time of day because returning to the present is always a fresh start. Each fresh start is a new beginning. Every time we return to nowness, it’s like the first day of spring. This fresh start can occur in an instant or unfold as a […]
Understanding Merit and Virtue An essential component of the Buddhist path is accumulating merit through virtuous acts. Virtuous actions, according to Buddhism, are outlined in the Vinaya, the Buddhist code of ethics. The Vinaya is part of the Tripitaka (or “Three Baskets”), which form the foundational teachings of the Buddha. The Tripitaka consists of: Vinaya […]
From Imprisonment to Possibility There is an old Zen saying: “Disappointment is the chariot of liberation.” But what does that mean? Is it simply wishful thinking when things go wrong? Not quite. It points to a fundamental aspect of the path toward liberation. What are we liberating ourselves from? While we often blame external persons […]
When we think of patience, we often imagine holding ourselves still with tight muscles, grinding teeth, tapping toes—waiting, holding, and waiting some more. We are locked in a ball of tension waging a war with circumstances. We live through moments of turmoil as we wait in grocery lines, toll booths, for a friends to show […]
TRANSFORMING AGGRESSION INTO WISDOM Just he released the book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism in 1971, Trungpa Rinpoche realized his burgeoning meditation community reach an audience beyond the familial hippie trappings. This would mean different kinds of peo0ple, with varying degrees of processing, would be enter his community and it would elevate him to the […]