A Path With Heart: The Classic Guide Through The Perils And Promises Of Spiritual Life

It is an easiness of heart that understands that all of the spiritual vehicles are rafts to cross the stream to freedom.

MEDITATION ON EQUANIMITY Equanimity is a wonderful quality, a spaciousness and balance of heart. Although it grows naturally with our meditation practice, equanimity can also be cultivated in the same systematic way that we have used for loving-kindness and compassion. We can feel this possibility of balance in our hearts in the midst of all life w

Insight Meditation and similar Buddhist practices can lead to quietude, to withdrawal from and fear of the world. The emptiness taught in Zen and nondualist Vedanta can lead to a related problem, to being disconnected and ungrounded. Any form of idealistic, otherworldly teaching that sees life on earth as a dream or focuses on higher realms can lea

Only in the intimacy of the timeless present can we awaken. This intimacy connects us to one another, allows us to belong, and in this belonging, we experience love. In this we move beyond our separateness, our contraction, our limited sense of ourselves.

One is called take what’s good. After studying with my first teacher,

relationship. We are always in relationship to something. It is in discovering a wise and compassionate relationship to all things that we find a capacity to honor them all. While we have little control over much of what happens in our life, we can choose how we relate to our experiences.

The frustration of seeking perfection is illustrated by a story of Mullah Nasrudin. One day in the marketplace he encountered an old friend who was about to get married. This friend asked the Mullah whether he had ever considered marriage. Nasrudin replied that years ago he had wanted to marry and had set out to find the perfect woman. First he tra

Since beginning to teach, I’ve seen how many other students misunderstand spiritual practice, how many have hoped to use it to escape from their lives, how many have used its ideals and language as a way to avoid the pains and difficulties of human existence as I tried to do, how many have entered temples, churches, and monasteries looking for the

“The dharma, the True Path, is like underground water. Any time we dig we will find it there.”

A fifth quality of spiritual maturity is a sense of the sacred that is integrated and personal. “Integrated” in that it does not create separate compartments of our life, dividing that which is sacred from that which is not; “personal” in honoring spirituality through our own words and actions. Otherwise, our spirituality is not of any true value.