In our culture, I’ve observed that many people doing spiritual work tend to choose practices that focus on the mental experience of clarity more than on cultivating an open heart. An example would be a meditation practice in which you put your attention on your breath, while noticing and letting go of the thoughts that enter your mind, one by one.

Slowly, over time, this practice of investigating our experience—and discovering that there is no problem in the present moment—helps dissolve (or at least begin to unwind) the neurotic patterns that we carry from childhood.

We find that we have very contradictory feelings about dissolving our chronic patterns, even if we believe they are causing us suffering. Most people, it turns out, are actually heavily invested in their problems. From the developmental point of view, we understood this investment as arising from our best efforts to protect and take care of ourselv

From the fruitional view, the question is not how our history has shaped our identity dramas, but how we manage to perpetuate patterns of experiencing that used to be relevant but now are no longer necessary or useful. Because we are only living in each present moment, we must re-create these patterns over and over, even as our current adult experi

I offer these analogies to help with an intellectual understanding of a very basic Buddhist concept—the simultaneity of appearance and emptiness. This view asserts that we are always going to experience vivid appearances, but upon investigation, we will never find an essential nature to any of those appearances. So what about the observer of all of

Given the choice between satisfaction and dissatisfaction, good relationships and difficult ones, health and illness, most of us would certainly choose the more positive experiences. But a positive display cannot be continually sustained, since life is incredibly complex, always changing, and not under our control. The content of our lives will som

Nothing needs to change for us to feel complete and at peace except our own perception of reality.

she hadn’t realized until she stepped into an acceptance practice how much energy she’d spent trying to have something true be not true. In a way, it can appear paradoxical. The effect of this fruitional approach—of Ana’s accepting her feelings of deadness without trying to change them—is that she feels lighter and more alive already! Without any c

In my experience, going directly into the immediate embodied experience of our fear turns out to be a much faster, more direct way to dissolve neurotic organization than addressing the historic issues that gave rise to that organization in the first place.