It’s not as if falling in love with the Divine rescues us from the travails of the human condition. Our partners betray us sometimes, and our dead remain dead. It’s that keeping the heart open, even in hell, makes space for the Beloved. It is in the darkest nights of our souls, when all we know is that we know nothing, that the presence of the sacr

many of us are going to mistake the fire of grief or longing for what we cannot have or can no longer have—for problems to be resolved—rather than as evidence of our holy membership in the human condition and an invitation to spiritual transformation.

We are conditioned to see death and painful longing as problems to be solved rather than as sacred landscapes to be revered. We are encouraged to medicate our grief, to treat loss as a malfunction that needs troubleshooting, to satisfy our longing as swiftly as possible. We may feel obliged to employ any of dozens of spiritual methods, from meditat

Your discovery of the restorative root system underlying your ruined life will come later, in the inevitable springtime, when the small green shoots of compassion muscle their way up and out of the charred earth and begin to spread and bud and flower and propagate themselves. You will eat, because you will be hungry. And then you will feed the worl

If someone were to tell you that your losses were your passage to a voyage across the sea of samsara, the suffering of illusion, to the land of Nirvana, the bliss of awakening, you would not believe them.

So far, this incarnation has been fraught with losses, rife with disappointments, heavy with heartache. There have been untimely deaths of loved ones who seemed to be about to cross the threshold into a beautiful and interesting life, not out of it. Serious health diagnoses that changed the way you navigate space, relate to food, see your self-imag

Spaciousness feels like laziness, looks like boredom, smells like danger.

The fire of our desire melts the boundaries that divide us from our source, and we surge back home. “For the raindrop, joy is entering the river,” says the Sufi poet Ghalib.

Contemplative life is not for the timid. It’s scary to be quiet, and it takes courage to be still. No one could be expected to sit on the battlefield of her own mind without being armed with the sword of unconditional truth in one hand and the sword of unconditional love in the other.