Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW...so you stop asking.

If anxiety, anger, or any other feeling comes along and is just some mild atmosphere in the background of your experience, don't worry about it. But if it's so strong that it stomps up to the foreground and demands to be addressed, note how it feels ... physically. Neutrally, nonjudgmentally, matter-of-factly, allow yourself to experience the sensa

So we stumbled through our loving, difficult readings and tiny speeches; then the button was pushed, and as the coffin advanced solemnly into the furnace, dysfunctional squawks came like a shower of arrows out of the sound system. The tape kept trying to play and its clicks and grindings were amplified very efficiently into the overhead speakers. T

A regular sitting practice makes all those aspects of life, of our body and mind, all the things that we keep ordinarily at arm’s length, increasingly unavoidable. It’s not what we might have had in mind when we first signed up, but it’s what we get.

The lesson here, which you can actually apply to anything that happens in meditation, is: Just say "Hmmm." There's a scene in The Big Sleep where Humphrey Bogart, as the detective Philip Marlowe, is considering a clue. Tugging at his earlobe, he says, "Hmmm." When Lauren Bacall asks him, "What does 'Hmmm'

mean?," Bogey