Rob Tourtelot

I am also slowly learning that being present is not just about giving my full attention to whatever is happening right now. It is also about recognising that what I have is good, and then wanting what I have.

So you’ve got yourself a five-second moment — a moment of transformation or revelation or realization. This is good. You’re already a better storyteller than most people in the world. Truly. Tell a story about a real moment of meaning from your life — a five-second moment — and people will want to hear more. More good news. You’ve also found the

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Here are some rules of thumb that might help you navigate whatever practice you are trying out.

1. Criticizing, judging, or assessing yourself isn’t virtue. It doesn’t help in meditation; it’s just more noise. And if you are criticizing, judging, or assessing yourself, don’t criticize that, and so on, until you wear out and compassion enters.


2. Criticizin

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It’s still possible to get caught up in habitual patterns of the thinking mind and the compulsive body. But eventually, there is a remembering, a coming home. The mind stops, the body quiets, the heart opens. When this happens, in that natural stillness and wakefulness, everything is complete and nothing more is needed. There is no me, no

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a good story, by definition, has to be smarter than the person who wrote it. Because if it’s less smart, that means the writer wasn’t writing a story but assembling a piece of Ikea furniture. Most of the masterpieces I’ve encountered were smarter than their creators, and often more decent and purely good than them, too.

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.

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