Share Unstuck thinking includes being playful, creative, willing to experiment, make changes, and bring a freshness to every day. It's about looking outside the box for answers to little questions, being alive to all of one's senses: seeing, hearing, attuning, questioning, and noticing what brings joy, variety, and beauty to our lives.─ Charlotte Sophia Kasl in If the Buddha Got Stuck Book: Stuck: Why We Can’t (or Won’t) Move On by Anneli Rufus is an astonishingly insightful book about being stuck on the past, the present, habits, trauma, other...

Share The “house” in the title of this documentary is a special shelter in Eastern Ukraine. It was filmed before the Russian invasion but war was already being waged in the East. The children sent to live in this shelter are not war orphans; they are mostly children of alcoholics who can no longer take care of them. They are allowed to stay there for up to 90 days until the state courts decide whether they will be sent to an orphanage, to a foster family, or to their parents. Three social workers provide love, support, and activities for the ch...

Share Schweitzer’s Prayer for AnimalsWho Are SufferingHear our prayer . . .for the animals that are overworked,underfed, and cruelly treated;for all wistful creatures in captivitythat beat their wings against bars;for any that are hunted or lost,deserted, frightened; hungry;for all that are put to death . . .And for those who deal with themwe ask a heart of compassionAnd gentle hands and kindly words.- from Peace to All Beings by Judy Carman There are more than 40 million donkeys in the world, with large numbers of them in Ethiopia, China, Paki...

Share Harriet Tubman (born c. 1822 – died March 10, 1913) was an abolitionist, distinguished as a freedom fighter and conductor on the Underground Railroad during the American Civil War period. Born into slavery as Araminta Green, she suffered severe beatings, whippings, and even a blow to her head by a metal weight meant to hit another slave that struck her instead. The blow led to spells of dizziness, pain, and excessive sleepiness that she coped with throughout her life; it was also the beginning of vivid intuitions and dreams that she felt ...

Share In the last century and earlier, a “hope chest” referred to a collection of linens and other household items collected by an unmarried woman who hoped to one day be wed. Clearly, it’s time to update that notion; so as we move into the future, it might be a fruitful practice to create a different kind of “hope chest” – or at least a basket or box of hope, which hopefully will include Have Hope. You might start your own collection of hope quotations, or make a hope scrapbook filled with words and images that bring you hope. Having a collect...

Share For many, spending time outdoors, where one can really experience the cycles of nature, is an inherently hopeful practice. By doing so, we are able to see how nature has rhythms of dormancy and growth – and that just when winter seems its coldest and meanest, the tiniest green shoots remind us that new growth and new life are just around the seasonal corner. Have Hope included mentions of the four seasons to remind us of how Mother Nature herself gives us hope each year, with the beginning of every Spring. Consider beginning a little natu...

Share Real-life examples of people who embody hope through their thoughts, words, and deeds can bring hope to nearly everyone. Whose example makes you feel hopeful that you can make it through any challenge? Whose life story makes you feel hopeful that you can achieve what you want to bring to the world? One place to start could be with the people who have offered us hope during our national season of sheltering-in-place – people like Stacey Abrams, whose dedication to voters’ rights in Georgia led to two historic elections in that state, givin...

Share “The following koan from Dogen’s essay 'Spring and Fall' illustrates how direct experience can cut through categories and alleviate suffering: “A certain monk asked the great master Tung-shan, ‘When the cold or heat arrives, how can one avoid it?’ The master answered, ‘Why don’t you go to a place where there is no cold or heat?’ ‘Where is this place where there is neither cold nor heat?’ asked the monk. Said Tung-shan, ‘When it is cold, the cold kills the monk; when it is hot, the heat kills the monk.’— Eihei Dogen, 'Spring and Fall,' in ...

Share The editor, Thomas G. Plante, PhD, ABPP, is the Augustin Cardinal Bea, S.J. University Professor, professor of psychology at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, and directs the Applied Spirituality Institute. He is an adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, CA. He has published many books, including Spiritual Practices in Psychotherapy: Thirteen Tools for Enhancing Psychological Health. He maintains a private clinical practice as a licensed psychologist in...

Share How can a person be brilliant, creative, insightful, and fascinating, yet be almost lost to history? It happens more than we realize, often to women. Fortunately, Hilma af Klint was not one of the forgotten ones — but she came close. Born in Sweden in 1862, af Klint's life was "filled with magic and mystery." She studied art at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where she was subject to remarks like "women shouldn't be allowed to paint at all." She only shook her head and kept on painting. She had a strong mystical strea...

Share We often explain the age-old practice of meditation on a verse, particularly the verse from the book of Psalms: Shi’vi’ti HaShem L’negdi Tamid. “I place the Eternal before me always” (Psalms 16:8). Some do this by sitting in front of a wall hanging, known as a Shi’vi’ti, a traditional wall card, poster, or plaque with the verse from Psalms on it. Some of these wall hangings are elaborate works of art, with beautiful illustrations and other scriptural verses surrounding Psalms 16:8. The Hebrew letters of God’s name (YHVH) are often arrange...

Share Following is one teaching of Moses Maimonides, the great thirteenth-century physician and philosopher: What is the way to love and fear G-d? When a person contemplates (hitbonen) His great wondrous deeds and creations, seeing through them His boundless, infinite wisdom, he immediately loves, exults, and is ecstatic with a passion to know the great Name. This is, what King David meant when he said, ‘My soul thirst for G-d, for the living Deity.’ (Psalms 42:3)When one thinks about these things, he immediately becomes awed and abashed. He re...

Share Thich Nhat Hanah suggests using the question “Am I sure?” when confronted with something that we think threatens us. Such a practice could be used when faced with a stressor. “Right View” is all about realizing that our perceptions are not reality and in fact can never be reality. In his explanation of “Right View,” Thich Nhat Hanh points out that the Buddha said, “Where there is perception, there is deception” (in The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching). According to Hanh, “most of our perceptions are erroneous” and erroneous perceptions lea...

Share Passage meditation was developed by Eknath Easwaran, one of the teachers featured in our Remembering Spiritual Masters Project. Rather than reflecting or contemplating on a passage, this practice calls for focusing attention on the words themselves. Doing so increases one’s capacity for sustained concentration both within and outside of meditation, and such focused attention yields an absorption of the passage’s spiritual content. The passages below, which are drawn from Eknath Easwaran’s Timeless Wisdom: Passages for Meditation from the ...

Share This film, winner of the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, provides an immersive journey into the heart of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil. It will have you nodding in amazement at the courage and determination of the indigenous people of that land while you are shaking your head at what is being done by nonnative farmers and illegal settlers determined to take the land for their own use. The “territory” is the ancestral land of the Uru-eu-wau-wau community. Partially shot by the community, t...

Share Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent), a 60-year old taxi driver, is upset that people like him have to pay for a license in order to watch television. When he reads in the newspaper how much the government has spent for a portrait of The Duke of Wellington by Goya, he decides to steal the painting from the National Gallery in London. He sends ransom notes saying he will return the painting if the government will pay more attention to the needs of poor people. He figures the ransom money will pay for a lot of TV licenses. The Duke tells the stor...

Share Cole Arthur Riley is the author of this New York Times best-seller and is also a spiritual teacher in residence at Cornell University. She is the creator of Black Liturgies, a space that integrates spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black literature, and the Black body. You can get a taste of these on her Instagram page, which is followed by 190,000 people: @blackliturgies. She writes beautifully and insightfully because she uses her senses so well. Listening recurs often in these pages. “Have you ever stood in the presence of a tree ...

Share “When people demand joy always, it makes the world seem incompatible with those of us whose happiest days are still anguished. In this way, joy was one of my earliest alienators. If I did not belong to this loud, laughing family, whose was I? I was the child who would sit in closets or bathrooms while everyone else laughed together in the kitchen. Every now and again, someone would knock and whisper through to me, 'Well, you gonna join us, hunny?' But I’d stay tucked away under Goosebumps books and shadows, knowing I was never going to la...

Share International Women's Day draws attention to women's rights worldwide to work, vote, be trained, hold public office, and be free of discrimination. First celebrated on March 19, 1911, by more than one million women and men in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland, it has grown to be a worldwide event. In recent years, there have been signficant advances in women's emancipation and equality, but we still have far to go as long as women are victims of violence, denied equal opportunity in education and healthcare, under-represented in ...

In celebration of International Women’s Day, we’ve gathered guided meditation scripts from some of the powerful women of the mindfulness movement. Here they share their deep practice with you so you can be inspired not only to sit and practice, but also to rise and act. 1) A 10-Minute Meditation to Cultivate Embodied Awareness Sebene Selassie Mindfulness Teacher, Author, and Speaker “Mindfulness presents the opportunity for us to be more fully present for ourselves, our loved ones, and the earth.” Read and practice the guided meditation script ...