The Daily Meditation with Paul Harrison Dzogchen Meditation – We Made A Simple Guide For You / 13:08 As a meditation teacher, many people have asked me about Dzogchen meditation. And in this guide, I am happy to share everything that you need to know about this wonderful technique and its corresponding philosophy. You’ll soon see why Dzogchen meditation is so helpful when it comes to achieving enlightenment. With this guide you will learn to enjoy Rig Pa, which is a clear and blissful mind. Indeed, that is the main purpose of Dzogchen meditatio...

I often think about my first mindfulness experience, long before that word—mindfulness—entered my vocabulary. I was eight or nine, and my dad told me to pick a cloud in the sky, and to just breathe, wait, and watch for it to disappear. I’ve been returning to mindfulness in nature in recent years with my own son, and reflecting on its power in a number of ways. For one thing, it connects us immediately with the natural world, and allows us to simply appreciate its beauty. The beauty of nature inspires awe, which we know from the research boosts ...

Share Spiritual practices are the best ways we know to demonstrate kindness and courtesy toward the Earth, to express our gratitude and wonder, to yield to the mystery and the beauty of it all. Based on our Alphabet of Spiritual Literacy, we offer these practices you can do to honor the Earth over the next months. 1. Attention The great Catholic writer Ernesto Cardenal in Abide in Love observes: "Everything in nature has a trademark, God's trademark: the stripes on a shell and the stripes on a zebra; the grain of the wood and the veins of the d...

When it comes to our tech-immersed world, there are some pretty big questions we don’t often stop to ask. Like, where do our tablets, smartphones, desktops, laptops, and game consoles come from? The box? The phone store? Sigh. It’s not good, y’all. For one thing, our tech is made up of different kinds of metals that must be extracted from the earth: iron, aluminum, magnesium, copper, silver, gold, graphite, and lithium, to name just a few. That mining destroys the ecosystem of the mined area and the area around the mining area, not to mention t...

Share “In my study of human nature, I often posed questions to people such as 'Are you a marathoner or a sprinter?' and 'Do you love simplicity or abundance?' When I asked people, 'Do you have a signature color?' I was astounded by the enthusiasm of their responses. People are passionate about color. “I couldn’t commit to a single signature color for myself — I fudged my answer by choosing the 'color wheel' — but I could select one color to collect. I chose a deep, luxurious red that was popular but not too popular, had extravagant associations...

Share Author Gretchen Rubin is well-known to many people for her earlier bestsellers and her award-winning podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin. She lives in New York City but was raised in the American heartland. Rubin looks for what makes us happy, and recently she’s found that what the five senses deliver to us is what makes us happiest of all. And we don’t pay enough attention to those things. Cheering up, calming down, engaging with our people and in our communities — these are all made possible, most of all, by heightening our senses and ...

This story, from an anonymous source, sums up how our minds work: One evening a Native American elder told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, and superiority. The other is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, and compassion.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then...

jozefmicic/Adobe Stock This meditation is about working with habits. In particular, our habitual reactions to difficult situations that commonly arise. These could be anger at being stuck in traffic, sadness at not getting what you want, or frustration when dealing with companies that keep you on hold for what feels like eternity. Whatever it may be, whether it is something significant or something that might seem mundane, mindfulness practices can help us deal with our habitual reactivity in more skillful ways. Follow This Guided Meditation to...

Welcome to the world of Ammi—a mindfulness adventure series for young children. Ammi is a wise and gentle child who leads the way as we explore ourselves and one another through the natural world. Each story uses guided imagery to inspire inner connection and support emotional regulation. These simple meditations recognize the importance of imagination as a foundation for conscious creation in the world. They bridge the physical, the energetic, the emotional, and all the spaces in between. Whether in the home or classroom, you can engage in the...

Share The U.S. National Parks Service and the National Parks Foundation join together each year to provide a week of special activities and events aimed at helping people across the country enjoy the beauty, history, and culture present in the parks. In addition to social aspects of this week — as people team up for conversation projects and go on hiking and biking adventures — it's worth taking time to cultivate fresh reverence for the gift of protected wilderness areas. As of this writing, the United States has 61 area protected as national p...

Share Brian Selznick is a children's book illustrator and author who won the 2008 Caldecott Medal for U.S. picture book illustration honoring The Invention of Hugo Cabret. In 2017, Selznick teamed up with filmmaker Steven Spielberg and co-producer Chris Meledandri to create a movie told from nature's point of view through the perceptions of plants. Due to the pandemic, the movie plan faltered. But having fallen in love with the idea —which had taken on a grand scope hearkening back to the origins of life and coming all the way up to the present...

Share On rare occasions, someone alights in time with a brilliance that makes it seem as if they had arrived from the future or from a galaxy more advanced than ours. Leonardo da Vinci – with his artistic, architectural, engineering, musical, and scientific vision – surely gave this impression. His genius bridged so many intellectual disciplines that he epitomizes what we have come to know as the Renaissance human being, someone whose creativity knows no bounds. Born on April 15, 1452 in the town of Vinci in the Republic of Florence (part of pr...

Share “We often blame our memories for blanking, but monks were likelier to accuse theirs of being hyperactive — and this was an additional threat to their attention. “It was impossible to empty your mind completely, no matter how much you disliked its contents. But you could restock it and reorganize it, filling it with things you actually cared about and making them easier to access. A mind should become a room that was furnished well, but sparely. “Monks learned how the memory worked — rather than treat it like a black box, as we often do to...

Share This book is written by a scholar of ancient and early medieval history, without academic jargon. It is a work that opens up the ways of early Christian monastics on topics of spiritual retreat, solitude, singlemindedness, meditation, and boredom. The lessons of these vowed religious – both women and men are profiled and quoted – demonstrate that the distraction so many of us feel today, in the twenty-first century, is not as unique as we may think. People have been fighting against themselves and their culture to pay attention to the pre...

Share The Boy, The Mole, the Fox and the Horse is the Oscar-winning animated short based on Charlie Mackesy’s 2019 bestselling book; the book has brought joy to more than seven million readers worldwide. After two years of collaborative work, the film based on the book was released in 2022. More than 120 animators from around the world collaborated on the animation, which was drawn first in pencil and then inked over and hand painted. This beautifully animated 38-minute film speaks to young and old alike with its gorgeous images and spiritual i...

Share The Elephant Whisperers marks the documentary debut of Kartiki Gonsalves. The 39-minute film won the Oscar in 2023 for the Best Documentary Short Film. During her acceptance speech, she said: “I stand here today to speak for the sacred bond between us and our natural world, for the respect of indigenous communities, and empathy towards other living beings we share space with and finally, for coexistence.” Bomman and Bellie belong to the Kattunayakar community living in the Theppakadu Elephant Camp in Tamil Nadu, South India; the community...

Share “I hope that you’ve come to this book because there’s a cat in your life you love. And assuming that you have, I am going to also assume that we are all here for other reasons as well, among them, because we sense a stirring in our souls that tells us the meaning of life is not fully explained by biology, environment, or luck. There is something else going on in the world. There is something we understand as ultimately mysterious and indefinable. . . . There is something more. In fact, for some of us, that may even be a name for God: Some...

My whole body softens when I hear the grind-click-pop of my lighter, followed by the sizzle of lit candle wick. A cup of milky Irish breakfast tea emanates heat onto my left elbow as I find a blank page in my journal, and my morning ritual begins.   The sounds, smells, and tastes of this ritual feels like it lives in my cells, now, after all these years.   It started when my youngest child—now a 7-year-old Lego aficionado—was just a baby.  I barely had time to brush my teeth, but the desire to reclaim even just a few moments when I could feel l...

Share In the spring of 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, we adopted two kittens and named them Rumi and Shams. At the same time, Jon Sweeney, Spirituality & Practice’s Contributing Editor for Books and New Media, also adopted kittens. His had been named by their foster mother -- Martin after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa after Rosa Parks. Since we had named our kittens after spiritual teachers and exemplars, it’s not surprising that soon we and Jon were trading stories about our kittens’ spiritual behaviors. Little observations...

Share Born to social activist parents in 1957, Amy Goodman is a tireless and courageous investigative journalist who has dedicated her life to promoting independent media, strengthening peace and justice by vigorously upholding our First Amendment rights. She has co-authored six bestselling books, some with her brother, David Goodman, who is also a journalist. Goodman’s goal as a fiercely independent journalist has been to go where the silences are and tell stories from the perspectives of those most affected. To that end, in 1996, she co-found...