Dear excellent member of the Open Heart Project, I hope your meditation practice is going well. I really enjoy helping you to bring more mindfulness and awareness into your life. I hope that comes across! It is truly a pleasure for me to send you meditation instruction. Each week I create completely new meditation videos for you and, each time... READ MORE
Hello and welcome to the first Open Heart Project podcast! Personally, I’m very psyched. The first topic is: “The Dharma of Love.” To listen and subscribe on iTunes, click here. This podcast is about falling in love, being in a relationship, and breaking up—from a Buddhist point of view. As a student of Buddhism and someone who has fallen in love, lost love,... READ MORE
It is almost impossible, no, it is impossible, to have any idea how to react to a tragedy as profound and senseless as the one that occurred today at an elementary school in Connecticut. It is impossible to grasp. I’m sure that, like me, many of you have been crying all day. An event this horrific causes us to see that all... READ MORE
I love yoga. I’ve been a half-assed student (which might be an asana, I’m not sure) for close to twenty years. I remember the moment I fell in love with the practice. It was at Kripalu. The teacher was Stephen (Kaviraj) Cope. The pose was trikonasana/triangle. Following Kavi’s precise verbal instruction and watching him model the pose with his beautiful... READ MORE
The practice of sitting meditation begins to shed some light on the Buddhist view of discipline. In meditation, you cultivate focus and awareness by placing your attention on your breath rather than your thoughts. PS It has nothing to do with emptying the mind of thought!! Almost impossible!! Stop trying!! Big hoax!! Instead, you take a different view of your... READ MORE
My dear and wonderful (and accomplished and generous and brilliant) friend Ishita is establishing her meditation practice and will be reporting in from time to time (hopefully really, really often) about how it is going. I am SO EXCITED to have her as a regular part of the site, talking about what it’s like for her to explore the practice.... READ MORE
Marianne is a writer, a human rights advocate and a yoga teacher based in New Zealand. Her beautiful blog is about her experiences teaching yoga in Afghanistan, teaching other people to live authentically, and writing her very first book, Zen Under Fire: Learning to Sit Still in Afghanistan. (Not out yet.) We became friends on Twitter, had drinks in Brooklyn,... READ MORE
In January and February I drove across the country giving talks on what heals a broken heart. The talks were based on my new book, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart. Well, what is the wisdom of a broken heart then? How can something that feels so outrageously awful contain any intelligence whatsoever? Why would anyone want to do anything... READ MORE
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