I recently added a rescue puppy to my already full life (more on that to come!) and haven’t had much time to write. So for the month of June, I gave myself a small daily practice. Each morning, I'd do a ten- or fifteen-minute free-write centered on a single metaphor that emerged from that day’s meditation and yoga. My reasoning was that the inner experience of practice can't really be captured in literal, linear language. Metaphor can be what Zen calls "the finger pointing at the moon." My prompt each day was simply: This morning, my practice was [...]

Rewilding Tucked among firs and purple needlegrass at Whispertree are logs tagged as “re-wilding beehives.” Toyons hum with the gathering of nectar no human will ever extract. Twenty-three women have come for refuge to a wildlife preserve, land tended by the Tabahtea people for thousands of years before anyone called it a retreat center. Our schedule is not a paved road, but a meadow we meander. Our practice moves in cycles, like the waxing crescent moon that rises each night over the hills, cradling its dark body in a bowl of silver. We lie in the lap of the [...]

Each morning this week, I’ve made a short pilgrimage to the wild plum that’s blossoming in a slow-motion starburst at the weedy, untended fringe of my yard. The 13th-century Zen master Dogen said, “You should entreat trees and rocks to preach the Dharma, and you should ask rice fields and gardens for the truth.”  So I’ve asked the plum to be my teacher. To get there, I do walking meditation: past the bare branches of the persimmon, the scraggly winter twigs of the lemon verbena, the toyon with its desiccated red berries, the tumble-down boards of a long-abandoned compost [...]

It’s become an annual ritual for me: put on rain gear, tramp through a winter storm on some muddy local trail, and reflect on my talisman word for the year ahead. This is a word I tuck into my heart’s pocket—a small reminder of who and how I want to be, like a creek stone picked up on a wind-tossed, water-splashed day. This year, my word is connection. There’s so much I aspire to connect with more deeply: the natural world; friends and family; creativity and intuition; the quieter, subterranean currents of my own spirit. As the daily [...]

  I’ve just returned home from India, and as the new year approaches, I’m letting my pilgrimage settle into my heart and my bones. This was a journey to sites associated with the Buddha’s life, which I co-led with my dear dharma friend Shantum Seth for a group of mindfulness teachers, all of them graduates of the global Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program. It was especially poignant because it was the very same pilgrimage Shantum first led me on more than three decades ago, when I traveled to India as a young writer to cover the experience for [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself crouched beside my twenty-year-old tent on a baking desert plateau, surrounded by red sandstone cliffs layered with 1.7-billion-year-old rock—and struggling to thread the buckle on my rain fly. I was two days into a canoe trip down the Green River in Utah with a group of fellow “nature dharma” teachers, and I was remembering what one of them had said the night before: “In the wilderness, the skills are the dharma.” Now, as the rest of the group cooled off in the river, I was still sweatily trying to figure [...]

Last week one of my longtime dharma friends, Anna Douglas--a founding teacher for Spirit Rock Meditation Center--died at home in her bed at age 85, with her glasses resting on a poetry book on her nightstand. I might not be a Spirit Rock dharma teacher today if Anna hadn’t invited me, back in 1999, to lead yoga for the Friday morning yoga and meditation class she had pioneered there a few years earlier. In those days, bringing yoga into a Buddhist center was considered radical and a bit bizarre. But that never stopped Anna. Back then, I wasn’t aiming [...]

Dear Friends, Here’s a scrap of conversation I overheard one New Year’s Day, drifting down the trail from the family hiking ahead of me in the rain-greened hills above my house: Mother: Does anybody have any resolutions for the New Year? Pre-teen daughter (putting both hands over her ears): Mom! Please stop talking RIGHT NOW! I get it—New Year’s resolutions can be irritating. The word “resolution” might ooze with striving and self-judgment: I must replace the current inadequate model of Me with an upgraded Me who eats more brussels sprouts and watches less TikTok! [...]

Given the chance, everyone has a story to tell about fire. And about water. And earth. And wind. That’s what I learned in my most recent Write Your Way Home class series, when we wrote our way through the elemental energies that are a classic aspect of Buddhist meditation practice. We shared memories—birthday candles and wildfires, gardens and cemeteries, oceans and tears, hurricanes and dying breaths. We scrambled our sentences to create cut-up poetry. We imagined a visit from water in human form. We had conversations with the wind. People shared sentences from their [...]

It was a snowy late December afternoon in 1986 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was pet sitting for a local filmmaker—away with his family for Christmas vacation—and I was browsing through the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that lined the wall of their living room. The one I reached for would change my life:  Natalie Goldberg’s now classic guide Writing Down the Bones, which had recently been published. I read a few pages, then grabbed a pen and my spiral-bound notebook and began to scribble, following Natalie’s first rule of writing practice: Keep your hand moving.  The instruction was to [...]

My cat Tahini is halfway through her 21st year, which my vet tells me is equivalent to a human aged 98.  She’s skinny and arthritic and deaf, she walks with a stiff-legged limp, and she regularly gets disoriented and wanders around the house moaning like a foghorn. But she still savors life’s basic delights: laps, cardboard boxes, a can of food cracking open, a hand rubbing under her chin. Tahini spends much of her time napping at the foot of my bed on a folded comforter—speckled with fur, occasionally puked on, and—because she is prone to UTI’s--smelling faintly [...]

I’ve set a New Year’s intention to jump-start my creativity by sharing a short blog post at least once a month—a reflection on some aspect of the entwined practices of dharma, yoga, and creative expression that I’ve been practicing now for over four decades. Intention setting is vital to establishing a regular practice of anything. I often begin my creative writing workshops by inviting participants to do a 10-minute free-write in response to the prompt “I write because…” while following my friend Natalie Goldberg’s golden rule of writing practice: Keep your hand moving. So [...]

Almost every day this month, I’ve taken a little time to clear the clutter in one small area of my home—for example, my herbal tea shelf, where it was time to face the fact that for five years, no one has wanted a second cup of “Dry Desert Lime.” Clearing clutter involves peering into dark and dusty corners. For a few horrified minutes, I thought I had uncovered a dead bird rotting behind the recycle bin in my pantry—until I shone a flashlight on the clump of mildewed feathers, spotted a string coming out of its rear, and [...]

You’d think that as a good Buddhist, I’d always click the Zoom option to “Hide Self View.” But no, there I was--gazing empathically into my own eyes, framed side by side in Gallery View with my mentee, a mindfulness-teacher-in-training, who was weeping as she lamented that she wasn’t mindful enough to be a meditation teacher. “The teachings are so beautiful and deep—and I just don’t live up to them.” (Note: This mentee is a 30-something lawyer and mom who at that time was caring for her six-month-old baby during the first months of pandemic lockdown while also offering free online [...]

As we dive into the longest night of the year here in northern California, I’m honoring the memory of my dear friend Janice Gates, who passed away in October.I know many of you have practiced with the two of us on yoga and meditation retreats and trainings. In my last message to you, I wrote about our joyful self-retreat together last June on the northern California coast. If this is the first you are hearing of her death, I’m so sad to bring you this news.For almost 20 years, Janice and I celebrated the winter solstice together at my home [...]

Dear Friends, I just returned from a self-guided, weeklong meditation retreat in a cabin on the Northern Califonia coast with a dear friend and fellow mindfulness teacher. Over the past two decades, Janice Gates and I have taught dozens of meditation and yoga retreats and teacher trainings together, while raising our children like cousins in the same small town. So we’re comfortable gliding spontaneously between meditation in stillness and movement, in silence and speech. We’ve seen each other come undone at the seams many times—and helped stitch each other back together again. As we drove up to our retreat [...]

Dear Friends, On New Year’s Day, I hiked through a redwood forest along rain-gorged Lagunitas Creek, hoping to spot Coho salmon swimming upstream to spawn. The migrating salmon have been abundant here in northern California this year, as winter storms have filled drought-depleted rivers. I didn’t sight any that afternoon, perhaps because they were hiding from the (also abundant) holiday hikers. But I knew they were swimming nearby in the shadowy currents, making their pilgrimage back to the nest sites where they were hatched. Each January, I try to distill my intentions for the coming year into a single [...]

I’ve carved out more than a month this summer for a personal writing retreat-- just before I lead my next Write Your Way Home women's daylong, The Power of Place, online on July 10. But for the first week of my retreat, I deliberately didn’t write a word. Instead I spent six days meditating in silence at an almost-deserted beach on the northern California coast. I spent hours each day just walking barefoot on the dark, gritty sand; watching the waves that tumbled turquoise or grey in the shifting light; delighting in seals bobbing in the surf and the [...]

“I feel like the world has just gotten a little smaller and my heart has gotten a little larger.” As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps the globe, I keep remembering that comment from Luciana, an educator and small business owner in Brazil, during the first online meeting of our small, mindfulness-teacher mentoring group. One of the great gifts of my teaching life over the last few years has been my role as the director of mentoring for an online, international mindfulness teacher certification program led by Buddhist teachers Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. As a mentor, I meet face-to-face via [...]

Right around the time my now 19-year-old son turned two, he became obsessed with a collection of thumb-sized bottles of essential oils that sat on a wide, tiled window ledge in our bathroom. They were already dated even then, their labels smudged and oily—the remnants of two different aromatherapy kits that had been sent to me as promotional packages when I was an editor at Yoga Journal in the early 90s, many years before my son was born. Back then, I had brought them home to the hilltop house I rented with three other 20 and 30-somethings. I had planned [...]