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Should Non-Natives Practice Indigenous Religions?
Seekers in the West hunger to learn from indigenous spiritual teachers, but what are the politics and ethics of taking on and changing the traditions of others?
How Gratitude for Life Beats Fat
It took losing 50 pounds for Brad Hirschfield to even realize that he was overweight, or so he jokes. The joke is, in fact, on point: Hirschfield, 38, is a teacher and Orthodox rab…
Vengeance 101
Throughout history, we’ve had an insatiable fascination with stories of vengeance. From the earliest Greek tragedies, to the Bible, to Shakespeare, to recent movies like Atonement,…
Reopening the Eyes of Compassion
I vividly remember my first day as an intern at a large inner-city hospital in Southern Africa. As I made my morning rounds through the male cardiothoracic unit, I saw patient afte…
2009 September/October
Neurons of Compassion
Have we found the basis for empathy and altruism? Like most great scientific breakthroughs, the discovery of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) was a complete accident. What may…
Wired for Compassion
In the mid-seventies, psychologist Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., left teaching at Harvard to write "The Brain" column for Psychology Today. He then joined the New York Times, where he mad…
Play This Mind Game with Fruit and Nuts
Recently I was running a workshop on the MB-EAT program for therapists experienced in mindfulness meditation. We started with a mindfulness eating practice that focused on making c…
2002 Summer
Focusing on What Matters, Moment by Moment
“Many of the world's contemplative traditions teach that the normal mind is afflicted in various ways; that since it so readily brings us suffering and anxiety, it can't be deemed healthy.”
The Physics of Our Entanglements
Reality isn’t what it used to be.Historians disagree over precisely when it changed. Some say the year 1905. Others point to key events in 1964 and 1982. I think of it as a glacial…
The Ceremony at the Heart of "Salmon Nation"
About 18 months ago, an extraordinary woman came to my home on the Rogue River in southern Oregon. At age 83, Agnes Baker Pilgrim is the oldest living Takelma Indian and chair of t…
2010 March/April
Transformative Travel: Three Museums That Will Shake Your Soul
Here are three museums that take the notion seriously that who we are—spiritually, morally, ethically—is not a fixed thing. These museums plunk visitors into radical, intense, real…
