At the Garrison Institute, we believe our current ecological crisis is also a spiritual crisis—one that asks us to both deepen our emotional, intuitive, and embodied ways of relating to the earth and to expand our collective sense of perspective, meaning, and solidarity around the global crisis. However, in addition to our efforts to encourage a societal shift around profound…
Namaste and thank you for downloading Medit8, the most authentic Buddhist practice app on the market. The modern meditator faces an abundance of distraction unknown to the awakened ancestors. The only tweets Zen Master Dogen dealt with were those of the local avian population. Indian Buddhist Master Padmasambhava’s world wide web was codependent origination. And things were so boring during…
Can contemplation still find a place in the world of technology and conflict which is ours? Does it belong only to the past? The answer to this is that, since the direct and pure experience of reality in its ultimate root is man’s deepest need, contemplation must be possible if man is to remain human. If contemplation is no longer…
When it comes to commerce, poetry is marginal relative to other art forms. And yet, at the big moments in our lives — birth days, graduations, weddings, and funerals — we turn to poetry again and again. We recently asked poets Marie Howe and Ellen Bass to have a conversation about the power of poetry during moments of transition. Marie Howe:…
The phrase “voluntary simplicity” has, to my ears anyway, a quasi-paradoxical ring to it, not unlike “waking dream.” It accrues meaning by pointing to the implicit assumption in its antithesis: That we are by default, if not involuntarily, immersed in a world that tends toward complexity and confusion. For most of us alive today in the hyper-real world of the…
New York magazine recently published one of the grimmest accounts of the possible results of climate change. Unfortunately, it comes at the same time as news arrives of the long-anticipated “calving” from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica, creating of one of the largest icebergs ever, a sad reminder of the startling changes being brought by the warming planet.…
Solitude has been instrumental to the effectiveness of leaders throughout history, but now they (along with everyone else) are losing it with hardly any awareness of the fact. Before the Information Age—which one could also call the Input Age—leaders naturally found solitude anytime they were physically alone, or when walking from one place to another, or while standing in line.…
Over the last 40 years, Jack Kornfield has been a significant force in bringing Buddhist practices to the United States. In 1967, he graduated from Dartmouth College, joined the Peace Corps, and was assigned to service in Thailand. Kornfield then trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma, studying under many influential teachers. After returning…