Spiritually Speaking

It’s that time of year for many of going back to or starting school, college, university, or other learning and training. And there are an abundance of continuing education/lifelong learning programs beginning as well. It’s a season for learning.

Over the years I have had numerous conversations with people about what is and isn’t spiritual. Some tell me they are not spiritual. Some say they don’t know what spiritual means or that the word is too vague and wishy-washy to mean anything at all.

Recently, I have noted again and again how much ways of being that I have long considered virtues seem to have fallen on tough times.

There is much in the news about breaking the glass ceiling of prejudice in the fight for equality of the sexes. Less known are the spiritual underpinnings of this movement and its history in the heart of Islam.

August has a wonderful sense of slow, languorous living. The days fold into longer warm evenings, a time to enjoy the celestial lightshow of the Perseid meteor showers or the storied constellations.

Leadership is being debated with ever greater vigor these days – whether it is business leadership, political leadership, religious leadership or social leadership.

Even as we see exhilarating portraits of Olympics and other “glorious” events in the world, I find it hard not to notice that there is still much suffering in this world (including in the favelas where the trickle down beneficial effect of Olympics i

A singular, very impactful intellectual shift that comes through meditation is the heightened sensitivity to initial conditions. This is the corollary to valorizing kindness over rightness. In the absence of a Creator God, universal chaos reigns.

Buddhist thought is slowly seeping into the vernacular of of the so-called western world.

I've been doing a lot of editing lately for a big project. I'd written the first drafts thinking a certain way about how the text should read, what it should convey. I sent it off to the client who liked it, but then asked for edits.