A recent Tricycle Daily Dharma (click here to receive these daily emails with brief excerpts of writing from Tricycle Magazine) the great Thai teacher Ajahn Chah gave the metaphor of plowing your own field.  When people genuinely meet the dharma, they realize it directly within themselves. So the Buddha said that he is merely the…

We all learned “Stop, Drop, and Roll” in fire safety. This mnemonic helps to avert panic and the proliferation of the fire. In fact, when done correctly you can put the fire out limiting its destructive impact.  In the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, he warned, “Monks, everything is burning.  And what is burning? Monks, the eye…

The psychotherapist Connelly turned to William Carlos Williams to elucidate the “poetry” of living. Williams said, “The underlying meaning of all [our patients] want to tell us an have always failed to communicate is the poem, the poem which their lives are being lived to realize” The philosopher Suzanne Langer reminds us that a “Poem has…

David Balfour, the main character in Robert Louis Stevenon’s Kidnapped gives us a metaphor for the delicacy and power of attention and how self-pity can maroon us, cutting us off from the very things that can save us; the very things that are right in front of us. At one juncture in the story, David…

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