Here are some rules of thumb that might help you navigate whatever practice you are trying out.

1. Criticizing, judging, or assessing yourself isn’t virtue. It doesn’t help in meditation; it’s just more noise. And if you are criticizing, judging, or assessing yourself, don’t criticize that, and so on, until you wear out and compassion enters.


2. Criticizin

We all come to practice looking for techniques that will relieve our suffering. We all come looking for answers to our questions. But though practice can transform our lives, it does not do so by providing us with those techniques or answers we think we need.

Finally, we really begin to understand and surrender to the truth of things. We begin to accept, at a deep level, the truth of our actual human lives as they are. All the “stuff” that the Dark Night may have brought up may still be going on, but somehow it has lost its ability to cause real trouble. Equanimity is much more about something in the re

It’s a little harder for most people to realize that not only is the mind that I’m trying to escape the only mind I have, but that the mind that I’m seeking is also the mind that I already have. The perfection that we’re so busy pursuing is to be found nowhere but right here in this very moment, regardless of its content. This is the most basic spi