One of the greatest gifts we could ever give to our family, friends, co-workers, and even our pets is the gift of presence.  What does that mean? The gift of presence? You know the typical scenario we can find ourselves in: emails galore, text messages that need to be returned, kids, work, and family obligations […]

How many times when we’re feeling a bit “off” does someone ask, “What’s wrong?”. What about instead we ask “What’s good?” and working on noticing what's right? Is it possible for us to begin to notice the actual experiences we're having instead of our thoughts about the experiences? Notice the experience, not our thoughts about […]

You don’t need me to tell you that what is going on around many parts of the world is destructive, chaotic, unkind, and even sinister. All we need to do is turn on the news for five minutes to feel the weight of despair. Disease, war, oppression, discrimination, climate change, violence, intolerance, and unrest. What does […]

Are you feeling stuck, unmotivated and uninspired? Take your ego mind out of the equation! In Buddhism, all of the physical and emotional obstacles can be very powerful teachers.  If we allow ourselves to get caught up in the daily minutiae and stressors in our daily lives, it can almost be impossible for us to […]

For a lot of us, we may not be skilled at entering new or unfamiliar social situations or environments. Someone might invite us to a gathering and even though we say we’d like to get out and meet new people or try new things, we simply can’t seem to bring ourselves to break out of […]

Are you feeling fragmented? Scattered? Sluggish? Are you able to stay in the present moment? I can feel the seasons changing. I sense the onset of a slower, more sluggish time of year descending as the weather changes to fall.  But for some of us, this sense of sluggishness and feeling scattered isn’t merely seasonal. Instead, […]

We are excited to welcome honored Tibetan Buddhist monk the Venerable Zawa Tulku Rinpoche back to Satsang House! In addition to teaching and performing empowerment ceremonies, Rinpoche is also a master of the construction of sand mandalas and ritual arts. Rinpoche will be hand-designing and bringing to life a special mandala during his stay. For […]

There are seven energy centers or chakras in our body where nerve points meet. The third eye chakra, or ajna chakra in Sanskrit, is known as “the seat of intuition.” Translated from Sanskrit, ajna means to “perceive beyond wisdom.” Located in the center of the forehead in the pineal gland, it acts as your center […]

Oftentimes, people come to learn how to meditate because their lives have been overtaken by stress, they can’t focus, they can’t sleep, they feel anxious or depressed. These are wonderful reasons to begin a meditation practice. But meditation is much more than a good feeling. It is the union of body, mind, and spirit. Most […]

Wouldn’t it be great if we could simply sit down on our little cushion to meditate? Instantly drop into the stillness, our internal chatter quieted, our bodies relaxed, not a care in the world? No doubt it would! But it doesn’t happen like that. But did you know that meditation changes your brain? It takes a bit […]

One of the greatest benefits of meditation is it allows us to stop the insanity of our daily lives. Have you ever stopped to notice how we are caught up in an endless tug-of-war with the way things are?  Think about how easy it is to be driven out of the present moment by our own […]

If we walk around believing everything we think without question, particularly the not so pleasant self-doubting thoughts, it’s pretty hard to see any other viewpoint than our own. If we tell ourselves certain things about ourselves long enough, it may never even occur to us to question our own thinking.

Meditation isn’t about trying to stop thinking. Instead it’s about noticing the thoughts as they arise and allowing them to be. To be able to have access again to our ground state of being which is already whole and complete, we must recognize how we’ve allowed ourselves to be hooked by the stories and conversations we tell ourselves in our own minds. Most times, we don’t even question the thoughts, perceptions, judgments or beliefs and instead believe our own thinking.

What if your happiness, joy, peace and fulfillment is just covered over by an old mindset of limiting beliefs and assumptions? Making positive changes starts with a shift in mindset. Once that takes place, the rest will follow.

he truth involves letting go of those long-held perceptions that keep us imprisoned in patterns of behavior and ways of being which prevent us from living a life of freedom, peace, and joy. Letting go of those beliefs involves looking at ourselves deeply. Understand that for any concrete and lasting change to occur, we have to be willing to change. Without this willingness, we may simply be seeking a change that doesn’t actually involve us!

Many people come to spiritual practice or learn meditation in an effort to induce positive emotional states or to at least minimize negative emotional states. But those feelings of happiness and joy are byproducts of awakening, not the actual awakening itself. The problem is, as long as we chase the byproducts of awakening, we might miss the real thing.

From a spiritual perspective, the ultimate purpose of mediation is to reawaken you to your true self. But this is almost impossible when we are caught in a cycle of chronic stress, an endless "to do list" and too much on our plate. A meditation practice can help.

Mindfulness and Meditation go hand in hand. Meditation lays the foundation for you to go out into the world carrying a sense of peace and serenity within. While mindfulness is the integrated practice you can employ in all of your daily interactions and relationships. Establish a daily meditation practice with a little mindfulness sprinkled on top!

Stressed, unfulfilled, stuck? Do you have the feeling that there just has to be more to life than the way you are living it today?

Anyone who has had even the slightest introduction to Buddhist teaching is familiar with its starting point: the inescapable truth that existence entails "suffering." This is The First Noble Truth, one of the most central teachings of Buddhism. One of the fundamental teachings behind Buddhism, its ethics, philosophy, practices and community life, is the discovery that freedom and joy are possible in the face of the regular "suffering" of human life. 

It’s no surprise that some of the strongest areas of research centered on attention. Researchers at MIT and UC Santa Barbara found that merely eight minutes of meditation practice improved concentration and reduced mind-wandering. They also found that mindfulness had a dramatic effect on working memory - the facility we have to manipulate stored information in order to reason and make decisions.