Zen Moments

“…the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry… the more peaceful our planet will be…” “A powerful talk  – well worth 18 minutes” Stroke Of Insight – Jill Bolte Taylor – Some Highlights… “I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with [...]

“I love him for every single bizarre behaviour he throws my way…” I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before – but my three year old son, Oliver is weird. This is at least partly due to something called SPD (sensory processing disorder) that causes him to engage in activities that “feed” his need for [...]

“We can all use a little piece of Zen in our lives…” Webster’s defines Zen as a Japanese sect of Mahayana Buddhism that aims at enlightenment by direct intuition through meditation. The online Urban Dictionary gives this definition: “One way to think of zen is this: a total state of focus that incorporates a total [...]

“Hand in Hand – Beautiful Ballet Dancers” Li Ma was a beautiful promising professional ballerina when she lost her right arm in a car accident in 1996. She was only 19. Her handsome boy friend walked away from her. She tried to kill herself, only to be saved by her parents. Her love for her [...]

“They tried to ask in a dozen ways what was wrong…” A Zen Moments reader sent us this gentle story about the care that one devoted family took to find out what was troubling their loving, elderly father. In his later years he suffered from advanced dementia and lived in a nursing home where his [...]

“…if you choose ‘life’, call me and I’ll be there. “ Today, March 12 2009, I celebrate my third year of sobriety. Today I celebrate life and 1,095 days free of drugs and alcohol. Three years ago today was a dark day for me, yet a turning point in my life. It was the day [...]

“Such eyes of compassion, stillness, even love…” The first week I met my new student, a four year old with leukemia. He’d just had a week of intensive treatment. He had lost his hair, and his large brown eyes seemed to be looking at me through a curtain of pain. The next week he was [...]

“I was angry… we were not going to be staying at a five-star-celebrity-filled-pleasure-factory-resort-spa…” This past summer, my family were planning a trip to California and I was filled with anticipation and excitement. Finally I was going home, back to the state where, not only was I born; but where my father grew up; where my [...]

“I talked to him about many things…” “My Heart Is Afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. “Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it [...]

“…a grotesque figure moving erratically, crab-like toward me…” At the end of World War II there were more Kentuckians in Detroit, where they had come to work in defense plants, than there were back in Kentucky. Well, maybe I exaggerate a bit but there were a lot of mountain people working in Michigan back then. [...]