The time has come to write a new story for our lives and to let go of those handed down to us by our families and our cultures. These are not our stories; they do not belong to us. We must hand them back with love and write our own. We are being urged to become aware and informed and, by doing so...

by Eldon Taylor. Uncovering our biases is an important step in discovering ourselves. Evaluating the words we choose, what they mean, what they imply, and how we use them is an exercise in self-awareness. Whether we repeat a “blonde” joke, a sexist expectation, a racist definition...

by Deborah King. Often, our most important beliefs are unconscious. Over 90 percent of those that we currently hold we took on as kids from our parents or caregivers, school, and culture. These views run the greater part of our lives and determine if we’re going to be...

I was speaking to a friend who is the head of a customer service department. She tells everyone in the company, whether they work in the warehouse, in accounting, or wherever, that everyone in the company is in customer service. As I reflected on her words later, I realized that her sentence "we're all in customer service" had much more further reaching...

by Alan Cohen. I recently made a pilgrimage to the ancient Mayan temples at Chichen Itza and Tulum in Mexico. At one pyramid our tour guide informed us that the Mayans regularly offered human sacrifices to appease their gods. While we would regard such offerings as primitive and even abhorrent, the mindset of sacrifice is still...

What would you be doing differently if you did not have to prove yourself to anyone?  Your enemies are not your dysfunctional parents, childhood sexual abuser, or punitive parochial school teacher; your enemies are the thoughts they instilled in you that you still believe...

Whenever you live something consciously it never becomes a loaded thing on you. If you go to the market to purchase something and you move consciously, walk consciously, purchase the thing consciously, with full remembrance, mindfully come back home, this will never be a part of your memory. If you want to remember it, you can remember it, but it will not be constantly forcing your attention towards it...

When you open your life to the rest of our world, it can be daunting. It is easy to become hypersensitive to the violence and suffering around us. Maybe you cannot tolerate the extreme violence of many movies and TV shows, or even the news reports on the radio. Emotions may run high on all accounts.

by Alan Cohen. My eight-year-old neighbor Mark keeps me on my toes. Mark asks lots of questions, which I am sometimes tempted to dismiss as childish. But when I think about them, I usually discover a profound lesson. The other day Mark asked me for a ride to the local grocery store...

Most people have some physical symptom that signals them that they are starting to run down their batteries. A sore throat, headache, or hemorrhoid flare-up is the universe's way of alerting you that you are getting stressed.

Our difficulty lies in the fact that in asserting our right to partake in the man's world we have come to identify with the very patriarchal attitudes that devalue our mothers and grandmothers. We are ashamed of our yearnings for connection, our tears, our mothers. We try to live like men: valuing separateness and achievement.

Now is the time for women's equality in Congress and at all other government and corporate decision-making levels. With men, we get rhetoric, more problems and no answers -- but lots of excuses. I am convinced that we need women's realistic, common-sense approach to the needs of modern America.

In just one year, guns are used to kill more than thirty thousand Americans, and thousands more are injured. The fear of gun violence alone affects the quality of life of every American, even those who have never experienced it firsthand. What we forget is that living in fear does not have to be an inevitable part of life in America.

In my community, there is one man whose life speaks louder than his words. He is known as Sam, and he lives on the streets. His life provides us with a sense of charity so that we can live guilt-free in our lavishly furnished homes. We don't want to learn how one could adapt to living on the street.

A testimonial of an encounter with a policeman who assisted in showing her the way back to the path of enlightenment and recovery: "One morning last spring I was driving down US1 at 5:30 in the morning. Well, I wasn't just driving, I was speeding. I was going at least 15 miles over the 45mph limit, and my mind was not on the road..."

A lot of the afternoon talk shows are featuring "therapists" who say that it's not possible to completely repress memories of abuse. Well, I know from my dealings with thousands of abuse survivors that repression is an extremely common coping mechanism. However, many women do not remember the abuse they experienced until a dramatic life event occurs.

The goal of hypnosis is to access the subconscious mind which functions at a deeper level than our usual level of awareness. Our subconscious mind is not limited. It can remember everything and can transmit solutions to our problems.

by Madeline Ko-i Bastis. When we quiet the mind, our transgressions emerge from the shadows and we become sensitive to our interaction with others. A turning point presents itself. Though we feel regret at having caused harm, there may still be a niggling voice whispering that our actions were necessary. Tit for tat; he deserved that...

My strongest memories of my father are of him leaving for work. There was something important about the ritual of him preparing for work. He was off to do important things. He was off to do business, to work, to provide for us. If his leaving in the morning was an important ritual, waiting for Dad to come home had an air of expectation. Did he have a good day? Or a bad one?

The first among the six perfections is generosity. Generosity is of three types: giving material aid, giving dharma, and protecting from fear. 'Giving dharma' refers to the giving of teachings to other sentient beings out of the pure motivation to benefit them. Giving away one's own possessions without even the slightest touch of miserliness...

Most people's pictures of reality are fear-based and limiting, and do not serve us. Yet we take them home and replicate them in our own lives, to the point that we believe they're our own. Then we wonder why we, and the people we know, are so unhappy.

As I was washing the dishes this morning, I remembered how I used to "hate" washing the dishes. To me, it was always equated with a task that I "have to do", not one that I "choose" to do. This led me to reflect on other such situations in...