One of the most powerful tools for living a well-regulated, mindful life is the ability to notice, to bring your benevolent observer into the present moment.
While we don’t have the power to control or even anticipate what the next moment may bring into our experience, we do have some say about how we meet these experiences internally. Within this website, I offer tools to support your present-day, benevolent observer and ways to return to a more centered and grounded daily experience.
672nd Week: Nurturing Compassion
For this week’s experiment in conscious living, I draw from my book, Sacred Practices for Conscious Living, 2nd Edition, from the chapter on “Compassion and Lovingkindness: Living with An Open Heart”. Here’s a quotation from that chapter: “For many people, the process of awakening to a greater sense of compassion initially feels overwhelming. A question…
671st Week: Intentional Living
Each week, I post an inspirational quotation and a photograph of nature on the Devadana Sanctuary Facebook page, as well as on the Devadana Sanctuary website. I never know which posts will touch people and which won’t. It’s a daily experience of choosing something I think will be inspiring, finding a photograph that, for me,…
670th Week: Generating Empathy
One of the things that has been very much on my mind these days is an awareness of the stunning lack of empathy expressed by public figures, particularly in the political realm. What feels so impacting is that this apparent lack of empathy resonates with so many people around the world, as reflected in news…
669th Week: Accessing Options
I just listened to an interview with Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant on the NPR show, On Being, with Krista Tippett. The interview centered around Sheryl’s and Adam’s new book about Sheryl’s husband’s death and Adam’s work with resilience. At the end of the interview, Sheryl said that it is really about “post traumatic growth”,
668th Week: Breathing Ease
When I was young, my grandmother taught me a practice called “breathing color” as a tool for healing and settling in. She was my first spiritual teacher, from whom I learned to meditate and to attend to the spiritual side of reality as a part of daily living and color breathing became one of the…