Posts Tagged ‘Mother’s Plunge’

turning life into love

August 23rd, 2010    -    6 Comments

When I was at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral this spring, I asked the audience what they thought turned the inside of the church into a sanctuary. Was it the concrete walls?

When I was leading walking meditation in the chapel at Seattle’s Bastyr University in June, I asked the people with me what turned the ground under their feet into a pathway. Was it the terrazzo tile?

When I was at a yoga studio in suburban Milwaukee last Saturday, I asked the group in front of me to notice the change that occurred in the room from the time we convened at 2 p.m. until the hour we dispersed at 4 p.m. What turned the mildly restless, self-conscious discomfort at the start of our time together into the vast, settled calm at the end? Into a still and quiet ease so deep that no one cared to move? So satisfying that no one rose to leave?

The answer is you. The secret is yours. The power of your own nonjudgmental attention is what transforms space into spaciousness. It turns your wandering into the way. It transforms your life into love.

And now we’ll do the same in Boston when we gather for the Mother’s Plunge on Saturday, Sept. 18.  I’m so pleased that we’ll be meeting at the Seaport Academy, a therapeutic day school for adolescents who need extra attention to navigate the perils of growing up. The students will not be there the day we are, but your attention will, and your attention will transform our humble gathering into the spaciousness of infinite potential. Come see for yourself what the power of your love can do. We’ll leave some of it behind, and you can take the rest home with you.

And if you’re not on the East Coast on Sept. 18, come to the one-day meditation retreat I’m leading in LA on Sept. 12. We’ll turn our attention onto a bare white wall and unleash the wild blue yonder. You don’t have to believe it; you just have to see it.

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a mother’s suitcase

August 3rd, 2010    -    4 Comments

First Stop:
Brookfield, Wisconsin, Sat., Aug. 21, 2-4 p.m. Extraordinary Ordinary workshop at YogAsylum. Register during these last 10 days of early bird savings.

Second Stop:
Boston, Mass., Sat., Sept. 18, 9-3:30 p.m. Mother’s Plunge retreat at Seaport Academy. Last 10 days of early bird savings.

Full Stop:
Los Angeles, Sun., Sept. 12 9-5, Beginner’s Meditation Retreat at Hazy Moon Zen Center. The best way to practice with me for real. Register here.

I’m home from a week’s retreat and unpacking my suitcase. My practice amounts to unpacking all the time, metaphorically and otherwise. Laundry piled and put away, refrigerator emptied and filled, mail opened and tossed before I’m off for warm pastures and waterfronts.

A letter waited on my kitchen table, and with it, this story unfolded. It’s the story packed in every mother’s suitcase. I hope you find yourself at home in it. read more

the gifts of ordinary

July 18th, 2010    -    6 Comments

One of my favorite finds this year is Katrina Kenison’s memoir The Gift of an Ordinary Day. And if you still haven’t read this elegiac rendering of a family in transition, I know you’ve cried a tear over this video. I’m spilling over with the news that Katrina will be my special guest at the Mother’s Plunge in Boston on Sat., Sept. 18. Now you really have to come and bring a friend to share a cup with us. Katrina will read and talk and sign books, while I carry on in my blah blah customary manner.

One of my favorite finds this year is Katrina Kenison herself. Our new friendship is a pretty amazing story that Katrina began telling on her own blog. I’ll fill you in on the rest when I see you in Boston. It will be an extraordinary day. Or, if you believe in magic as much as I do, you will find it to be another perfectly ordinary day.

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not that far

July 11th, 2010    -    8 Comments


When you ask yourself “Why not?” you may find yourself in motion, across a vivid and unpredictable landscape, over impossible mountains and beyond the deep blue water’s edge, where you surprise yourself, once and for all, by getting wet. – Momma Zen

I’m flying over the ocean, across a vivid and unpredictable landscape, over immense peaks, impossible heights and unfathomable distance. I’m coming home from an island retreat, and although I didn’t quite take to the surf like some in my family did, I went far enough to get wet.

Our lives are always calling us to step out from an island retreat and into the water. Beyond our false and insular views of “me, my, I” and into the ocean of true reality, true connection. Farther than the familiar edge that halts us, and through the question that dissolves all fear: why not?

Initiative is what takes you everywhere. There is never an absence of information in our lives. There is as much inspiration as sand. But we are all plagued by a shortage of initiative, like surfers stuck on shore, waiting for waves that will never come far enough to transport them forward. read more

ripples from a drop in the bucket

June 13th, 2010    -    7 Comments

I’ve just returned from a marvelous time at the Mother’s Plunge -Seattle where the sun emerged from weeks of rain and radiated into our bones. There were 34 of us cloistered amid a wide circle of pines and clear air. I won’t even describe it: nothing I say comes close.

Although it’s nifty the way our fancy social media works, we haven’t met until we meet face-to-face. There is one more Mother’s Plunge on my calendar for this year: Saturday, June 26 here in my hometown. I hope that in the light of the approaching days you will find a way to come.

In my Zen lineage, a wisdom tradition transmitted from one teacher to one student one at a time through 81 generations since Buddha, a single meeting matters more than the volumes you read on a page. A true meeting only occurs face-to-face. In the shared field where we meet, eyes lock, minds unite, light streams and hands close the distance with which we divide ourselves.

One meeting, one day, seems like a drop in the bucket, but the ripples go on forever. It’s in the ripples that the shoreline shifts. The landscape of our lives changes forever.

Just take a look at this iridescent scarf handed to me when I met Anna Katherine Curfman at the Plunge in Seattle. She felts these flutters from the lightest fibers of merino wool and silk. I can’t imagine the time and attention she places into each one. Now I don’t have to imagine it. I see it, I believe it, I love it, and I especially love that it requires the intimate care of an oh so gentle Hand Wash Cold.

***

More ripples:

A Weekend with Karen – if I were to crash your pad, commandeer your car and keep you up too late three nights in a row, there would be repercussions.

Attention! – “Baby steps will get you anywhere if you don’t stop stepping.” A valedictory address from a graduate of the Mother’s Plunge.

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kindness, milk and cookies

June 11th, 2010    -    9 Comments

I wake this morning in Seattle – Tacoma, to be exact – where I am soaking up the hospitality that greets me every place I arrive for a reading, a talk or a Mother’s Plunge retreat. Tomorrow’s Mother’s Plunge with 34 women is the multiplied outcome of a single kindness. By kindness I don’t just mean the command to come, but one person’s compassionate effort and initiative to make this event happen.

This is how we save the world. This is how we save ourselves. With living kindness, the kindness that walks on your own two legs, finds a room for people to gather, hosts a tired traveler in an upstairs bedroom, brews coffee and bakes cookies and makes the world a better place.

In that spirit I offer you this simple treatise today, an excerpt from Hand Wash Cold: read more

take the plunge

June 8th, 2010    -    2 Comments

Summer is just plain crazy. That’s why I never pass up a chance to get wet.

Mother’s Plunge – Los Angeles
Saturday, June 26, 9-3:30
Mater Dolorosa Retreat Center
In my little hometown of Sierra Madre
Cradled in the bosom of the San Gabriel Mountains

Before you lose yourself in the crosscurrents of a crazy summer, take one day all for yourself. Personal encouragement, fresh insight, spiritual refreshment, easy laughter, beginning meditation, gentle yoga, mountain walks and a private tour of my own historic backyard Japanese garden. A perfect day to share with a friend, a sister, a mother or a partner. You need not be a mother or a woman to attend, because anyone can learn the breathing stroke (and never fear the water again).

If you’ve attended a Plunge before you might wonder if you should come again. But when the temperature rises, a cool dip refreshes like new. You can go in even deeper next time.

Staying overnight? Here’s a list of nearby hotels. Can’t get farther than a splash at your bathroom sink? Inspire yourself with this. Waiting for another day? I wouldn’t wait.

Take the plunge.

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rules for a mindful garden

June 1st, 2010    -    4 Comments

I’m not in Kansas anymore, but as Dorothy herself knows, we never leave our home in Kansas. Just a few minutes before I went to sit among the good people at Rime Buddhist Center, I clicked my heels and realized what I should tell them.

I had first thought that I should talk to them about all of this, but I didn’t want to repeat what they had already had the chance to read over and over. Looking into the forested cool of my mother-in-law’s rambling backyard, an ocean of green that blankets the Midwest prairies in late spring, I remembered a simple set of instructions that I always give children when they visit my backyard garden. (Since she was three years old, we have invited Georgia’s class to our garden for a field trip each year. She is now ten, and I am far older, and yet the instructions still apply to us all.)

Life is a garden and we are the gardeners. Here are the rules for a mindful garden: read more

a day without laundry

May 26th, 2010    -    15 Comments

“A day without work is a day without eating.”
– Zen saying

This expression might strike you as a grim resignation. You might even call it depressing. Perhaps you think of work as drudgery. But when you realize the dependency between work and life, it can turn your notion of work upside down. Work does not detract from life, interrupt life or hinder life. Work sustains life. All work sustains life, whether we think of it as important or unimportant. It is vital and enhancing. It keeps us alive.

This brings me to the laundry. (Everything brings me to the laundry.)

The other day I put something up at the Huffington Post that I’ve published elsewhere: 10 Tips for a Mindful Home. It is a simple list to help us see how life is enriched by doing the little things we might disdain as insignificant, like laundry, dishes and bedmaking. It’s amusing to see the unrest that is stirred by the modest suggestion that we make our own beds!

One comment on the post was a variation of the kind of objection I encounter from time to time, a slow boil of outrage over gender inequality, a denigration of what is sometimes called “women’s work.”

“Women wind up doing a lot of the things that ‘never get totally done,’ that must be redone again in a short time, over and over again – while the man gets more time to build and repair things the result of which can be appreciated and used for years.”

Really? The things men build and repair last for years? Tell that to the man in my house who fixes the sprinklers and the leaky toilets, who changes the light bulbs and the oil in the cars, who clears out the cardboard shipping boxes that multiply mountainously in the garage. Tell it to the man in my house who builds spacecraft that break down dozens of times before they ever launch, might disappear before they ever arrive, and whose instruments routinely malfunction (if they work at all) over and over. Tell that to the boys who drill deepwater wells, and to the ones who keep trying to fill them. Tell that to the Wall Streeters who ride the stock exchange up and back down again. Tell that, but don’t ever for one second believe it.

Nothing that anyone does is ever done for good. Everything is undone and redone. That’s how life is. Why value big work over small, a monstrosity over the miniscule? I’ll do the laundry any day, and I’ll happily eat too.

But there is such a thing as a day without laundry! That would be called a Mother’s Plunge, my signature one-day retreat for mothers and all others coming up real soon in Seattle on Sat., June 12 and here in Sierra Madre (Los Angeles) on Sat. June 26. You must register now. But even before that, check out the post at Shutter Sisters today and see how you can win free admission to a Mother’s Plunge by merely lifting a finger!

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i am amazed

May 23rd, 2010    -    1 Comment

I am amazed that there is little more than a week left to register for the Seattle Mother’s Plunge. I am amazed to be headed to Kansas City next weekend to spend time with my friend Jill Tupper and the kindest sangha on the planet, the good people at the Rime Buddhist Center. I am amazed that wherever I go I am met by familiar names, full embraces, and knowing smiles. Like a shoreline met a million billion times by a wave.

Photo from Bastyr University, site of the Seattle Plunge.

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baggage carousel 2

May 15th, 2010    -    3 Comments

I hit the jackpot at an amazing Kitchen Table potluck in Reno last week and now I’m about to plunge north for a sold-out mother’s weekend in the Bay Area,  so here is another short spin in lieu of a stop. Setting down these few things for you to open as your own:

Giving the moon to the Sun – Every time they ask, I give the moon to the Shambhala Sun.  If you have silver to spare, check out their first-ever Auction for a Mindful Society opening this week. It includes many treasures worth pondering. And then there’s this, which is only worth a little.

“How do I begin?” – A question I’m asked over and over. Here is your personal invitation to start with me as I lead a beginner’s one-day retreat at the Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles on Sun., June 6 from 9-5. Informal, sincere, intimate, meaningful instruction on how to begin a meditation practice. You’ll be on your way in no time. Contact me with your questions. Overnight accommodations can be arranged for long-distance travelers.

“Soul Centered” – A destination I’ve added to my Kansas City itinerary. Join my friend Jill Tupper and me on Sat., May 29 for a morning retreat at Unity on the Plaza. Because nothing brings you back home faster than a friend.

“I was asked to write a book.” – a dharma sister from the Hazy Moon Zen Center interviews me on writing as practice. Here’s where you’ll find the story behind the story, and how Zen infuses it all.

“Now I’m asking you to review it.” – If you’ve read Hand Wash Cold, please consider writing on online review on Amazon, Goodreads, or both. You have no idea how much you matter in the scheme of things. And if you think it is beneath an author to request a review, once you’ve read it you’ll know that absolutely nothing is beneath me. Thank you.

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invite yourself over

April 25th, 2010    -    5 Comments

Here are a few places I hope you take the time to hop over to:

An interview on the Gregoire Today show: I had this live conversation with Bob Gregoire on his blog talk radio show the other day, and it made me as happy as red polka dot shoes! He is a rare thing: a man of faith with an open mind, and you can hear it opening wider as he asks me about Buddhism and the practice life inside our homes. I’m insufferable for the way I keep pointing you to nothing more than my own voice, but I don’t care whose voice it is. What I experienced in this hour-long conversation was the illuminating warmth of the teachings, and the comfort that comes when we turn on the porch light.

An invitation to my front door: Here again is an invitation to my open house and book reading this next Sunday, May 2. I’m sincere when I say that everyone and their brother is welcome. You can tramp around the garden, have a cookie and sip a glass of my mother’s style of Texas iced tea. You’ll go home rested and well-read, with your hands full! No need to RSVP through the invitation; you might not even be able to do so via the links. Just jot down the info and plug it into the GPS.

3 ways to find love in a kitchen timer: Read my latest installment of kitchen wisdom on the Huffington Post. Time, unhurried, is never wasted.

5 days to sign up for the Mother’s Plunge San Francisco Bay Area: It’s a wonderful group to be part of, and no one will be turned away for coming out of their way. Sat., May 22 at Mercy Center Burlingame: sign up here. I have one more scholarship to go to someone who would otherwise have a hard time with the $75 admission. Contact me to put your name on it.

My home or yours: Have you given a thought to coming here for the Mother’s Plunge – Los Angeles (which is really in my hometown of Sierra Madre) on June 26 or Colorado Springs on July 17? The latter will be my only Midwest retreat all summer, so why not kick off your shoes, dig your toes in and make a family mini-vacay out of it?

All on the table: And for those of you who have Kitchen Table Tour stops on my calendar between now and June – here’s a taste of the pure magic of friendship and story that awaits, from a golden evening at Christine Mason Miller’s home, courtesy of Anne Carmack, who possesses all the time in the world and invests it most wisely.

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unspooled

April 19th, 2010    -    2 Comments

Lisa Erickson (Mommy Mystic) interviewed me about writing and Zen practice and marriage and other mentionables, and I share the whole thing here because I like it and I’m grateful for her support. It’s a little funny for me to read, because she recorded our conversation and captured how I speak. Which is a lot. I talk a lot.

Last weekend I spoke (a lot) to a gathering in San Francisco, and someone asked me what the Mother’s Plunge daylong retreats are like. I said they were like the talk she just sat through, except I keep talking. I keep talking. A lot.

And speaking more about that, it’s seriously time to register for the May 22 Mother’s Plunge in the San Francisco Bay Area. Once again, if you need financial help to afford the $75 admission, or if you can offer a scholarship, please send me a message via my contact page. You never know what might come out when you speak up.

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