Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post.   Like everything living, we open and close, as we lean into life and resist it. For human beings, though, each movement—opening and closing, leaning into and resisting—has an emotional mood that colors our days. And so, our feelings are at once a great challenge and our greatest source of information about the life we are living. This recent reflection explores the swirl of choices that are always near as we make... Read more

Like it or not, we are all asked to be in relationship with loss and grief. Over the years, I have discovered that grief doesn’t go away but teaches us how to discover our strength and resilience by staying with deep and inexplicable feelings over long periods of time. In truth, grief, once we move through its painful opening, reveals our more lasting connections to the Universe. This is a recent poem that tries to speak about what grief and... Read more

In a world where things are constantly falling apart or breaking apart, health often resides in the art of putting things together. Both are happening at the same time constantly, though we understandably focus on what falls apart first, as it makes more noise and is often accompanied by pain. This video clip from an interview with Sounds True took place in Colorado during a week of recording my box set of teaching conversations, Staying Awake: The Ordinary Art. Mark... Read more

Read Mark’s weekly reflections on The Huffington Post. Everyone in life must face and move through time. Feeling how precious life is, we tend to squeeze as much as we can out of the moment. Often, this only makes us more anxious and moves us further from life. This poem came from my own efforts to slow down and relate to time differently. You can’t hoard moments like coins. You can only bathe in them. You can’t trim hours like... Read more

Find these entries weekly on Huffington Post’s GPS for the Soul. I travel fairly often and find myself reflecting on different aspects of life against the backdrop of airports, taxis, and baggage carousels. This poem came while traveling to Chicago. I wrote it for a friend who was in the middle of a life crisis. It speaks to the paradox of our travel over a lifetime: working to establish ourselves and our identity when, over time, life wears us down... Read more

Mark’s weekly reflections are now also running on The Huffington Post. We all struggle with making lists and being plagued by them, with getting somewhere and being here, with doing and being. It’s like rowing in a lake, all that effort to simply glide in the quiet. And after a while, we need to row some more. I arrived in this moment in the middle of a busy day. Today I am sad or so I thought. But more I... Read more

The base of all Hebrew prayer is to listen for the Oneness. As Rabbi Alan Lew says, “There’s a deeper speech that doesn’t come from where normal speech comes from.” So how do we hear this deeper speech of Oneness? Well, we can gather many views of something true, not relying on any one; and, if stilled enough, we can join our small breath with the one breath of the Universe; and, if patient enough, we can track what lives... Read more