The first time someone gave me a Tibetan singing bowl sound healing, I left my body. “What just happened?” I found myself saying once I returned to it, dazed. Then I glanced around the nondescript office in Midtown Manhattan where a young woman had just placed golden bowls of many sizes all around me and on top […]
I’m not a politician. I’m not a theologian. I’m not a historian. I’m not an expert at anything… Except for what I’ve experienced directly. And here’s what I know after living in this body on this planet for almost sixty-seven years: Love is all that matters. You can call me corny. You can call me […]
The first prayers I ever recited were taught me me by rabbis at the Providence Hebrew Day School, where I was a third grader. My father had sent me to this yeshiva after his own father died. Saying the Kaddish – or Jewish memorial prayer – every day for an entire year had comforted my […]
There’s a point during every meditation retreat where I think I’m going crazy. And there’s nothing to distract me from that notion. I see ghosts. People from my past jump out of the closet where I’ve tried to hide them. Memories and emotions I thought I’d banished forever resurface as well, flooding my central nervous […]
My mother had a way with words. Even in the midst of her thirteen year battle with Alzheimer’s. One of my most memorable visits to her nursing home was a short one. I was in a rush to run to the bank, meet with her lawyer, and apply for a copy of her social security card […]
I don’t hate my sagging neck. I’ve studied with too many wise Buddhist teachers to be angry at the body that’s taken me on this exciting, bewildering ride. But it’s definitely aging. It’s slowing down and aching and growing odd little barnacles all over the place. I’m drying up like a desert. Still, I try […]
When I was fifteen years old, I suffered my first panic attack, behind the grease-splattered stainless steel serving counters of the Brown University cafeteria in Providence, Rhode Island, where I was a waitress. One minute I was dishing out peas to hordes of bored young students, and then I almost died. Not really. But my heart […]
I was an unhappy child. Or at least that’s what I told myself for decades because of all the somber black and white photographs my mother took of me back then. “Get this kid some Prozac!” I imagine someone might have suggested to her had anti-depressants been invented in 1961. I’d constructed a sad narrative […]
