The Buddhists have four stations of the heart: Metta (kindness), Mudita (compassion), Karuna (joy in the joy of others), and Upeka (equanimity). The Jews have four matriarchs: Sarah, a mother who laughs and who does not speak when her husband takes her son before dawn to offer him as a sacrifice in the place God…

When a former MFA professor asked me to come to her class and speak on revision, I immediately said yes. Not only was she a writer and an academic that I respected, there had been an ongoing, semi-inside, joke between me and some of my MFA cohort members about my desire to be acknowledged by…

What is poetry, anyway? I found myself musing about this as I sat with John Slater’s stimulating new collection, Lean. First I recalled what I’d once heard poet Li-Young Lee say at a reading: In poetry, language is not the only medium; silence is also a medium. This is a difference of poetry from prose.…

For the past five years, I’ve been experimenting with the use of contemplative practices in the classes I teach at UNC Asheville. For a quick overview of the range of contemplative practices being used in higher education today, see The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society’s Tree of Contemplative Practices. On the eve of a…

It’s precisely then that presence is needed: a practice to banish distraction, dial down emotion, return attention to the exchange happening right now, and note my responses—mental and physical. That’s when I live into the role of attending physician. . . Without practices of attentive presence, the patient’s real concerns will be overlooked, important information remain hidden, diagnoses missed, and complex therapies wasted.

Here is a poem that silently enacts a conversion.  The poem starts off with a string of scornful terms for the speaker’s new neighbors, culminating in the almost mean pun on their child’s “grin” as “grim.” But right after this, the speaker begins to soften her terms: she notices a “warmth” in this noisy, dirty,…

What if God turned up at your door in the form of a brush salesman? That’s the premise that Karen An-Hwei Lee’s prose-poem plays with. Mystery and comedy merge in this delightful meditation. First, an unnamed “He” does not do certain everyday things, like shampooing your carpet. Then “God” slips into the poem as the…