“Any time gone by was better,” wrote the Spanish poet Jorge Manrique in the 15th century, perfectly capturing what a powerful emotion nostalgia is.

Meditation is like doing mental push-ups that strengthen the muscles of awareness and choice. While it's not a practice that most people are willing to adopt for life, even several weeks of meditation can help train your mind and change your attitudes. If you should decide to keep it up, the benefits for the body are just as positive.

After being so careful for nine months, my husband Barry mysteriously contracted the Covid-19 virus. Within days, he tested positive and within a few days after that, I tested positive as well.

In Western culture, many have become removed from witnessing the actual dying experience as a normal part of life. In my hospice work, I often find myself not only energetically supporting the patient, but also providing guidance to family and loved ones who...

It has been tremendously helpful for me to understand the difference between consciousness and spirituality. Spirituality is one type of energy — the energy that links us to our deepest essential nature and to the universal source. Consciousness is the awareness of all of the energies within us..

I was very close to my father, and very upset when he died. A few days after his death, I turned over in my bed, supposedly still in mid-dream, when a shadowy form appeared. He, for I assumed the figure to be such, was similar to those dark depictions of the spirit...

People are interested in spiritual experience (if only at times of crisis or transition in their lives), and the clergy have not been trained to guide them through such experiences. All great religions, although their inner essence is esoteric and inevitably the province of the few, have to make some provision for the world at large. 

Our commercial culture screams at us to go, go, go and buy, buy, buy as the way to happiness, but just as too many sweets will make us sick, too much stuff and a packed schedule leave us stressed, anxious, and unable to appreci­ate the abundance that we have.

We all desire happiness, and yet happiness seems to be just beyond our reach. However many 'how to be happy' books might appear, human beings are still largely beset by the same problems as their ancestors. The poor seek wealth, the sick yearn to be healthy, those suffering from domestic strife...

The main ways we understand and mark the occasion seem to be rather similar across the world. It’s about time with community, family, food-sharing, gift-giving and overall merry festivities.

The year 2020 has been no stranger to suffering. In the midst of a global pandemic, widespread financial hardship and violence arising from systemic racism, empathy for others’ suffering has been pushed to the front and center in U.S. society.

From our morning routines to our cultural and religious traditions, the COVID-19 pandemic has intensely highlighted our need for rituals.

On Dec. 21, 2020, Jupiter and Saturn will cross paths in the night’s sky and for a brief moment, they will appear to shine together as one body. While planetary conjunctions like this are not everyday events, they also are not particularly rare.

When winter cold settles in across the U.S., the alleged “War on Christmas” heats up. In recent years, department store greeters and Starbucks cups have sparked furor by wishing customers “happy holidays.”

Every Christmas, a relatively small town in the Palestinian West Bank comes center stage: Bethlehem. Jesus, according to some biblical sources, was born in this town some two millennia ago.

It seems like "not having enough time" is a recurring theme... We spend our waking hours doing things on our list of "things to do" and not having (or taking) the time to do the things that would nurture our spirit and that would please us best.

Grieving is not something done to us, but rather something we do. Thus, grief demands a response from us, one other than resignation. An active process specifies choices and presumes change. More than anything, the process of grief is about transformation.

Each year, as many as 10 million people travel to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, in what is believed to be the largest Catholic pilgrimage in the Americas.

In the long-overdue discussions taking place over the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States, few appear to be addressing the relationship between religion and racism.

What is meditation? Seems like it should be an easy question, but it's like asking what is love. There are so many aspects of it, so many perspectives on it, and so many ways to experience it that meditation doesn't lend itself to being reduced to one quick answer. The best I can do is this: Meditation means ways of making the mind understand itself.

Enlightenment does not mean everything in our lives works out. It doesn’t mean all money problems and relationship issues and health challenges suddenly disappear. What it does mean is the human drama does not block the unreasonable joy which is the play of existence.

"I am here for you. Remember, I love you always." Jackie awoke from her dream with a start. However, she could only manage to recall the last few sentences of his long message to her, but how powerful that voice felt! She wrote down as much as she could recall...

Compassion is not a thought or a sentimental feeling, but is rather a movement of the heart. Compassion is born out of lovingkindness. But we may get distracted, we forget, we get caught up in something else, or we confuse another feeling for the state of compassion.