Live Blade: The Way of the Sword A Selection from Chapter 13 Excerpted from Three Years on the Great Mountain By Cristina Moon About This Title An invigorating memoir about a young woman pushed to her limits at a Zen monastery in Hawai‘i, where she learns that the key to unlocking the ultimate breakthrough is

On Constantly Being in the Present From Finding Freedom When we think of what seems like the enormous amount of time we have in life, we all have a tendency to put things off that we could do today. This is because we live with promises that life is long and that time is constantly on

The History of the Zen Nuns’ Practice Excerpt from Naked in the Zendo Early in my Japanese monastic practice, I had a wonderful trip to Eiheiji, the head temple for Soto Zen in Japan. Eiheiji has the stature and grandeur of the Vatican in Rome. Its scenery, dignity, deep practice, and beautiful furnishings inspire reverie

Sutra 5 An Excerpt from The Mama Sutra I’m speeding down Sir Francis Drake Boulevard on a glorious fall day, running through yellow lights, completely stressed out, trying to get to the meditation hall on time. I’m teaching the daily yoga classes at a women’s meditation retreat at Spirit Rock, a Buddhist retreat center in

Sharing is the antidote. Irene messaged me a few months after her son Oliver had died of SIDS, another episode in our ongoing conversation from one continent to the other. Looking for you today. I hope you don’t mind. Oh! Are you okay love? No, but I’m getting used to it now and don’t expect

Death A Long Distance Call On a Wednesday morning, sitting in my old blue Volvo in a parking lot after just getting a facial—my cheeks redolent with cream, all pores clean—I called the Cancer Center in Santa Fe, persuaded an oncologist to look up my chart. The oncologist I was assigned to was on vacation,

The Power of Art This short essay was written in 1987, when no one had any idea whether the Cold War would ever come to an end. We are still in a global crisis, but in another form. The Necessity of Political Art Art in a period of widely-perceived global crisis can never be the

When Life Changed Forever Off to Colorado Life changed forever the day I set out in my sky-blue VW Bug heaving with everything I owned. An old carpenter’s chest, a gift from my mother and stepfather, had been carefully packed with watercolors, paintbrushes, and other art paraphernalia and small, cherished belongings. A single suitcase that

Meditations on the Roof of the World It was while I was living in England, in the jostle and drizzle of London, that I remembered the Himalayas at their most vivid. I had grown up amongst those great blue and brown mountains; they had nourished my blood; and though I was separated from them by

Hermann Hesse’s Southeast Asian Travels In the morning I had chased butterflies on the byways, overgrown with grass and overhung with foliage, that run among the European gardens. In the white heat of noon I returned to the city on foot, and I passed the afternoon walking about, visiting shops, and doing my shopping in