Monk Notes

It would seem that gratitude would come naturally to us. We are attracted to the gratitude we see in others, and sense our own lives would be enri...

We prepare for everything important in life. Celebrations, weddings, anniversaries, graduations, tests, performances, presentations, projects, and...

Life is births and deaths. Hidden in every birth is the death of something old.Hidden in every death is the birth of something new. Each transitio...

Everyone and everything in life has a hidden potential. We can see this by looking at an acorn; who could imagine that within such a small acorn h...

There’s a fundamental tension in life between two internal postures: Control and surrender; agency and dependency; prudence and trust. Some people...

We often feel guilt in relationships because we feel that we don’t do enough.There always seems to be more need; more that we could do to help the...

There is a very specific reason we often avoid taking the time to reflect:When we reflect, it doesn’t feel like we’re doing anything.For many of us...

Relationships shape the person that we become. With little effort, one can come to see the many ways we have been shaped by our family of origin: o...

Generosity is directly connected to meaningCulturally, we have a strange connection to generosity. We hold up generosity as a universally positive ...

“Go with the flow” can sound like good advice when you are enjoying yourself on a gentle river, but it is terrible advice when you have lost your f...

The path to productivity — and to a fuller life — is a path of subtraction, not addition.This is the reason the lives and environments of monks are...

The dominant narrative in western culture is one of pursuing more.An unfortunate side effect to this is that we often end up with more. More stuff,...