How do you know if you’re living a balanced life? And do you care? Bernie developed a tool for checking your balance, his version of The Five Buddha Families, a variant on a Tibetan teaching. Bernie’s aspects of life were spiritual practice, study, livelihood, social action, and community. Jishu showed me how to use it. Take a week-at-a-glance calendar with each day divided into hours, half hours might be even better. For two weeks, keep track of your activities, fill in yo

Mindful eating has been part of my spiritual practice almost from the beginning. Jishu took me on my first dive into mindful eating. During a course on the Zen paramitas, the practices of enlightened beings, she asked us to pick an everyday activity that we did without paying attention. I took a four-month plunge into eating without reading. I wasn’t dieting, I wasn’t focused on how much I was eating. This plunge was about the way I ate, and it was illuminating, showing me

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m seeing a nutritionist again. Maybe it’s an inevitable consequence of getting older and accumulating medical specialists. This year I added a neurologist and a urologist. For a while, it seemed that I was being MRI-ed every other day. When I accompanied Dee on her search for a holistic practitioner, sitting in on her initial consultation, I was still a week away from the follow-up with my urologist, still awaiting the results of a prosta