Dear Friends,

I hope you are well. 

Foremost in my mind and heart lately has been the question of how to support peace in our world so full of war. Thich Nhat Hanh was a strong proponent for peace during the Vietnam war and throughout his life. His message, as I understood it, was to work on creating peace in ourselves alongside the creation of the conditions needed for peace in the world. Both are necessary and they are interrelated.

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Dear Friends,

I hope you are enjoying life wherever you are today.

I wanted to share about a practice I am working with these days. It’s something I have heard Sister Peace talk about in the past, and again in a recent talk given at the BIPOC retreat at Deer Park Monastery.

This practice she calls Eye Hugging.

I think you can imagine what this means, but here is how Sister Peace describes it:

I call it the practice of Eye Hugging. And I look in your eye and I smile and you smile and you look in the eye of maybe someone next to you and you smile and you embrace.

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Dear Friends,

I hope that you are managing to live with some ease.

I wanted to share about a practice - using the word AND to include all aspects of a situation - that has come up for me in a few places lately.

At a recent retreat at Blue Cliff Monastery, a Buddhist monastic shared her practice of AND as a pathway to generating happiness, AND as a way to let go of polarizing concepts, such as right and wrong. 

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