Among the tasks or “yogi jobs” a participant can volunteer for during silent retreats at the Insight Meditation Society, a Buddhist meditation center in rural Massachusetts, the most resonant in every sense is that of bell ringer.
Author: Tracy Cochran
Tracy Cochran is editorial director of Parabola. For more information, please visit tracycochran.org.
“We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote the Catholic poet T.S. Eliot. “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
A podcast from Parabola Editor, Tracy Cochran’s mindfulness meditation talk at the Rubin Museum of Art on January 6th, 2016.
“Here we have the ground zero cafe,” says Bart Ives, gesturing toward a white frame building standing in the open center courtyard of the Pentagon.
One morning last October, I experienced a moment of grace. It happened as I was walking my black Labrador retriever, Shadow, on one of those warm autumn days when everything looks edged in gold. But I was shuffling along like a waif in a storm because I had just learned that a project I had…
“Religion isn’t for me,” announced my eight-year-old daughter, Alexandra, as we ate dinner together one January night. “I think of it like an old spider on the wall. I know that it’s there but I try to ignore it.” Alexandra took a bite of pasta and studied my reaction. “When I pray it’s usually just…
There must be more to me than this. Have you ever thought this? It’s a little moment of awakening rather than an ordinary thought—a clearing in the clouds, a a distant memory, a knowing that there is more. More to life. More to me. This realization can feel like hitting bottom.
Head down, hugging a grocery bag, I hurried past gutted buildings and empty lots, back to my ex-boyfriend’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. It seemed like a good idea at some point, having dinner together as friends. But the little Spanish market on the corner of Ninth Avenue and West 35th Street was the only pocket…
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” writes Emily Dickinson. “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.” After a great shock or loss or change, a stillness comes. We sit still and receive life without leaning forward to grasp at it or commenting on it—think of the way a king or queen receives visitors. We have…
A conversation with intuitive and healer Laura Day Ivisited Laura Day in her apartment in Tribeca in lower Manhattan to talk about intuition. Since her early twenties, Day has been internationally famous for her uncanny ability to know things immediately, without the aid of research or reasoning, accurately seeing the outcome of even arcane events.…