Mindfulness

I have been practicing Buddhism in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh since 1999. I belong to the Eyes of Compassion Sangha in Denver and am a member of the Insight Meditation Community of Colorado and Zen Peacemakers International. You may notice hints of Buddhism in some of my poems, and I have managed to merge my religious practice with my academic interests in two scholarly books focused all or in part on Buddhism in nineteenth-century Great Britain.

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In 2019-2020, I completed a 300-hour training with the Engaged Mindfulness Institute to become certified as a secular meditation instructor. My intention was to carry that training into prisons as a volunteer, but after one class meeting the prison system was closed by COVID. I then began offering 6 and 8-week mindfulness workshops for faculty, staff, and students at the University of Colorado Denver | Anschutz. On this part of my website, you can find the syllabus, handouts, and presentations that I developed for those workshops. I invite you, if so inclined, to make use of them.

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Here’s a mini-meditation that you can use whenever you would like to disengage yourself from, or stop identifying with, an unpleasant emotional state or judgmental thought, repeating each of the four gathas once or more, inhaling with the first phrase, exhaling with the second: