Words from writer and meditation teacher Robert Schwoch
Recently we celebrated Australia Day with our Australian friend Sam. We festooned our dining nook with Australian flags and set out wine and a spread of snacks that included a small jar of Australia's beloved food spread Vegemite, perhaps best known to Americans from one of the sketchier rhymes in pop music: "I said do you speak-a my language...he just smiled and gave me a Vegemite...
Eighteen months and a technological era ago, I started a blog on mindfulness and meditation, augmenting my writing and Zen practice, and the classes and talks I give as an instructor at the Zen Life and Meditation Center of Chicago. The blog got a nice response. But the platform wasn't right. Its constrained interface and subscription-driven structure (on a blog meant to be free) were making the...
Twenty years ago this month, my first published short story appeared, in a well-regarded, now-defunct fiction journal out of Chicago called Other Voices. I'd originally written the story for an application to a three-week summer fiction intensive at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, taught by the late, great storyteller Frank Conroy, then the director of the program and one of the country's more...
Non-thinking is not the aim of meditation. An empty mind, if we could achieve it, would be a vegetative state, not a productive one. But taking up meditation is an acknowledgement that much of our thinking is counterproductive to good living. So what, ideally, should our minds contain when we meditate?In meditation, we’re replacing conscious thoughts with sensory experience. When a thought arises...