Pain offers the difficult blessing of causing one’s world to slow to a centered simplicity, as in, “Let’s see if I can manage to lie down without crying.”

One of the most difficult challenges we have as humans is facing what is, especially when life presents you with things you didn’t order and don’t want: like everything in 2020.

The same fire that destroys life and darkens the landscape is also what stimulates the opening and growth of new life.

It seems everyone I talk to is dealing with something serious and vexing. How do we create peace and some level of wellbeing even in the midst of suffering?

The degree to which we suffer is the degree to which we experience joy. Our pain is, in fact, our gain — if we remain open and receptive to it.

Four principles to remember when facing the very real challenge of pain.

Warning: This column has nothing whatsoever to do with Valentine’s, the Lunar New Year, or other such niceties. You may find it helpful, however, if Life has thrown you a few curve balls or wicked sinkers lately, which it has to me.

It’s counter-intuitive to take a blow without doing something, anything, to defend oneself. When your marriage is a mess or your body betrays you or you’re on a financial cliff edge, the tendency is to become two years old again and have a hissy fit.

On the nature of disease, its meanings, and our role in creating it.

The real suffering of life—the unavoidable agonies—are not problems to be solved but experiences to be faced and felt.

To understand illness you must understand the life of the mind, the achings of the heart, the longings of the spirit — all pieces of the puzzle.