Follow Us

Now this? Radical acceptance revisited

On Christmas Day, 2012 meditation teacher Allan Lokos and his wife were in a plane crash. Later, Lokos described the moment when he realized, as he struggled to escape the burning plane filling with black smoke, that his foot was caught on something and he could not move. Lokos feels his years of meditation practice helped him pause momentarily, find a sense of calm in the chaos, and stop struggling long enough to free his foot. The mindfulness that helped him escape the plane also guided his long path to recovery from severe burns. I share this amazing story as a follow up to a recent post (“Radical acceptance” https://bit.ly/2CMLYMt) in which I wrote about the importance of accepting the p

Terror and hope in New Zealand

“Let’s go check on people,” Dorothy said. I’d just met her the day before. A resident of Biloxi, Mississippi her house was a total loss after Hurricane Katrina. I was there with a medical mission from Toledo. What a delight it was when she, an African American Baptist woman, and I, a white male Catholic man, dropped in on Biloxi’s Buddhist Temple that served many of the Thai shrimpers who lived in that area! At a moment of great crisis, religious labels, skin tones, genders, and nationalities seemed irrelevant. We were united in a common concern for every individual human being. New Zealanders are responding the same way after the horrific attack on Muslims in Christchurch. Speaking to the

Radical acceptance

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the title of Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance. Her focus in that work is mostly on how to accept oneself unconditionally, but I’ve been thinking more about how to accept life that way. My unspoken deal with life is usually something like, Treat me reasonably well and I will love you and live you with passion. But the daily news is full of people going through tragedies that would test any of us. Like me, you may try to keep such unthinkable things in the realm of the unthunk (I could have written “unthought,” an actual word, here but my playful side liked the sound of unthunk better!). I’ve been wondering if I can cultivate a new deal with life: I’ll

Full catastrophe living

"Don't try to figure out suffering, Kev, it will drive you crazy," my Dad said to me several months into the illness that would eventually take him from us. In just the past week I've had several calls from people struggling with suffering that seems particularly "un-figure-out-able." So I thought of an essay (below) I originally included in The Inconceivable Surprise of Living about my trip to Biloxi, Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina. Our medical team from Toledo was on site before the Red Cross or FEMA. But, believe it or not, Papa John's pizza got there before us, handing out pizzas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to anyone who needed them! Just as Papa John's provided sustenance for

Recent Posts
Search By Tags
Archive

Subscribe to "Living the Winged Life"

website © 2014 by The Winged Life

All writing excerpts on this site copyrighted by Kevin Anderson.  For permissions, email wingedlifeinfo@gmail.com

Crecopia moth photo in header used by permission of Scott Rosenfeld, scottrosenfeldphoto.com