Author: Michael Stevens

I used to manually shovel snow for our home and that of three to five neighbors. It is a labor of love but my 66-year-old body is not as adaptable to this kind of...

If you are a practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism, you will eventually come across teachings about the dying process referred to as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Tibetan title is Bardo Thödol which...

There is dry and then there is dry. I am speaking of the kind of dryness one might experience in the desert. Here in the high desert of central Oregon, depending on the location,...

Many years ago, my father purchased a dining table with a hand carved wooden base from a Mexican artist south of the border. He carted it to his home in Sedona, Arizona, and went...

I saw a documentary about an organization called reStart, referring to restarting a life after escaping the snare of internet addiction. This was the first residential digital addiction recovery center in the U.S. Many...

As children, we stared upwards and saw clouds morph into shapes of bunnies and dragons, mountains and valleys, smiling gods and wrathful demons. We occupied a mind closer to the mythopoeic (myth-making) minds of...

“Tangled within, tangled without: these people are tangled in tangles. I ask you this, Gotama: Who can untangle this tangle?” In the Samyutta Nikaya, Buddha is asked how we can untangle the mess we have created through...

We live in a world where the most important things are hidden to our senses unless we have the inclination to refine our sensitivity. For instance, I walked desert landscapes for years before understanding...

My dreamwork mentor, Robert. A Johnson, was told by Carl Jung not to join anything. Jung did not even think the Zurich Institute was an appropriate way to train as a therapist. You learn...

Many years ago, when I first began practicing in the Vajrayana tradition, I prided myself on making altars. I would build, arrange, and rearrange, the various Dharma items to make a perfect place for...