The greatest achievement is selflessness.
The greatest worth is self-mastery.
The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.
The greatest precept is continual awareness.
The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.
The greatest action is not conforming with the...

My life is speeding forward and I feel like I am caught in a whirlwind of unexpressed desires, unmet goals, and unexplored opportunities. Why do I find myself browsing craigslist for studio apartments in Portland Oregon when 1) I have never even been there and 2) I really have no intention of going there...

If you can't tell by now, my hands are feeling much better and I'm rather enjoying my ability to type. In one aspect, my inability to sit in front of the computer was a blessing on this trip, but in the same instance, Sri Lanka has impressed me so much that I've been dying to share its wonders with...

Traveling
can't always be always a fairy tale and it only makes sense that this
day would be challenging. After two days biking across vast ruins in
one of the hottest parts of the country, I climbed Sigiriya in the
early morning, quickly packed my bags and caught a tuk-tuk south to the
town of...

I
boarded the bus early the next morning in Anaradhapura with locals
piled on top of me as the Hindu driver weaved through twisting lakeside
roads to the hot and dusty village of Polonnaruwa,
which for three centuries was the royal capital of both the Chola and
Sinhalese...

Bodhgaya.  I left Kolkata on the night train on Wednesday, which was perfectly on time in both departure and arrival.  Nothing I know about India could have prepared me for the peace I would find in Bodhgaya, the place where the Buddha
reached Enlightenment under the Bodhi tree 2550 years...

It's
funny to think that my last update, in which I raved about the miracles
of Sri Lanka, came after just three days here and having only seen the
seaside town of Negombo.
So much has happened since then to re-inforce those feelings and my
excitement about this country that I hardly know where...

There's
a lot of places out there that I've had the desire to travel to and
see. For many of them there were specific reasons that they interested
me or drew me in. Other places intrigued me because they only existed
in a fantasy to me, and pages of National Geographic.

We know that to wage a nuclear war today , for example would be a form of suicide; or that to pollute the air or the oceans in order to achieve some short term benefit would be to destroy the very basis of our survival.As individuals and nations are becoming increasingly indterdependant, we have no other...

While i was travelling in South-East Asia last spring and summer, i sat a retreat in the meditation centre attached to the forest monastery of Wat Suan Mokkh, in Southern Thailand. Being the zen nerd, this wasn't the first retreat for me. I had a couple of zen retreats under my belt and i wondered...