Quotes by Jay Michaelson

About Jay Michaelson:

Jay Michaelson is a writer and LGBT activist in the USA. His work involves spirituality, Judaism, sexuality, and law. He is currently a contributing editor to The Forward, newspaper, and a columnist at the The Daily Beast Michaelson has twice won the New York Society for Professional Journalists award for opinion writing, most recently in 2014. Michaelson is Jewish and openly gay and often works in the intersecting fields of LGBT people and Jewish traditions.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The Buddha’s dharma didn’t teach peace and relaxation; it taught awakening—often rude awakening.

Jay Michaelson

All relaxation does is allow the truth to be felt. The mind is cleared, like a dirty window wiped clean, and the magnitude of what we might ordinarily take for granted inspires tears.

Jay Michaelson

Part of why I love these angry, straight, white punks is that they are stripping the dharma of its bullshit, and applying it to contexts and styles that, even if they aren’t mine, are at least different from the norm.

Jay Michaelson

For the Buddha of the Pali Canon, the goal is liberation: the cessation of suffering, the end of the endless hamster-wheel of dependent origination, of mental formations leading to desire leading to clinging leading to suffering and so on. Nibbana, o...

Jay Michaelson

There’s no path to liberation that doesn’t pass through the shadow.

Jay Michaelson

At the last stages of the journey, there’s no journey at all.

Jay Michaelson

We are animals descended from five billion years of wanting, striving, and seeking. And life just doesn’t cooperate. So we suffer. And so the solution to that problem is to upgrade our minds, in a distinctly ‘unnatural’ way, so that the mind cl...

Jay Michaelson

Sometimes, sitting there on the cushion failing to watch your breath, it can feel like you’re the only weirdo weird enough to be wasting your time in this way. But you’re not! There are generations of weirdos, monasteries full of them, and we hav...

Jay Michaelson

What a miracle, that all we have to do to be beautifully loving creatures is just relax and allow.

Jay Michaelson

It is possible to refine awareness itself so much that the emptiness of things, and the role mental construction plays, becomes a directly apprehended reality.

Jay Michaelson

Author Bio

  • NameJay Michaelson
  • DescriptionAmerican writer and academic