How’s it going? We’d like to know!
Practicing mindfulness is a way to step fully into the world, beginning with your personal life. Your job, relationships, and aspirations are not separate from the practice—they form its foundation. From this foundation point of fearless engagement, utter confusion, and complete sincerity, practitioners of all ages make an effort to live a life of truth.
The Shambhala Sun is putting out a call for personal essays up to 2,500 words. Please note the use of the word personal. We’re interested in you and what it’s been like for you to discover, embrace, reject, and/or deepen your personal path as a meditator, Buddhist, Buddhist wannabe, yogi, or spiritual rebel. In other words, we’re not so much looking for explanations of your spiritual leanings as we are stories of how you interpret it and what happens when you try to live from a sense of deeper intention. You can write on any subject you like, as long as it’s relevant, but for inspiration, click here to see what themes we’ve focused on in the past.
We’re making a home on our website for your writing. Our intention is to publish all of your essays online, as long as they are relevant, appropriate, and coherent. We also post a weekly piece on the Shambhala Sun website.
You can be as creative as you like. A traditional essay is fine, but you could also submit a poem, short story, or screenplay. You can create a short video or audio piece to accompany your submission, which we may include with your written piece on our site.
Here are the guidelines:
- Your submission can be up to 2,500 words and should be a personal essay/poem/short story about your experience as a dharma practitioner.
- We will post a weekly submission from the Under 35 Project on the Shambhala Sun‘s website, and we hope to find, in your work, new voices for their print edition as well.
- When you submit your work, it is with the understanding that we and the Shambhala Sun may publish it online. Here are the specifics about rights, ownership, copyright, and so on. Please read this carefully. You’ll be required to agree to this upon submission of your work.
- Your work will be reviewed by our editors in a timely fashion, and may be lightly edited (to correct spelling and grammatical errors) before posting.
We are very excited about this project. The hope is to bring new voices to the emerging dialogue on spirituality, meditation, and the aspiration to live a life of wisdom and compassion.
