I was telling a Buddhist teacher about the latest drama in my life, and the farther I got into my twisted tale of miscommunication and projection, the bigger his smile got. "This is great!" he enthused. "You've got so much to work with!"
Sometimes waves of sadness crash over us that are so heavily charged it feels as if there will never again be any room in our hearts for any sort of happiness or peace of mind.
Whenever anger arises our tendency is to try to rid ourselves of...
Pope Francis, the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church, recognized that non-Catholics, including atheists, humanists, and other secular folks, can still have a moral compass. "We must meet one another doing good," he said on Wednesday. This comes as a...
One of the stickier concepts from Indo-Tibetan Buddhism that is difficult to translate, both into the English language and in Western culture, is “merit” (Tib. བསོད་ནམས་ bsod nams, Skt. punya). There is also another tricky layer to this notion: the...
Whenever I manage to get a driver’s license, I want to drive a hearse with a baby crib in the back. It will serve as an apt reminder of the constantly turning nature of birth and death.
I’ve been contemplating my aspirations for practice. Why do I meditate? Why do I practice the precepts? Do I have faith in the path of the Buddha? Do I feel compelled to attain enlightenment?
A tornado in Oklahoma killed dozens of people Monday and flattened whole neighborhoods in certainly the most destructive tornado in decades. Winds faster than 200 miles per hour were recorded, and at one point, the tornado measured over...
When the Buddhist path becomes a template for bypassing it becomes essential to loosen its tight grasp as an absolute illusion catering to a ”save one//save all” salvation & notice it as an alternative approach, flowing toward some...
As the recession drags on in European Union countries and austerity measures affect more and more people, the newly poor aren't finding sympathy but are being blamed. People trapped in the fear that they too will become victims look for...
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche has just published his fourth major book, The Shambhala Principle, and I’ve been lucky enough to spend a good deal of time reading and rereading my now-wrinkled advanced readers’ copy over the past few...
“Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all." -- Gautama Buddha Congrats to all.
In the opening paragraphs of his new blog post at HuffPo, Zen teacher and author David Loy very accurately spells out the activist burnout many engaged citizens feel, Buddhist or otherwise.
We all get set off from time to time--we think, hear, see, smell or taste something that we really, really like or we really, really dislike...and suddenly we’re hooked.
Once we’re hooked, it feels as if the armor we normally try to hide...
When I set out to blog about how my meditation practice changed after marriage and motherhood, I started with some stories from after the wedding and early pregnancy. In this post I’m picking up where I left off, a few months before our...
I recently wrote this reflection for an ISHTA Yoga training I am taking through The Table. While here at IDP we are really focused on secular Buddhism, there are definite parallels with Yoga and I know some other folks here practice Yoga, too...
"Somebody said the rainy weather was 'unacceptable', and I said to myself, 'The weather's not unacceptable to me, I accept it."These words (albeit paraphrased) are attributed to John Lennon, who made an appearance on a news forecast in the 70's...
Every day, my high school art teacher would walk around the classroom to inspect each student’s progress on their project—but mostly to make sure people weren’t goofing off. I never goofed off. I was there to make art—and to escape from my problems...
A new study finds that lovingkindness meditation makes your vagus nerve more responsive. That's meaningful because it is involved in cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and immune responses.
Traditional Buddhist teachings tell us that we should love all beings because -- over the course of many lifetimes -- everyone has been your mother in one of them. In traditional Buddhist southeast Asian cultures, this is a valid metaphor for...
