Lama Thubten Yeshe was one of the first Tibetans to teach Buddhism to Westerners. I went to see him in Nepal, but he had just left to teach in the USA, where he died from heart disease in 1984, at age 49. Several of his Western students recount that whenever he met anyone, he would…
I heard the news as I was driving home from work this past Tuesday morning. Ram Dass was dead. Maybe I will remember this drive home like I still remember that bleak winter day in late November in 1963. I was seven years old that morning our 2nd grade teacher told us that JFK had…
Even though it’s not the end of the year yet, Thanksgiving has always been a time of reflection for me. I look back with chagrin at all my failures and aspirations. And I think about our world. We don’t have to look too far to see how much pain we have been through so far…
Understanding the central message of the Buddhist traditions can be a complex undertaking. I have met several people who have dedicated their entire adult lives to studying the sutras in the original languages. While their ability to synthesize complex topics into understandable English is impressive, I did not feel their hearts were liberated from what…
The meditation practice of metta, or loving-kindness, has had a profound effect on me over the years. I would like to touch on some of these as an offer of encouragement to discover the healing depth and profound re-orientation metta offers those who are drawn to mindfulness. greater self-acceptance Metta helps me accept myself as…
A complaint I sometimes hear from folks who are trying to be happy by practicing meditation is that meditation is just not working. Putting effort to change your mental state does sometimes lead to frustration. Gratefulness, however, is a wholesome mental state which changes everything. notice when you naturally feel content in your daily life…
In one of Tara Brach’s online talks on self-compassion, she tells a story about the work of Dian Fossey with gorilla groups in Rwanda. Ms. Fossey was asked how her research group was able to obtain much more information on the social world of the gorillas than anyone had previously. “We didn’t bring guns” she replied.…
I was driving somewhere the other day with my son Kupai in the car. It was late afternoon and I had just gotten up from bed (I work nights). I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, just trying to get to where we were going. Kupai suddenly said, “Look Dad, that license plate says ‘Be…
We have come to the fourth of the four immeasurables: meditation on equanimity. It might be the most important of the four, as without it we can easily lose our balance or direction. Whereas the previous three meditations on love, compassion and joy have a soft, heart opening quality, this meditation is, as Roshi Joan…
In these past few posts we have been looking at the practice of the Four Immeasurables – Love, Joy, Compassion and Equanimity, also known as the Four Divine Abodes. Essentially these are four wholesome emotions that we intentionally develop and cultivate. In the last four posts we practiced two of these emotions together — Love…