Shambhala Sun Audio: An interview with “How To Be Sick” author Toni Bernhard

Shambhala SunSpace readers recently had the pleasure of meeting Toni Bernhard via a guest post called “Why would a law professor write a Buddhist book on chronic illness?” Toni’s expertise, of course, isn’t merely scholarly: she actually has a chronic illness, and her new book, How To Be Sick, offers her hard-won lessons on living with that illness, many of which are informed by her Buddhist practice.

In this exclusive Shambhala Sun Audio interview, Toni speaks about how she’s come to find joy despite the pain and limitations caused by her sickness. She also offers a practice that she uses “every day, in every way” — and that she considers “the greatest antidote to clinging.” Click though to listen. Continued »

Mindfully navigating a wired (and wi-fi) world; The Karmapa on the “technology of the mind and heart” (Video)

On the New York Times Opinionator blog today, Robert Wright (author of The Evolution of God) writes:

A week of silent meditation can help highlight how technology keeps us in its grip, and what some of the costs of our ongoing surrender are.

Wright speaks from personal experience. His online piece, titled “Mind the Grid,” is based on his recent participation in an Insight Meditation Society retreat with Michael and Narayan Liebenson-Grady. Check it out here, and for more on how to mindfully naviagte the on- and off-line worlds, see Steve Silberman’s Did You Get the Message?, from the Shambhala Sun’s 2010 Guide to Mindful Living issue.

A related update — Now available: a new TED video of His Holiness the Seventeenth Karmapa talking about “the technology of the mind and heart.” (Click through to watch it now.) Continued »

Charlotte Joko Beck, Joseph Goldstein, Sylvia Boorstein, and Sharon Salzberg on how meditation has changed their lives

How might meditation change a life? Author Donna Rockwell asked four teachers just that, for inclusion in a Shambhala Sun article called “True Stories About Sitting Meditation.” How do their answers resonate with your experience?

Rockwell: Can you please complete the following sentence for me? “Meditative awareness has changed my life in the following way…”

Charlotte Joko Beck: “‘It has changed my life in the direction of it being more harmonious, more satisfactory, more joyful and more useful probably.’ Though I don’t think much in those terms. I don’t wake up in the morning thinking I’m going to be useful. I really think about what I’m going to have for breakfast.”

Joseph Goldstein: “…I’ve become more aware of the nature of my mind — how it creates suffering and how it can be free.”

Sylvia Boorstein: “It changed me from being afraid of being in a life to celebrating it.”

Sharon Salzberg: “…it has changed my view of who I am.”

For more, read “True Stories of Sitting Meditation” in its completion, via our How to Meditate Spotlight page. And maybe you have a story to share, yourself?

Meditation: So, what’s YOUR story?

Photo: kinworks.net

Recently a “Facebook friend” — though I bet he’d be my “in-person friend” if we lived near each other — posted what seemed to me to be an especially intriguing status update:

Meditation at Navy Medical Center this morning. After meditation one guy said, “Wow, thank you… I had no idea my mind moved so fast!”…It was the process of watching the mind that allowed him to see how much it jumps. It was his first ever meditation.

I didn’t quite get the context for this inspiring little story, but I knew I wanted to hear more. And then I got to thinking how much I’d like to know if our readers might share their own stories of first-ever or otherwise breakthrough meditation experiences — large and small. Sure, it’s a personal thing to talk about — but maybe doing so will help us help each other keep up the energy and will it sometimes takes to keep meditating.

After the jump: Facebook friend Jeffrey Zlotnik shares the background on his above anecdote, and in so doing shows that “TMI” can sometimes be a fine, fine thing. (It’s not what you think.) Continued »

Now available: The Best Buddhist Writing 2010

The new book from the editors of the Shambhala Sun is here — with contributions from Thich Nhat Hanh, Mary Pipher, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Steve Silberman, and more. Here’s what Publishers Weekly has to say:

This excellent anthology embraces a range of issues (e.g., illness, food, caretaking, and nature) from Buddhist perspectives, becoming a demonstration of the ongoing and powerful interrelationship between Buddhism and life in the West, especially the United States. Continued »

How to Meditate: Your online guide

Our special How to Meditate issue is on newsstands, featuring guidance from Matthieu Ricard, Noah Levine, Pema Chödrön, James Baraz, Cyndi Lee, Sakyong Mipham, Mingyur Rinpoche, and more.

Well, there’s lots more where that all came from. So come visit our special online How to Meditate Spotlight page. There you’ll find links to articles from the How to Meditate issue, as well as archived, classic teachings from the likes of Jack Kornfield, Thich Nhat Hanh, Judy Lief, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, Pema Chödrön, Sayadaw U Pandita, and more.

Whether you’re just getting started or looking to refresh your meditation practice, this is the place.

“Buddha for Sale” — An insult to all? Or just “some”?

A new piece from the editor of the Sweden-based Asian Tribune (published by the World Institute for Asian Studies) makes no bones about the Tribune’s feelings about Dharma-Burgers, or examples of Buddhist ideas or images being used in marketing and/or advertising. (I can only imagine how they might react to that term in and of itself.)

After the jump: a couple of excerpts — and questions. Continued »

Putting Martin Luther King, Jr. – and Glenn Beck – in perspective

Glenn Beck likes to say that the date of his “Restoring Honor” rally tomorrow — to be held at the Lincoln Monument, on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech — is a coincidence. He also offers that he’s “no MLK” — no kidding! — but he has come out and said that he considers the rally to be “about what Martin Luther King stood for.”

Others, of course, are more than a little dubious. So we’re left to wonder: will Beck’s DC rally somehow honor King’s memory, or just try to exploit it? Each year since the “Dream” speech, Americans have paused to recall it, bask in and renew its promise, and remember the dreamer behind it.

Lest that memory be tarnished by a master media manipulator’s machinations, we’d do well to ask ourselves now: What did King stand for? As Charles R. Johnson wrote in an exclusive for the Shambhala Sun, he was more than just the “civil rights leader” he is remembered as today; he was one of our greatest moral and political philosophers, his life founded on deep, sophisticated and courageous spiritual conviction.

It was a life we all can learn from. Click here to read Johnson’s beautiful appreciation of King, The King We Need: Teachings for a Nation in Search of Itself.

Sit-a-Long with Jundo: The Absent Child

Every life and family is touched by tragedy. No house is free of times of sadness.

Our family is no exception, reminded as we are of an adopted little girl who was to come to us years ago, but never has. She is just a name to us, a shadow, an empty child’s room that has gathered dust.

[Click through to hear more, and to "sit-a-long" with today's video.] Continued »

Watch a movie with friends — and help save the people and culture of Zanskar

“Don’t film us,” exhorts a parent in the new film, Journey from Zanskar: A Monk’s Vow to Children. [Trailer below.] “We look like corpses.”

But a monk responds: “The rest of the world will see how things are in Zanskar.”

And it’s a good thing, too. The residents of Zanskar don’t have it easy and, too often, are forgotten. Zanskar, you see, is a sort of No Man’s Land.

Found in Northern India on the border of Tibet, Zanskar was once part of Tibet, but became part of Kashmir when the British drew the region’s borders. China, Pakistan, and India have repeatedly since tried to claim Zanskar — often through bloodshed. Buddhists in the region are flanked by non-Buddhists and so are largely ignored when it comes to attention and aid.

“There are no phones, no hospitals, no running water or sewers, no public electricity,” Richard Gere narrates in the film. “There is also no universally affordable education that teaches Tibetan language, culture, and history.”

That, says Geshe Lobsang Yonten, “is why we bring kids from Zanskar all the way to Manali” — where there is a school that teaches those subjects, along with others. Manali, however, is 180 miles away, through the mountaintops. Continued »

Aging: Everybody’s Doing It

A guest post by Susan Moon, author of “This is Getting Old,” from our September 2010 issue.

My granddaughter says she’s three and three quarters. She wants full credit for her maturity. Practicing her attitude, I’ll tell you I’m 67 and five twelfths. I want full credit, too; I’m growing up!

The posters in the Gray Panthers office say: “The best age to be is the age you are.” And Buddhism urges me to be present with what is, to see things as they are, to be grateful for the precious opportunity of human birth.

Besides, there are lots of good things about getting old, though at the moment I’m forgetting what they are. I’m not saying I feel bad right now—I feel fine. As a matter of fact I feel terrific. Nothing hurts, it’s a beautiful June morning, and I’m enjoying my cup of dragonwell tea. Hey! I’m alive! I can feel my heart beating in my chest, from the inside. How did this happen? Continued »

Matthieu Ricard on meditation: “Wishing is Not Enough”

We have no choice about what we already are, but we can wish to change ourselves. Such an aspiration gives the mind a sense of direction. But just wishing is not enough. We have to find a way of putting that wish into action.

We don’t find anything strange about spending years learning to walk, read and write, or acquire professional skills. We spend hours doing physical exercises to get our bodies into shape. Sometimes we expend tremendous physical energy pedaling a stationary bike. To sustain such tasks requires a minimum of interest or enthusiasm. This interest comes from believing that these efforts are going to benefit us in the long run.

Working with the mind follows the same logic. How could it be subject to change without the least effort, just from wishing alone? That makes no more sense than expecting to learn to play a Mozart sonata by just occasionally doodling around on the piano.

We expend a lot of effort to improve the external conditions of our lives, but in the end it is always the mind that creates our experience of the world and translates this experience into either well-being or suffering.

If we transform our way of perceiving things, we transform the quality of our lives. It is this kind of transformation that is brought about by the form of mind training known as meditation.

– from “Why Meditate?”, Matthieu Ricard’s contribution to our September 2010 How to Meditate issue. Click here to browse the magazine online.

Sit-a-Long with Taigu: Doing one practice

Zen master Eihei Dogen said in the Genjo Koan:

Now if a bird or a fish tries to reach the end of its element before moving in it, this bird or this fish will not find its way or its place. When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. When you find you way at this moment, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point; for the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others’. The place, the way, has not carried over from the past and it is not merely arising now.

There is no need to hurry and nowhere to go. As soon as one practices fully, this place is the whole, full-blown moon. The self changes, everything changes, so movement occurs. But although movement occurs, we never leave this place. The time of practice is not even taking place now. So mindfulness is extra. The time and space that Dogen is talking about are different from the ideas we have about time and space. [Click through to sit along with today's video.] Continued »

Karen Maezen Miller on “the First Noble Misunderstanding” (An excerpt from her new book, Hand Wash Cold)

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about meditation. In fact, that’s pretty much all that meditation is — the process of seeing how very much you’ve misunderstood about it and everything else.

We might be drawn to meditation because we want more out of life and ourselves. We might want to be more centered, for example. More peaceful. More focused. More balanced. More patient. More mellow. More wise. More like my ex-boyfriend who liked to meditate.

These may be all the reasons we are drawn to meditation, but they are not the reasons we meditate. We meditate because there is a six-foot flame dancing on top of our heads. It has made us mighty uncomfortable for quite some time up there. We try to pretend otherwise, but have you noticed? We have a fire on our heads! It keeps crossing the containment lines! The temperature shoots up and we prance about, panicked, frantic, holding our breath lest we stoke the inferno, but it rages anyway. About the time our eyebrows singe, we might heed the call of rescue. Continued »

Welcome to the future: Zen priest ordination performed simultaneously on three continents

Taigu and I (Jundo) are very content to announce that, last Thursday, our Treeleaf Sangha ordained three new novice Soto Zen priests in the traditional manner.

What was not so traditional, however — and rather groundbreaking and somewhat controversial — is that it was, we believe, the first time that a Buddhist Ordination has been performed simultaneously on three continents (with the preceptors, Taigu and Jundo, in Japan, and our three ordainees in Canada, Germany and Sweden) all linked by audio-visual media via the internet.

Well, welcome to the future… which is just the present all along! [Click through to read more and view video of the ceremony.] Continued »