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.

Click this player to listen:

Download audio file (Shambhala-Sun-Audio-Toni-Bernhard.mp3)

See also:

Why would a law professor write a Buddhist book on chronic illness? (A guest post by Toni Bernhard)

The How To Be Sick Facebook page

…and these Shambhala Sun Spotlight pages:

Working with Pain and Suffering — We all deal with pain and suffering. But how can we better deal with them? These teachings from the pages of the Shambhala Sun will point the way.

Caregiving and Practicing with Illness — A selection of truly helpful teachings and writings from John Welwood, Rachel Naomi Remen, Barry Boyce, and more, about how to cope with illness, for caregivers and for those who are trying to practice with illness.

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.)

(That’s our friend Tyler Dewar for translating the Karmapa in this video. Our best and thanks to him.)

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?

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.)

The “TMI” in question is, actually, San Diego’s non-profit The Meditation Initiative, of which Jeffrey Zlotnik is Executive Director — and it was at a TMI-led event that his story from the Navy Medical Center took place. I asked Jeffrey to tell me some more.

“The Meditation Initiative,” he explains, “is leading a free 8-week meditation program via the United States Navy Medical Center in San Diego working with Wounded Warriors. This is part of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Intensive Outpatient Program (PTSD IOP). We are honored to work with these men.”

TMI’s mission is simple and much-needed: “The Meditation Initiative provides free meditation classes for children, adults, and seniors, to help reduce stress and anxiety, improve focus and attention, and share tools for anger management while improving overall health and wellbeing. Our free meditation outreach includes K-12 public schools, colleges, hospitals, prisons, diabetes patients, HIV patients, senior centers, veterans’ facilities, sober living homes, and group homes for victims of domestic violence and human trafficking.

In other words: meditation for everybody. You can’t beat that.

So, everybody: why not check out The Meditation Initiative (especially if you’re in the San Diego area), and then see if you don’t have your own meditation story to share in our Comments section, below.

Because who couldn’t use a little more inspiration to meditate?

See also (especially if you don’t yet have a meditation story but are interested):

How to Meditate: A Shambhala Sun Spotlight page of teachings

Our September 2010 “How to Meditate” issue

Also:

US military: Mindfulness helps soldiers cope in Iraq

“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. According to the contributor David R. Loy, Buddhism ‘needs’ the West, and all the essays suggest the continuing interdependence between the religious practice of mindfulness and our busy, democratic, social lives. According to editor Melvin McLeod, Buddhism continues to have influence beyond our awareness, but collections such as this go a long way toward enlightening us. A feast of memoirs, histories, discussions, and counsel from American Buddhism, this anthology will appeal to both Buddhists and non-Buddhists.” — Publishers Weekly

To order your copy, click here.

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.

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

Excerpts:

Internet companies, institutes for massage, restaurants, resellers of furnishing, and breeders of exotic cats all adopt Buddha in their uninhibited capitalist interests. As well as leaching the symbolic meaning which adherents of Buddhism ascribe to the Enlightened One. Some resellers of these, as they are marketed, oriental objects, also advertise that their Buddha statues are traded fairly or subscribe to the criteria for fair production.

And:

The commercialization of Buddha is an insult to all adherents of the Buddhist tradition. And can be seen as an expression of the prevailing relation between the so called Third world and the postcolonial powers.

Some, of course, would say that this is all just plain true.

Some would say you have to look at such things in a matter of context.

There’s certainly an argument that different views might largely be the result of fundamental cultural differences. But then it can be fairly said that certain aspects of certain of cultures have to be more conducive to practicing what the Buddha taught than others. After all, wasn’t the Buddha ultimately offering a path to a different kind of culture, one fueled not by outward, material pursuits but by the best of what resides inside us all?

Or is a “Buddha for Sale” maybe not so bad, because we need reminders everywhere we go, not least of all the marketplace?

And hey, each Buddha for Sale is one less Snuggie or Big Mouth Billy Bass or whatever.

Maybe, though, it’s becoming more like one more Big Mouth Billy Bass. (Or whatever.)

(Yikes!)

Anyway, what do you say? Check it out.

Comments welcome.

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.

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.]Today’s Sit-A-Long video follows. Remember: recording ends soon after the beginning bells; a sitting time of 20 to 35 minutes is recommended.

To view all of Jundo and Taigu’s SunSpace posts, click here.

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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. And it’s actually not easy to find candidates to bring.

Zanskari families are understandably torn about giving their kids up to Geshe and the people who work with him to deliver Zanskari children into a brighter future. (The Manali school can take only 15 children, and these children must be 5-8 years old to qualify.) On one hand, they might not see their kids again for 10-15 years — because money is so scarce. On the other hand, no comparable opportunity is likely to show itself.

Geshe himself left Zanskar for a monastery at age 16. So he’s a believer. But it’s not easy: transporting the kids is a treacherous affair — their party could even be attacked by religious extremists. All along the way, altitude sickness, exhaustion, deep snow, rock slides, and hypothermia will remain threats.

All in all, in the journey depicted in the film, Geshe, aide Lobsang Dhamchoe, and their party will take 14 children with them to Manali, walking about 20 miles at a time. After days of trekking, they’ll still have to climb an additional 3,000 feet to get over the treacherous Shinku Pass. When they reach the point of the trip where they can begin to travel by auto, even that will be rough going: the bus they rent will be expensive, unheated, and uninsulated. Geshe, the children, and those who accompany them will ride “frozen, exhausted, dehydrated, and hungry.”

When they do finally arrive in Manali, it’s a beautiful sight. The kids enjoy their first-ever hot showers, their first-ever apples. It really is a new beginning. There, the children are to be enrolled in Drakpo School, run by headmaster Lorey Jangchop Gyaltsen. But the party has arrived in the middle of the school year. Geshe and his crew, though, offer to pay a full year’s tuition, and this leads the school to admit the children — minus one child who is delivered to a monastery, and another, to a nunnery — immediately. The trip is a success!

Not that there isn’t crying. The heartbreak felt upon seeing the families’ separation is palpable early on in the film, and when Geshe and his companions — some of whom are parents of the kids they’ve brought with them — leave Manali, the children are distraught. It’s not easy for the parents either. (It’s not even easy to watch!) But then, as Geshe says:

“Me and my friend Dhamchoe, we are always happy. It doesn’t matter if the weather’s cold, snowing, problems…. We’re always expecting the children will be come well-educated.” Geshe considers all the effort part of living up to his Bodhisattva’s Vow, to save beings from suffering. His success is hard-won, but it’s real; the film wraps up with very positive updates on children we’ve met, and this post-script title card:

So that children no longer leave Zanskar to get a Tibetan education, the monks of Stongde Monastery are building a school [to] combine the best of traditional Tibetan education with the best of modern Western education. The school will be free for all area children.

And activist and Shambhala SunSpace contributor Heidiminx — who has been deeply involved in the film and its cause — shares a video update:

Heidiminx adds:

“If you want to donate and have 100% of your donation go directly to the kids of Zanskar, do it via the cause’s website,  http://savezanskar.org.”

And she offers another great idea — watching the movie with others to spread awareness: “If you want a copy to do your own screening, to help raise funds, email me!” You can do so at minx<AT>builtonrespect.com, or, via Facebook.