Tabla de contenidos para July 2020 en Lion's Roar

dear Friends, We have a choice. Epidemics, like earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods, are part of the cycle of life on planet earth. How will we respond? With greed, hatred, fear and ignorance? This only brings more suffering. Or with generosity, clarity, steadiness, and love? This is the time for love. The time for bodhisattvas. In Buddhist teachings, the bodhisattva is someone who vows to alleviate suffering and bring blessings in every circumstance. A bodhisattva chooses to live with dignity and courage and radiates compassion for all, no matter where they find themselves. This is not a metaphor. As bodhisattvas we are now asked to hold a certain measure of the tragedy of the world and respond with love. The bodhisattva path is in front of us. The beautiful thing is,…

i’ve spent my adult life in communities and helping to build communities. I’ve been part of artistic, spiritual, social justice, Buddhist, and public school communities, among others. In a practical sense, I know a little about the patience, persistence, relationship building, and maintenance that are needed to create community, and the diversity and inclusivity tensions always present in community life. And then there is community in the broadest sense. In late January of this year, I dreamt I was in a picturesque small city waiting for an artist friend to pick me up for a pleasant outing to a redwood forest state park. But in the dream the downtown had been occupied by a large meditation-based white supremacy cult, whose smiling members kept trying to usher me into various “free…

LION’S ROAR: What’s your response to people who say that meditation and mindfulness are just ways of checking out and feeling good, no matter what’s going on around us? SHARON SALZBERG: Sometimes, of course, meditation does feel good, because it’s a respite from our normal, anxiety-driven thoughts. But that doesn’t mean those thoughts aren’t happening. It means we’re creating a different relationship to them, so we feel space. We get some rest even as our conditioning is playing out. What most people don’t understand about meditation is that it’s not about cutting out all thinking, or just sitting there in bliss or peace. It’s about developing a different relationship to whatever is happening. We learn to have a way of experiencing joy, wonder, and delight that we may not have…

THERE ARE APPROXIMATELY one bajillion reasons why you should probably be meditating right now. Leaving aside any particularly Buddhist ones—like enlightenment, or nirvana, or complete liberation from the endless cycle of suffering—there are some totally legit, immediately beneficial ways mindfulness and meditation can be good for you starting today. In a nutshell, we can say that meditation refers to a broad range of practices designed to help human beings suffer less and live with greater ease and well-being. Mindfulness is both the capacity of the mind to know and the development of that capacity. It is both an ingredient in all meditation practices and a type of meditation all by itself. The ancient Buddhist word for mindfulness is sati. Sati, it turns out, is a richly complex signifier, and its…

TEACHINGS & PRACTICES FOR THIS DIFFICULT TIME FROM PEMA CHÖDRÖN JACK KORNFIELD AMANA BREMBRY JOHNSON BONNIE MYOTAI TREACE, SENSEI ROSHI JOAN HALIFAX TONI BERNHARD CYNDI LEE MUSHIM PATRICIA IKEDA SPENCER SHERMAN DR. CHRISTIANE WOLF…

among those of us who live with chronic illness, there are various memes circulating that describe life in the time of coronavirus. The wording differs, but the theme is basically the same: Welcome, everyone, to how we already live. People like me who deal with chronic illness, which includes chronic pain, have been “sheltering in place” for years, only going out to attend to essential tasks. Others can do more, but still know the sadness of missing out on special occasions. All of us know the suffering of ill health and fears about our future. We can share ways to work with illness and with the additional layer of suffering the Buddha called “the second arrow.” The first arrow is how the Buddha referred to the unpleasant experiences everyone can…

today, we are all together in a boat, tossed by fears for our health, our finances, our future in the stormy waters of coronavirus. What will it take to keep ourselves afloat? I’m reminded of a story that Thich Nhat Hanh told when I visited Plum Village. He said that if panic swept through a crowded boat full of refugees fleeing Vietnam, then all would be lost. But if only one person was calm and steady amongst the many who were terrified and frantic, all the passengers on the boat would survive the journey. These days, we all feel the fragility of our finances. How can we be the calm person on the boat to get our family or business through these stormy financial waters? It starts with recognizing the…

SOME DAYS THERE SEEMS to be little reason for hope, in our families, cities, and world. Well, except for almost everything. The seasons change, a bone mends, Santa Rosa rebuilds after the fire. In the days after a cataclysmic school shooting, thousands of students took to the streets and the public squares. They got us back up onto our feet and changed the world. Still, we hold our breath. In times of rational and primitive fear, hope has to do push-ups out in the parking lot to stay pumped—and it does. More and more, one hears Dr. King quoted everywhere, of finite disappointment versus infinite hope. Science, art, community, and nature make manifest that bad will or mistakes can lead to progress, like Bob Ross on his show The Joy…

THE STORY GOES that before becoming enlightened, the Buddha was a young noble in ancient India, free from suffering in his palace, indulging in all kinds of princely pleasures, adorned in gilded dreams. But one day, as he ventured out from the palace gates, he confronted the unavoidable truths of existence: a sick person, an old person, and a corpse. For all his years, the young prince had managed to deny the fate of all life—sickness, aging, and death—and the encounters became messengers to the young prince. This well-known story reveals how the untrained mind is in a continuous denial of our approaching demise. Our mind keeps itself busy and is always hunting pleasure in order to dismiss that we will all eventually get sick or experience disease, that it…

CREATING A LIFE OF INTEGRITY In Conversation with Joseph Goldstein By Gail Stark Wisdom Publications 2020; 256 pp., $18.95 (paper) Joseph Goldstein is a key founder of the Insight Meditation movement in the West; Gail Stark, a businesswoman, has been his friend and student for more than twenty-five years. Together, they unpack Buddhism’s ten transcendent perfections—generosity, virtue, renunciation, wisdom, courage, patience, truthfulness, resoluteness, loving-kindness, and equanimity—which, they say, are essential for creating a life of integrity. These perfections (paramis in Pali, paramitas in Sanskrit) can be developed separately, generally moving from the first to last, in order to build a strong whole. Stark asserts that making a genuine effort to live a life of integrity is an important part of being happy. “The happiness from that effort is threefold,” she…

Upon witnessing the death of the Buddha, senior monks observed, “All conditioned things are impermanent.” Plagues have tormented our ancestors since long before they descended from the trees. It was ever thus. In the vast, ancient lineage of humanity (and viruses), what hubris is it to think I’m somehow exempt? Old age, illness, and death are part and parcel of life. As a Mahayana Buddhist, I aspire to be a bodhisattva; well, here’s my opportunity. I was once told to regard my rakusu as a waiter’s apron and that a sincere “How may I help you?” fulfills all of my vows. Ultimately, the coronavirus doesn’t change my fundamental practice, which is to find a need and fill it. —Emmet Bondurant, Hayesville, North Carolina One thing that has helped with the…

When I was about six years old, I received an essential teaching from an old woman sitting in the sun. I was walking by her house one day, feeling lonely and unloved, kicking anything I could find. Laughing, she said to me, “Little girl, don’t you go letting life harden your heart.” Right there, I received this pith instruction: we can close our hearts to life to try to protect ourselves against difficult circumstances. Or we can let difficulties soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice. If we see the fears and suffering we’re all experiencing now as a chance to grow in bravery and wisdom, in patience and kindness, then our personal distress can connect us with the…

ONE SMALL PRACTICE: GASSHO MIND Someone approaches and you need them not to get closer. There will be a flicker of fear or anxiety. Exhale. Say, “Please stop there” and bring your hands palm-to-palm into gassho, the mudra of intimacy. Step back a bit if you need to. Smile and meet their eyes warmly. Let yourself feel their vulnerability, along with your own. It is okay to take care of yourself in this and other ways. Even more important: don’t let fear close your heart. ANOTHER SMALL PRACTICE: SHOW IT We are the right sangha, the right community for this challenge. Every day find a way, big or small, to show care for another. At least one. Every day. Each of us will as always have different opportunities, vulnerabilities, capacities.…

CYNDI LEE is a leading yoga teacher and Buddhist chaplain. Her online offerings include Taking Refuge in Your Body, available at learn.lionsroar.com, and meditation teacher and restorative teacher training on yogainternational.com. as with all purchases these days, my new yoga mat was delivered right to my door. All my old mats had finally worn out, so I caved in and sent away for a brand new mat, the first one I’d bought in twenty years. I’d picked one like the original mat I used—average size, not too sticky, plain old purple. I tossed it in the washing machine to get it broken in. Then I unfurled it on the floor, sat down, crossed my legs, and closed my eyes. I knew the feeling of this new/old mat like I knew…

as the restrictions around social distancing get loosened, I hope for all of us that we are taking a moment to decide very deliberately which of our old ways we want to pick up again and which we don’t. If anything, this pandemic has taught us two things: that we are profoundly interconnected and that we need to slow down. Sometimes we need to be shocked out of our autopilot into waking up. Big life changes are often times when we are “invited” to reconsider what we are doing and if it is in alignment with how we want to live our life. The practice of mindfulness is always about pausing, noticing, and choosing the right response. Mindfulness practice strengthens our capacity to see more clearly what is good and…

THE MOMENT MY meditation habit was established for good was in a checkout line at Whole Foods. It was in 2002, I was in my early twenties, and I was living in Austin, Texas. I worked for a small software company, where I was failing. I smoked pot every morning before I went to work, and at lunchtime I sat in my car and smoked up again. Then I walked across the street to Whole Foods to get lunch. On this particular day, when a Whole Foods cashier changed my life, I’d been meditating for a few months. I knew I was fucking up my life, so I was looking for something that would help. I’d read some Zen books. I’d set myself a thirty-day daily meditation challenge and achieved…

CALIFORNIA DHARMA REALM BUDDHIST UNIVERSITY 4951 Bodhi Way, Ukiah, CA 95482. (707) 621-7000, info@drbu.edu, www.drbu.edu • Dharma Realm Buddhist University (DRBU) is an accredited university in northern California dedicated to liberal education in the broad Buddhist tradition. DZOKDEN 3436 Divisadero St, San Francisco, CA 94123. (415) 810-6168, office@dzokden.org, dzokden.org • Online and in-person classes on Kalachakra, Jonang Ngondro, Rimé philosophy, Zhentong-Rangtong Emptiness and Meditation. We hold special Events & empowerments throughout the USA (California, New York, Colorado, and Oregon). INSIGHT LA MEDITATION 1430 Olympic Blvd, Santa Monica, CA 90404. (310) 450-1821, programs@insightla.or, insightla.org • InsightLA Meditation is a meditation center teaching the highest quality evidence-based mindfulness practices throughout the Greater Los Angeles area. For 17 years, we have offered classes, retreats, and special events in an open and welcoming community.…