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A Secular Reinterpretation of a Tibetan Classic Teaching
Secular Buddhist Association Piece ‘Don’t Expect a Standing Ovation – and fifty-eight other pieces of helpful advice’ This is the title of my recently published book. Many people will immediately spot that it is a reworking in contemporary and secular terms of the ancient Tibetan teaching ‘Seven Points of Mind Training’, which was originally presented in…
Read More6/29 Practice Circle: Meeting Difficult Emotions with RAIN
This is a time of difficult emotions. We are scared, anxious, angry. We might be grieving everything and everyone who has been lost, or we might be frustrated by the slow chaos of progress. It doesn’t matter that we’re all feeling these things, or that it is very natural to have turbulent emotions in the…
Read More6/14 Practice Circle: The Power of Poetry
I’ve been a poetry geek since I was a kid, and the poetry I liked best was the most mysterious. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, were utterly indecipherable to me at 14 – and even years later, after I got a graduate degree in this stuff, it’s still hard for me to understand what…
Read MorePractice Circle 4/26: Love is the Antidote to Fear
There is the liberation of the heart by loving-kindness; frequently giving wise attention to it — this is the denourishing of the arising of ill-will that has not yet arisen, and the decrease and weakening of ill-will that has already arisen. — SN 46:51 There is much fear in the world now. Most of us…
Read MoreTips for Online Practice Groups
Virtually all of the in-person practice groups I participate in during this time of social distancing are scrambling to convert to online offerings. I read in the New York Times today that downloads of Zoom have increased exponentially. Many of these initial meetings have seen hiccups as presenters attempt to get the technology to work…
Read MoreLiberate Meditation App: A Review
Article in English and Spanish. Artículo en inglés y español. English: Update (12 August 2019): Recently, it was brought to my attention that this app is part of a for-profit business, owned by the developer and ran by 10 select employees. I do not know if this represents a change (I never checked…
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