From the inner city to the executive suite, in hospitals and prisons, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s meditation courses are helping thousands handle illness stress, anger and addiction. Lawrence Pintak profiles the man who has brought meditation to the American mainstream. John Coolidge was alone with his mind. Paralyzed and rendered deaf by a disease that had attacked his nervous [...]
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“Something Has to Change”: Blacks in American Buddhism
Lawrence Pintak tells the compelling stories of three African-American dharma teachers. He asks them why American Buddhism attracts so few people of color and what can be done about it. Jan Willis was feeling euphoric. Sitting in the basement of a church in London's impoverished East End last summer, she looked around and realized that of the 40-odd people in the room, 31 were [...]
Gene Smith’s Mission
In this article from 2002, Lawrence Pintak profiles Gene Smith, the man from Ogden, Utah who single-handedly spearheaded the preservation of thousands of Tibetan texts after the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959. Smith died in 2011. He has spent his life wrapped in the dharma. For the past 40 years, Gene Smith has lived, breathed and slept with the teachings of Tibetan [...]
Insight Meditation at 25
The idea was almost too ridiculous to contemplate. Three twenty-something meditation teachers, who had spent most of their adult lives wandering around Asia, now stood in front of a 150-room, former Catholic monastery-complete with bowling alley-in the hills of central Massachusetts. They were debating whether to buy it. The plan was to start a Buddhist retreat center. The [...]
Mind at Peace, Body in Balance
A look at healing meditations developed by Tulku Thondup Rinpoche, author of The Healing Power of Mind. The simplicity of the mindfulness meditations taught by Jon Kabat-Zinn makes them readily accessible to non-Buddhists. But healing practices are also at the heart of the more esoteric teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, and Tulku Thondup Rinpoche, a lama now living in Cambridge, [...]
