Andrea Miller on the life and spiritual journey of one Deirdre Blomfield-Brown. Pema Chödrön was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown in New York City in 1936. She has said that she had a pleasant childhood with her Catholic family, but that her spiritual life didn’t begin until she attended boarding school, where her intellectual curiosity was cultivated. At age twenty-one, [...]
About Andrea Miller
Buddha’s Birds
From the swan that Siddhartha nursed as a boy to the fantastical Garuda—Andrea Miller explores the intriguing role that birds play in Buddhist mythology and teachings. In my freshman year of college, my religious studies class was at the sleepy hour of two o’clock, and to make matters worse the professor was hypnotically soft-spoken and wore tired shades of brown. So on [...]
Awakening My Heart: On Retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh
Andrea Miller attends a transformational six-day retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh. The War Memorial Gym is a sea of eight hundred prone people. When I finally find an empty patch of floor, I unfurl my yoga mat. Then I lie down on top of it, covering myself with the itchy yellow blanket I carted here from my dorm room. This is the evening of the first full day of Thich Nhat [...]
The Revolutionary Dharma of Noah Levine
He was the kid you warned your kids about. Now he offers hope to at-risk youth and people battling addiction. Andrea Miller profiles Noah Levine, whose innovative work is based on his view that there’s nothing more radical than the Buddha’s original teachings. First, Noah Levine took a comb and tried to slit his wrists with it. When that failed to kill him, he smashed his [...]
The Life and Teachings of Sister Chan Khong
She’s best known as Thich Nhat Hanh’s invaluable collaborator, but Sister Chan Khong is also a dedicated activist and gifted teacher in her own right. Andrea Miller tells her extraordinary story. Death permeated the whole trip. The flood victims that the volunteer relief workers had come to help were either on the verge of death — starving, shivering, and homeless — or [...]
Till Death Do Us Part
Outside, through the open church doors, I could see our guests, peering in at us. They were dressed in the richly embroidered velvet costume of Adán’s region of Mexico and they looked, I thought, like a gorgeous dream I might have after spending a day with peacocks. I glanced at Adán—the smart, sexy man who was now my husband—and I squeezed his arm. Then we stepped across the [...]
How to Help Tibet
We've updated our list of organizations supporting Tibetans both inside Tibet and in exile, with links so that they might in turn benefit from others' support. The Tibetan people and the Tibetan Buddhist tradition have taught the world so much about kindness, compassion, and resilience. So why not give back? List compiled by Andrea Miller and the staff of Lion's Roar. The [...]
Book Reviews for March 2017
How to Be Alive A Guide to The Kind of Happiness That Helps the World By Colin Beavan Dey St. 2016; 437 pp., $25.99 (cloth) How to Be Alive isn’t the usual self-help book. Colin Beavan, known as the “No-Impact Man,” is an American writer and activist who in 2011 gave up gasoline-powered transportation, shipped-in food, and a host of other twenty-first-century conveniences [...]
Matthieu Ricard’s Journey to Compassion
Scientist, monk, best-selling author, humanitarian—how Matthieu Ricard discovered that caring for others is the only answer. In a tent made of woven yak hair, a thirteen-year-old girl was stirring cheese in a cauldron over a clay hearth as blue smoke from the fire escaped through an opening in the roof. Her father had died the year before, and now her mother had tuberculosis [...]
Book Reviews for November 2016
The Book of Joy Lasting Happiness in a Changing World By the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, with Douglas Abrams Avery 2016; 368 pp., $26 (cloth) When His Holiness the Dalai Lama decides to meet someone at the airport near his home in Dharamsala, India, it involves a major logistical operation that shuts down a main road and clogs up the whole city. Nevertheless, in April [...]