With noisy neighbors and the homeless camped on street corners, city life offers many opportunities to practice kindness. Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche on how urban living can open our hearts. Spiritual practitioners often aspire to live alone in the mountains among wildlife, yet a city can be an equally or an even more supportive environment for practice. Unlike the [...]
5 Ways to Win the Internet
Zen priest Gesshin Greenwood offers five tips for staying safe and sane online. The internet is a scary place these days. Actually, it's always been a scary place. Remember when your kids getting abducted by strangers they met in chatrooms was the most pressing danger of the internet? Now your kids are the ones programming the chatrooms. And yet, since the revelations [...]
Two-Minute Meditations for Anytime, Anywhere
Life is busy. Here's a selection of quick meditations to work with emotional distress and foster mindfulness when time is scarce. Meditation is about relaxing with the truth. When we sit in that vulnerability, we can get in touch with our thoughts, emotions, and body. However, even the most experienced meditators can get uncomfortable or find themselves short on time. And [...]
First Do No Harm
Environmentalist Stephanie Kaza invites us to consider how Buddhist principles can help us nurse the planet back to health. Sometimes it seems like Buddhism doesn’t have much relevance to environmental problems. Can Buddhist philosophy solve climate change? Can meditation bring back lost species? I think about these things much of the time, trying to find my way in a world [...]
Mirabai Bush and Ram Dass on Bringing Fear Close
As long as you think vulnerability is weakness, you’re going to be afraid. Mirabai Bush and Ram Dass on the kind of vulnerability that’s actually strength. From the November 2018 issue of Lion's Roar magazine. In the afternoon, we meet over tea. Ram Dass says, “When I am afraid of something, I come up as close to it as possible, and I notice my resistance. I allow myself [...]
Sweeping My Heart
When Zenju Earthlyn Manuel was assigned to clean the Zen temple, she felt generations of oppression rise in her. Conversing with her ancestors about what this work really meant helped her see how it could be healing. Zen practice is a return to the ordinary. It is only in the secular world that Zen is perceived by some as a high and holy practice. The robes are seen as [...]
How former Pixar CFO Lawrence Levy found his middle way
With the release of Incredibles 2, Pixar's feature films have collectively brought in more than $13 billion at the worldwide box office. Before the animation studio was a household name, Lawrence Levy helped the company find its “middle way” between business and storytelling. Note: The October 3 Lion's Roar newsletter incorrectly linked to this story instead of Karen Maezen [...]
Our Opportunity to Include All Genders in Buddhist Communities
As a trans practitioner, Ray Buckner has struggled to find a sense of belonging in Buddhist spaces. They offer suggestions for how we can better support sangha members of all genders. When I enter new sanghas, I see people connecting. They smile and laugh, walking with a sense of ease. Their bodies, facial expressions, and loving words spoken to one another communicate a [...]
Gretel Ehrlich: Struck by Nature
“Cover yourself with the living world. It becomes part of your love life.” Gretel Ehrlich writes about nature with passion and awareness, but twice her love affair with nature turned deadly. In this 1994 profile from the Lion's Roar archive, Stephen Foehr talks to the author of A Match to the Heart. The afternoon thunderstorm that tumbled over the Bighorn Mountains looked [...]
10 Precepts for Parents
John Becvar uses the Zen precepts as a guide for peaceful parenting that gives our childen love, trust, and self-confidence. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “No mud, no lotus.” And what could be muddier than our role as parents? When Buddhists vow to follow the precepts, we do this knowing that living them purely is near impossible. Raising children is the same. We vow to be [...]
