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, [...]
Pema Chödrön on how to enjoy life
In an exclusive interview with Pema, conducted at her home, Gampo Abbey, in Nova Scotia, she talks about what it means — and why it’s important — to enjoy our lives. From Lion’s Roar’s Pema Chödrön: A Special Collector’s Edition. I notice there's a sign in the entrance to Gampo Abbey that says "Enjoy Your Life." We don't usually think of that as a spiritual [...]
Lives Lived: Remembering Lisa Hilliard
Eve Rosenthal remembers the late Lisa Hilliard, a practitioner from the Shambhala sangha of Halifax. Over the years, Lisa Hilliard had pared down her possessions to fit comfortably into the Halifax studio apartment she considered her city retreat cabin. The room was spacious and elegant, but there came a time when she was too sick from lung cancer to stay there any [...]
David “Tex” Humphries dies, one of the founders of Gampo Abbey
Esther Rochon writes: One of the founders of Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, David S. (Tex) Humphries, died peacefully on Friday, September 4, 2009. Tex was born March 15, 1948 in Lubbock, TX and attended Texas Tech before moving to Nepal in ’71 (Peace Corps). This is when he had his first contact with the Dharma, both with the Nyingma and Kagyu lineages. He stayed in Asia, and [...]
Teenage Buddhist Nun
It sounds like the stuff of a bad comedy, but nineteen-year old nun Kunga Yeshe (formerly Jessica Topaz) is sincere about her spiritual path. Last year, when she left high school, she moved to Gampo Abbey, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, and now her days consist of meditating, working, and studying Buddhist philosophy. In an interview for beliefnet, Kunga explains [...]
