Music connects us to the present moment like nothing else, says Teenage Bottlerocket bassist Miguel Chen. In this excerpt from his new book, I Wanna Be Well: How a Punk Found Peace and You Can Too, coauthored with LionsRoar.com editorial director Rod Meade Sperry, Chen explains how to really listen to music. Playing shows, writing songs, recording albums, and most of all, [...]
Buddhism Includes Everything — Even Comic Books
Comic artist John Porcellino tells Lauria Galbraith how Zen has inspired his comics and helped him through hard times. Buddhism has texts and art – but what about comics? John Porcellino is a pioneer in the self-published comic industry, an outspoken voice for DIY ethics, and a practitioner of Zen Buddhism. Porcellino has been self-publishing and distributing his famous [...]
Revisiting a classic, cringe-tastic Dharma-Burger
New York magazine's blog The Cut has a funny new post called "A Brief History of Terrible Yogurt Commercials Targeted at Women." Among them is a classic Dharma-Burger. It's so classic, in fact, that there's actually a Buddhist book named after it. The ad is for Yoplait yogurt. In it, two women in a luxurious spa setting are swooning over their Yoplait, trying to come up with [...]
Watch the trailer for “My Buddha is Punk”
My Buddha is Punk is a new documentary about a 25-year-old punk rocker in Burma, named Kyaw Kyaw, who uses his music to raise awareness of social issues. In an October 2015 Al Jazeera article about Burma's punk activists, the athor wrote that Kyaw Kyaw blames the military dictatorship for ruining Burma's education system, and is harshly critical of the radical Buddhist [...]
Buddy Nielsen of Senses Fail on trauma, sexuality, and Buddhism
Since its formation in 2002, Senses Fail has gone through changes—from startup melodic punk band to capital-H heavy post-hardcore juggernaut (boasting, for example, some 523,000 fans on Facebook). Founding singer Buddy Nielsen, too, has had his share of boundary-busting transformation. It hasn’t come easy. As he’s written, “For over nine years I suffered in a cycle of shame [...]
Why Punk & Buddhism Beats “Us Vs. Them”
Teenage Bottlerocket bassist, meditator, and yoga teacher Miguel Chen on how punk rock and searching for peace go together. I’m a musician, a punk rocker, a Buddhist of sorts, a yogi. Most of all, I consider myself an individual. But the further I come along on my path, I realize that while that’s true—I am an individual—I am also the same as everyone else. The more time I [...]
A Punk Looks at Fifty
Crummy cars, a wall of guitars, and a whole bunch of meditation: not exactly the American Dream, but Zen teacher Brad Warner is good with that. I recently turned fifty. Happy birthday to me! It’s an annoying age: you’re not old enough to be considered wise but you are old enough to be considered old. I’m too old to be a prodigy but too young to be venerable. Nobody cares what [...]
Meet Ruin, “the first Buddhist punk band”
The story of Ruin – the "first Buddhist punk band" – is fascinating, and sprawling. Here it is, told in the band members' own words in an exclusive interview from 2005. Ruin are legend in certain circles: fans of classic Philadelphia punk rock keep the name alive with fansites and made a 90's "ReUnIoN" a cause for celebration. Even the reclusive Leonard Cohen was [...]
Q&A: Muslim punk author Michael Muhammad Knight talks Taqwacores, Buddhism, drugs, and the future
Claire Heisler sits down with Muslim punk author Michael Muhammad Knight to talk his book The Taqwacores, Buddhism, drugs, and the future of Islam in America. Michael Muhammad Knight was raised Roman Catholic but developed an interest in Islam and, at the age of seventeen, went to Islamabad, Pakistan, to study at Faisal Mosque. After becoming disillusioned with orthodox Islam, [...]
Showdown at Punk Palace
It's mindfulness versus Megadeth when Ian Prattis visits his art school son. Will hope triumph over heroin? My preparation for "The Heart of the Buddha," a retreat I did with Thich Nhat Hanh a few years ago at Plum Village in France, was not at all what I had anticipated. My eighteen-year-old son, Alexander, was studying at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, and my [...]
