You are a warrior when you have the bravery to face who you are, without fear, embarassment, or denial. This warriorship is the basis of the spiritual path, says Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Through the practice of sitting meditation, the warrior discovers basic goodness. Introduction by Pema Chödrön. Introduction by Pema Chödrön For me, contemplating the teachings of Chögyam [...]
Becoming Pema
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, [...]
The Natural Warmth of the Heart
In the difficulties of your life, says Pema Chödrön, you will discover your natural love and warmth. Before we can know what natural warmth really is, often we must experience loss. We go along for years moving through our days, propelled by habit, taking life pretty much for granted. Then we or someone dear to us has an accident or gets seriously ill, and it’s as if blinders [...]
The Myth of Permanence
No matter how hard we try to solidify our lives, says Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, nothing stays the same or lasts forever. Our denial of that basic truth is the reason we suffer. Human beings always want something. We are continually looking for pleasure and we are rarely satisfied with what we have. Even being able to afford a great vacation is not what we thought it was [...]
Huston Smith’s Fifty Years on the Razor’s Edge
In his 2009 profile, Barry Boyce visits Huston Smith, the renowned spiritual explorer who brought an insider’s knowledge of the world’s religions to a narrow-minded West and defined comparative religion as we know it today. There was nothing comparative about religion in 1950s America. Your religion was right. Others were wrong. The familiar religions were a [...]
The Mindful Society: Practicing with Cancer
Barry Boyce's Mindful Society column about Elana Rosenbaum, who used mindfulness practice to help herself through cancer treatment. In the spring of 1995, when she had been teaching Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction for eleven years, Elana Rosenbaum (left) was diagnosed with non-hodgkin’s lymphoma. Rosenbaum’s cancer led her to many arduous courses of treatment, including a [...]
Editorial: The Long Road Home
The editorial introduction to the November 2009 issue of Lion's Roar magazine by Liam Lindsay, Associate Editor of the Lion's Roar. Before I left California late last year to join the Shambhala Sun, I called a Buddhist friend to share my excitement. “Ooooooo!” she exclaimed. “You’re going to see Pema!” I said, “Well, I don’t know about that.” But, as it turns out, I did. [...]
The Hard Work of Dying
Simplifying, forgiving, and letting go — Stan Goldberg on working toward the good death. Imagine you’re preparing for a trip to a foreign country and you’re limited to taking only what can be carried in a backpack. Your decisions on what to take and what to leave behind will determine the quality of your experience. Too many items and the weight will be burdensome. Not [...]
First Light
Diane Ackerman, best-selling author of A Natural History of the Senses, offers a series of meditations on dawn and decay, koans and creation. A Dawning Pleasure At dawn, the world rises out of darkness, slowly, sense-grain by grain, as if from sleep. Life becomes visible once again. "When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can't think anymore," Claude [...]
A Heart Afire
A Heart Afire: Stories and Teachings of the Early Hasidic Masters By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Netanel Miles-Yepez The Jewish Publishing Society of America, 2009; 406 pp.; $45 (cloth) Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian By Paul F. Knitter Oneworld Publications, 2009; 336 pp.; $22.95 (paper) The question of how one understands and relates to the divine in the [...]
