A three-step contemplation to give yourself the compassion you need (and deserve).
Three Methods for Working with Chaos
Pema Chödrön describes three ways to use our problems as the path to awakening and joy.
Be Free of Suffering
Pema Chödrön offers a bodhicitta practice for generating love and compassion for all human beings.
The Middle Way of Stress
Life is stressful. Although some people claim that contemporary life is especially stressful, I am skeptical whether that is so. Living beings have always had to struggle for food, for shelter, and for safety. They have always had the stress of finding a mate and reproducing. The world is no Garden of Eden.
On Suffering and the End of Suffering
Sharon Salzberg on opening to the truth of suffering, the core of the Buddha’s teaching.
Forever Offline
Melvin Escobar on dealing with the loss of a virtual friend.
The First Noble Truth of Baseball
In the Baseball Sutra, recently discovered by scholar Donald Lopez, the Buddha explains why he created a game where suffering and failure are the norm.
The Right Way to Reach the Top
We have a whole system built on striving and it causes a lot of suffering—anxiety, competition, misplaced priorities. Brad Stulberg looks at ways we can change our stressful striving into right effort.
The Fifth Sight: The Suffering of Injustice
To the Buddhism’s traditional four causes of suffering we must now add a fifth: the suffering caused by racism, sexism, poverty, and all the other forms of human injustice. Only when seeing that clearly, says Ann Gleig, will our compassion will be complete.
The Heart of Good Spiritual Friends
When we are with others in times of suffering, says contemplative care expert Koshin Paley Ellison, we can take the four noble truths as our guide.