Aging As a Spiritual Practice

Does meditation still work when you’re old? Of course it does, when done properly and with the right attitude. But I meet many Buddhist meditators these days who say to me, “I’ve been meditating for decades. I’ve been to numerous retreats. When I was young it was fantastic. I felt like I was making tremendous [...]

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Harry Roberts was a part Native American who had spent his youth on a Yurok reservation in Northern California, training with his Yurok uncle in how to be a medicine man. When I lived at Green Gulch Zen Temple in the 1970s, Harry, by then in his 70s, served as a farm adviser, horticulturalist and down-to-earth [...]

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The night that Osama bin laden was killed, I found myself feeling relieved — even a bit glad. I examined those feelings and wondered: Were these feelings consistent with my Buddhist commitment to peace, compassion and forgiveness? I wasn’t sure, but my feelings were my feelings. The next day I read that the Dalai Lama appeared to [...]

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Vacchagotta — Vaccha for short — was one of the many religious wanderers whose spiritual dialogue with Gautama the Buddha is recorded in Buddhist scripture (the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta). Vaccha was full of questions, particularly about the soul. The soul — or atman in the language of ancient India — was thought at the time to be the eternal [...]

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Once, when I was on a live radio show being interviewed by a Christian talk show host, her first question to me was, “Do you Buddhists believe in God?”I had only a few seconds to think of an answer. “Yes,” I said. “Good!” the host said. “And how do you pray?” I said that we [...]

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As I am now blogging regularly on Huffington Post, it does not seem practical to try to post separately on this blog as well as on that one.  So with this post I am merging the two.  To maintain compatibility with this blog location, and to retain the email notifications of new posts that many [...]

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I have written before about the Buddhist precept concerning anger.  The precept says, “Don’t harbor ill-will.”  It doesn’t say “don’t have ill-will” or “you are a bad person if you get angry.”  The word “harbor” is very precise.  Harbor means to protect, to enfold, to nourish.  As one contemporary Tibetan Buddhist teacher said concerning harboring, [...]

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I have written before about Buddhism’s Five Great Fears; they are fear of death, fear of illness, fear of losing your mind, fear of loss of livelihood, and fear of public speaking.  I think that reason Buddhism calls these “great” fears is because each of them mobilizes the full force of our nervous systems’ threat [...]

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