ZEN: Roshi Joan Halifax (video)

Wisdom Quarterly; Krista Tippett (onbeing.org, 12-26-13), Roshi Joan Halifax (upaya.org)

"The craft of loving-kindness is the everyday face of wisdom and the ordinary hand of compassion. This wisdom face, this hand of mercy, is never realized alone but always with and through others." - Roshi Joan Halifax (upaya.org)

 

Joan Halifax on Compassion's Edge States and Caring Better

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by all the bad news and horrific pictures in the world. This is a form of empathy, Joan Halifax says, that works against us. The Zen abbess (Upaya.org) and medical anthropologist has bracing, nourishing thoughts on finding buoyancy rather than burnout -- or compassion fatigue -- in how we work, live, and care.

• Unedited interview: Joan Halifax
• Radio Show/Podcast (MP3, 51:06) 
• Learn More about the Show

(Library of Congress) Joan Halifax talks about empathy and compassion

on the part of caregivers who are tending to the ill and dying. 

Joan Halifax Roshi is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priestess, medical anthropologist, and author. She is founder, abbess, and head teacher of Upaya Zen Center, a Buddhist monastery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has worked in the area of death and dying for over 30 years and is director of the Project On Being with Dying. For the past 25 years, she has been active in environmental work.

• Free energy will transform and save the world
• Guardian angels (devas) or psychological aberration?
• Padmanadi vegan restaurant Edmonton, Alberta

The C-Word Monologues (video)

Wisdom Quarterly; Eve Ensler (eveensler.org), Krista Tippett (OnBeing.org, 11-14-13)

Buddhist Eve Ensler has helped women all over the world tell the stories of their lives through the stories of their bodies. Her play, The Vagina Monologues, has become a global force in the face of violence against women and girls. She herself also had a violent childhood. And it turns out that she herself was like so many of us Western women, obsessed with our bodies and yet not inhabiting them -- without even knowing we were not inhabiting them. Until she got a wake up call from that unspeakable C-word, cancer.

• A Second Wind in Life: Inhabiting the body after cancer
• LISTEN (Radio/Podcast) | Learn more about the show
• V Day, global movement to end violence against females
• The "gift" of brain cancer: brief TEDtalk by branding guru Stacey Kramer is three minutes, inspirational, and has punch.
  

Loving Kindness with Sylvia Boorstein (video)

Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; Trent Gilliss (OnBeing.org, May 7, 2011)

Extending love (metta) to all quarters of the universe? The Dark Universe exhibition displays works that use light and sound to explore the boundaries of awareness (Rene Passet/flickr)

Accomplished Buddhist meditation teach Sylvia Boorstein speaks with Krista Tippett

 

Boorstein (Trent Gilliss/onbeing.org)

In February, On Being partnered with WDET to hold a live event in a quaint suburban village outside of Detroit, USA. The topic was "raising children in complex times."

Host Krista Tippett’s conversation with Sylvia Boorstein was rolling along nicely: Stories were being told, approaches to child-rearing were being shared...

 

Then, unexpectedly, Boorstein (a Jewish Buddhist teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center near San Francisco, California) offered to lead a loving-kindness, or metta, meditation for a crowd of more than 300.

 

How would the crowd react, whose members may never have attended a meditation or mindfulness retreat of any kind? What to expect? What resulted was a magical experience in which the audience fully participated in this unannounced moment of reflection.

If readers are game, On Being offers this video to use as a guided meditation. Will this live experience translate into a fruitful online experience?

Tibetan and Theravada Buddhism (On Being)

Amber Larson, Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Krista Tippett (OnBeing.org, Oct. 31, 2013), Robert Thurman (tibethouse.us), Sharon Salzberg (IMS, InsightLA.org)

The horrific suffering of a deep spa treatment at Mahasukha ("Great Pleasure") at Menla: deep relaxation, Tibetan bell meditation, and *gasp* massage! (tibethouse.us)

  

Krista Tippett (princeton.edu)

On "On Being" this week, congenial host Krista Tippett talks with Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman on "Embracing Our Enemies and Our Suffering." These two legendary American teachers shine a Buddhist light on a classic Christian teaching: love of enemies. Thurman and Salzberg are working together on how we relate to that which makes us feel embattled from without as well, and more importantly, from within. [Why is within more important? What we express is what is inside of us. So when we change our mind, our body and speech follow.]
 

Embracing our enemies?

Sharon Salzberg (Dharma.org)

Sharon Salzberg is a Theravada Buddhist meditation teacher and the cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She is the co-author, with Robert Thurman, of Love Your Enemies. [Who are our "real" enemies? Surely not people and fellow living beings. Rather, if we look underneath the surface to the root of things, the radical (from the Latin, radix, "root") understanding is that it is defilements of the heart/mind like greed, hatred/fear, and delusion that are our real enemies.] Salzberg's other books include Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation, and the forthcoming Real Happiness at Work: Meditations for Accomplishment, Achievement, and Peace.

Salzberg, a pioneering Buddhist teacher of meditation in the US, answers On Being's in-house "wannabe" mindfulness practitioner's questions: techniques and focus, the balance of new technologies with human connection.
 

Robert Thurman (TibetHouse.us)

Robert Thurman, a close personal friend and supporter of the 14th Dalai Lama, is professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. He is also the president of Tibet House US. [But his most celebrated accomplishment may be his co-creation of actress Uma Thurman.] He is the co-author of Love Your Enemies. His other books include Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within, and Inner Revolution. More  LISTEN:

• AUDIO: this show/podcast (learn)

• Every Journey is a Pilgrimage (Bob Thurman)
• VIDEO: Lovingkindness (Metta) Meditation with Sylvia Boorstein The Buddhist author -- co-teacher and long time friend of Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and Joseph Goldstein -- once offered to lead a meditation for 350 folks during a live "On Being" event. The result? It was a magical experience! Try it.
  
• Beyond "Chinatown," 100 years of the L.A. Aqueduct
• LAX shooting to be used as pretext to beef up TSA "security"

KPCC FM, Pasadena (scpr.org) presents comedian David Sedaris

Mindfulness, Suffering, Engaged Buddhism

Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; Thay (Plum Village), Krista Tippett, OnBeing.org, NPR

Mindfulness, Suffering, and Engaged Buddhism

Host Krista Tippett (onbeing.org/CCP)

Vietnamese Zen master, peace activist, and poet Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay, "teacher") was forcibly exiled from his native country more than 40 years ago. On Being (NPR's discussion of faith and existence) visits the Buddhist monk at a Christian conference center in a lakeside setting in rural Wisconsin.

• Listen to the On Being radio show PODCAST
• Learn more On Being (Speaking of Faith)
• Deer Park Monastery, California

ON TOUR NOW (tnhtour.org)

Thay offers stark, gentle wisdom for living in a world of anger and violence. He discusses the concepts of "engaged Buddhism," "being peace," and "mindfulness." This message gets through to violent, hyper-vigilant police officers eager to kill at a moment's notice. Thay agrees to lead them on a Buddhist mindfulness retreat that manages to change their lives and their capacity to carry guns as "warrior" or "fierce" bodhisattvas (beings bent on enlightenment, not as Tippett defines it already enlightened beings staying on Earth). A person may take vows to become a bodhisattva, which generally means refusing enlightenment and liberation for the presumed sake of helping others. It would make more sense to help oneself and others by striving for enlightenment. But such is Mahayana Buddhist logic that martyrdom has been mistaken for a nobler goal. This historical Buddha was a bodhisattva not forestalling his own enlightenment but for the sake of becoming a supremely enlightened teaching buddha. This meant foregoing attaining as a disciple or as a nonteaching (pacceka) buddha. But it never meant dissuading others from attaining or from striving to reach the goal as quickly as humanly possible, bringing the ten perfections to maturity. More

Thich Nhat Hanh comes to Pasadena, CA on Oct. 4, 2013