Yo, Mr. B,
Hey, man. Thanks for reading this. I know you probably get, like, lots of mail and stuff, and you’re probably super busy, so thank you. Maybe you won’t even see this. I don’t know... whatever.
So, I heard about...
Yeah. I'll admit it. I watch Mob Wives - "a docu-soap series that follows the lives of four women at a crossroads, having to pick up the pieces and carry on while their husbands or fathers do time for Mob-related activities."...
I just read Ethan's post, The Well-Adjusted Nazi and Buddhist Practice and thought immediatley about Herb Kohl, a progressive educator whose book, "I Won't Learn from You:" and Other Thoughts on Creative Maladjustment, I return...
I'm in the very extraordinary Kolkata, India, where I'm traveling for the next week with a very extraordinary client on a very extraordinary TV project. More to come on that later. We spent a good part of the day yesterday visiting with...
What, exactly, does the line that begins so many buddhist sutras, "Thus have I heard," mean about what follows? How precisely do we transmit the buddha's teachings when we hear and repeat them? Is oral teaching just a giant game of...
You do not have to be a Buddhist to take refuge in the teachings of the Three Jewels, the Four Noble Truths and the Five Precepts. These are simple straightforward concepts that serve us well in times of great strife, great pain, great joy...
What does it mean to "give up" on someone? Does it mean cutting them out of your life? Does it mean living with them and hating everything they say and do? Does it mean wishing they were someone...
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I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a sane, awake, mature person in a society with at least some troubling conventional modes of behavior, which we accept as natural and...
It took me quite some time to discard the concept that everything I do is being rated and tallied up somewhere up there, and once I die I’ll either go to Heaven, Hell or that in-between Limbo place where I’ll have to endure some vague...
Mahayana Buddhism is built around the idea of bodhicitta. ‘Bodhi’ means ‘awake’ or ‘awakening’ and ‘citta’ can mean either heart or mind. So bodhicitta literally means ‘awakened heart’ or...
In The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “The Buddha expressed Interdependent Co-Arising very simply: ‘This is, because that is. This is not, because that is not. This comes to be, because that comes to be....
This time of year can be challenging for those of us who are teachers. After a long semester of talking, talking, and talking some more—throwing in some meaningful gesticulations, working hard to avoid death by powerpoint, and with...
I am not a mother. And though I’d very much like to be one someday, lately I’ve been strongly identifying as “not-a-mother.” Being not-a-mother, I eat cheese and pears for dinner, stay up late, and wake up on my...
This week I am thinking about Mèxico. Not the place where we may have attended a Yoga or meditation retreat or relaxed at a resort for a few days. I appreciate that version of Mexico and I practice tolerance of how we Americans...
Hope a four letter word
I wonder if the Buddha would think that “hope” was a four letter word. Or is it the way we allow the definition of hope to shape how we see our reality the one to analyze? Hope...
In my experience as a meditator, an overly active imagination has led to confusion and pain as much as it has led to interesting and beautiful works of art.
I'm super stoked about my medallion status on Delta Airlines. As I write this, I'm in the air earning the MQMs I need to achieve Platinum status on Delta. That's 75,000 Medallion Qualification Miles, which entitles me to a whole host...
