January 9th, 2017 How I Ended my Chronic Anxiety and Depression with Buddhist Practice
Part I
In my early thirties, after having spent years exploring which spiritual path I wanted to pursue in life, I decided to βpiss or get off the potβ and went to the Karma Choling center in Vermont for a meditation retreat with a nun and teacher in the Nyingma and Kagyu traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. Named Khandro Rinpoche, this nun is said to be one of many embodiments of Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal, one of the few females among the founding figures of Tibetan Buddhism 1300 years ago. But when I went to Karma Choling for the first time, it was around 1993. I was having a hard time with a relationship, and my mind, and teetering on the edge of what they used to call a nervous breakdown.
Continue reading Prison of Thoughts
January 6th, 2017 Tibetan Mandalas: Are they really what you think they are?
Encountering Tibetan Art
In the late 1990βs my Mom and I visited the Tibetan Buddhist art collection within the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Mom was a minister of Spiritual Science and a voracious reader of all the mystery traditions of the world. There were, seemingly, no great mystics of the 1970βs and 80βs who she had not encountered, from Ram Dass to the Dalai Lama and the Karmapa. She had traveled to India and Nepal and the stupa complex at Borobudur, Indonesia. She was also a great art appreciator, from her college days where she majored in Art History, to her years of scouring every gallery at the Smithsonian near our home in Washington, perusing every visiting collection, including the Sackler and Freer Galleries that display fine examples of Himalayan scroll paintings (thanka) depicting a traditional deity mandalas. But her comments made me realize something shocking: My mother had no idea what the purpose of the deity mandala we were looking at was.
Continue reading Tibetan Mandalas
January 4th, 2017 Pema Osel Ling Retreat Center
Imagine yourself in a stunning temple below towering redwoods. You are surrounded by men and women who are meditating, praying and conducting powerful ceremonies exactly as the yogis of Tibet have done for over a thousand years. In a moment, cymbals crash together, drums beat, and wind instruments resound, vibrating the bones in your body, eliminating any tendency to slumber.
The people are kind, humble, quiet and sincere, yet possessing all the quirks of human beings. The guy next to you has completed seven years in cloistered retreat. The woman in front of you just walked in yesterday.
Continue reading Jewel in the Redwoods
January 1st, 2017 Eleven Wonderful Reasons to Practice Tibetan Buddhism
The four messengers bowed deeply before the renowned meditator and Buddhist scholar. They offered two gifts: gold dust and a golden bowl. Following the bestowal came a request. Would he travel to a remote mountainous area far to the northeast and trounce the negative forces that were preventing the establishment of the first Buddhist monastery in the region? The sender of the message was the king of that region now known as central Tibet. The receiver was known by many names, mainly βthe Lotus Born,β Padmasambhava. The year was 810 CE. And so began a trek that delivered the most effective Buddhist spiritual practices, along with connected teachings on how to understand and put them into practice, from ancient India, first to Nepal, then Tibet, and now to your doorstep.
Continue reading Reasons to Practice
July 17th, 2016 Brain-eating Amoebas
You donβt want brain-eating amoebas in your skull, right?
Yeah. Me neither.
I also donβt want all the meaning to be sucked out of my life, to shuffle through life according to someone elseβs script. So, I havenβt. In the first part of my life I explored what it would mean to pursue social change and healing with alternative medicine with all my heartβ¦ as best I could figure out how to do that.
Continue reading Brain-eating Amoebas
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