Turning: Everyday Buddhism

Join me for a conversation with Arlene Faulk, as we talk about the ups and downs of living with the symptoms, diagnosis, and eventual healing of Multiple Sclerosis. Arlene went from a career as business executive to a calling as a Tai Chi teacher.  ​ Arlene captured her dramatic personal story in a memoir, Walking on Pins and Needles: A Memoir of Chronic Resilience in the Face of Multiple Sclerosi...

In the next two episodes, Episode 72 and Episode 73, I am in conversation with two amazing women who demonstrate with their lives how we can actively accept what seems unacceptable. Although these episodes represent something out of the ordinary for this podcast, they illustrate, in sharp detail, how everything changes and things that we don't want to happen to us WILL happen to us. After these tw...

Enjoy a preview of a NEW Members Only Feature: Bonus Contemplation Podcasts. These are short podcasts for you to use as subjects for contemplation or analytical meditation. They will be released regularly and presented by myself or some of my Bright Dawn Lay Minister/lay ministry student friends and colleagues. To be sure you don't miss any of them, join the Everyday Buddhism Membership Community:...

Rev. Gyomay Kubose, my teacher's father, wrote about "purposeless purpose." He said: "T oo much intelligence or too much efficiency can create trouble. So, we must learn non-intelligence, which is super intelligence. " Does that sound nonsensical? Our sangha is studying The Diamond Sutra now and it is filled with reasoning (or non reasoning?) like that. It is the the superpower of the Dharma becau...

In the past year I've noticed a feeling of "disappearing" in the world ... and to the world. A sense of my slipping relevance to the people and world around me. Yet, the good news about seeming to disappear is that it reveals the absolute truth of things as they are. Am I disappearing or am I transcending? It's a simple twist of the head. A change in perception. A change in awareness that I realiz...

My teacher, mentor, and friend, Rev. Sunnan Koyo Kubose passed away suddenly last month. In his honor, I'm replaying Episode 20, a special interview with him, as the first of a series of episodes dedicated to honoring my teachers. It is through Bright Dawn and my Sensei, I learned how to bring Buddhism into the everyday. Listen as we discuss what the Bright Dawn Center of Oneness Buddhism and its...

Join me for a delightful conversation with Vanessa Sasson who told the Buddha's story in a way you probably never heard it. She masterfully places you in the lives of Siddhartha and his wife, Yasodhara, as Siddhartha comes to grips with suffering for the first time. His obsession with ridding the world of the suffering that so many accept as part of life, is his calling. Sasson's calling was to wr...

Join me for a fascinating conversation with Arthur Brooks, where we talk about two of his 12 books, Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of Contempt and From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life , his new book just released this week. Because we talk about both books, it is a wide-ranging conversation, but I...

In this podcast, I talk with Pamela Patton, Director of Pastoral Ministries for All Souls NYC. Pamela is a both a Unitarian Universalist and a Buddhist and she founded the Buddhism and Mindfulness program at the popular Unitarian Universalist church, All Souls, in Manhattan. In a wide-reaching conversation, we talked—among other things—about how important it is to keep your own practice strong if...

In this episode, we celebrate the Winter Solstice, Bodhi Day, and the light of the Buddha's Promise, meaning our enlightenment, too. The message of the December darkness is a messenger of our own enlightenment. As Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote, "having discovered for himself the perfect peace of liberation, he kindles for us the light of knowledge, which reveals both the truths that we must see for ourselve...

Join me for an absorbing and inspiring conversation with someone who I now consider a personal teacher : Kaira Jewel Lingo, the author of the just-released book, We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons on Moving Through Change, Loss, and Disruption. Kaira Jewel is a gentle voice that quietly shares the deepest wisdom in the simplest way. It is my favorite kind of teaching. It shifts and moves in...

In this special repeat episode, we'll look at the overlaps between the pagan origination, rituals, and concepts of Halloween and Tibetan Tantric or Vajrayana Buddhism ... and also examine it all from an Everyday Buddhism perspective. What scares you? What do you NOT want to look at? What masks do you wear? Do you show yourself as someone without a shadow or demon side? Is the so-called "spirituali...

I can't stop talking about equanimity. So this episode is about the magic power of equanimity. What is it? Why is it important all the the time, but especially now? And how do we get it? As I've mentioned in previous episodes, I've been focusing my practice on developing equanimity and compassion. In this episode, I share some of the things that have been helping me find balance and a bit more spa...

Join me for a conversation with Scott Snibbe, the host of the podcast, A Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment . Enjoy a free-flowing conversation between two long-time Buddhist practitioners and podcast hosts as we talk about the power of Buddhism and meditation to help enhance our good qualities, make us happier, and—ultimately—help make those around us happier. Enjoy Scott's easy and fun style of exp...

To reiterate the obvious, life has been hard lately. Depressing and a struggle for many and devastating for so many others. All this suffering around us: plagues, violence, floods, fires. And those of you who follow this podcast know, I've been looking at how we might find a way to help ourselves and others through all this from many different Buddhist-oriented approaches. Finally, though, I perso...

Join the conversation with one of my first teachers, Frank Howard, as we talk about a little book called The 37 Practices of Bodhisattvas . I first met this book at the Dharma Center Frank directs and teaches, where His Eminence Garchen Rinpoche is a visiting teacher. Garchen Rinpoche says the entire Buddhist path can be found in the little book of The 37 Practices of Bodhisattvas . Rinpoche had o...

Join me for a conversation—and a gentle teaching—with one of the most clear and inspiring teachers I've met. Rebecca Li, the author of Allow Joy into Our Hearts: Chan Practice in Uncertain Times , talks with me about her new book and the inspiration behind it. I used her book—and will continue to use it—to help pull myself from falling into a dark world in my mind and a heart, as a response to the...

It seems, sometimes, that when Buddhist and other religious teachers, and serious practitioners get deeper into practice, the more they seem capable of deluding themselves —either in a performative way, posing and positioning for others, or because they have completely deluded themselves about what is really happening within them. They hide their humanness behind the beauty and strength of their w...

Buddhist sutras and teachings speak of lamenting only in ways that highlight how it is to be avoided and transcended, so as not to fall victim to the second arrow of suffering. The Buddha's teaching that there is dukkha, or unsatisfactoriness, but suffering is optional through one's internal relationship to that dukkha. He teaches that is enough. But is it? I bet, at some time during the last year...

Join us for this introduction of an Everyday Buddhism spin-off podcast! Follow the conversation of 4 friends: Holly Rockwell, a spiritual director and Ignatian prayer guide; Levi Shinyo Walbert Sensei, a Buddhist Lay Minister and seminary student pursuing chaplaincy and a Master of Divinity; Christopher Kakuyo Ross-Leibow Sensei, a Buddhist Lay Minister and sangha leader of the Salt Lake Buddhist...

Join me as I share my struggle finding some peace in the midst of the uncertainties that have chased us from 2020 into 2021. Despite our urge to run, hide, strike out, or curl up in a ball, as Buddhists we need to remember that the Buddha never promised a rose garden. The Buddha never promised an ordered universe. He said life is suffering because we grasp to life being something other than it is....

In this episode we are continuing our "How I'm Coping" series but with a bit of a different twist. I've brought together two podcast listeners who expressed a different perspective on how they are coping with the pandemic. Both of them come to their current coping abilities through previous "practice" as people with serious long-term health issues. We share many of the challenges, frustrations, fe...

In this podcast, we'll explore finding ways to say "thank you" in this time of loss, fear, despair, and uncertainty. I take some time reflecting on the Buddhist teachings of the gift of our "precious human life." Our lives are a gift. We did not plan, arrange, or have any control in making our births happen. We were gifted them. And, for that gift, despite how rocky our lives sometimes seem, we sa...

Join me in conversation with Kimberly Brown as we discuss her new book, Steady, Calm and Brave , a handbook of healing tools to help us through the fraught times of 2020—and beyond. In a delightfully honest and personal conversation, Kimberly shares how seeing students, friends, neighbors, and family afraid, disheartened, and sad, at the beginning of the pandemic was the motivation for writing the...

"When you look around you it feels like the world is going crazy.... Is this normal or have we all fallen under some spell?" ~Tristan Harris In this episode I take a Buddhist view on the spell we've fallen under— and it is the spell of a self-involved culture, swallowed by social media and focused on the hatred of "the other." We are largely living in a world of the extremes of ignorance and false...