Buddhism

A place full of surprises! — Peering out of the cab window, a sharp, cool breeze welcomed me. It seemed to take all the big city worries off my mind. McLeodganj, lovingly called Meclo by the locals, is a little town in Himachal Pradesh, a hilly state in the north of India. This place stands out…

Inspiration to help you transform attitudes and assumptions that block your happiness — We all long for happiness, don’t we? But often our actions are misaligned with our goal. So we end up creating suffering for ourselves instead. Popular author and meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg ties real happiness to mindfulness and awareness. Salzberg has taught Vipassana meditation since 1974—close to fifty years. And…

Forgiving others has been a difficult task for me in the past. Despite my strong desire to forgive someone and remove the burden from my shoulders, there was something missing from my process of forgiveness. It took me years and a lot of self-reflection to realize that there was one stop I didn’t visit before reaching the other person’s station: myself. I…

I come to Berlin quite frequently this year. And since I am very interested in Asian culture — and especially anything that is related to Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions of the area — I decided to book a tour in the Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Museum for Asian Art)…

Good morning, good people! Yesterday I shared with you one of the practical life guidelines that have collected over the years as I’ve gone along through life in my clumsy way and have learned from the various failures that have happened and mistakes that I’ve made. You have your own…

Chemicals are a legitimate, if limited, technique for expanding awareness, and just one avenue among many for achieving altered states. Ram Dass, whose spirituality was strongly inspired by his experiences with psychedelics, was told by his guru, “these medicines let you spend a couple of hours with God, but then…

Consciously connecting these two can shift the ‘blah’ moments of early sobriety — Month four and month five of sobriety were tough. It’s not that I wanted to drink, exactly. But I wanted to feel relief from the smothering flatness I felt. Having been at this point a few times, I knew that I had to sit with it. I knew that picking…

(unpoems from Dōgen Zenji’s waka) — There is a particular poem that keeps popping up in my mind, in even the most inconvenient of circumstances. Imagine. …

Our Delimiting Minds —