Valentine’s Day this year marks the 40th anniversary of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS). The retreat center was founded in 1976 by Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Jack Kornfield. The three first met in 1974, after each had returned from their studies in Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia. They founded IMS two years later in Barre, Massachusetts, and went on to become among the most prominent Vipassana teachers in the West. Since then, IMS has hosted tens of thousands of people on retreat.

“We’ve gone from the days in the beginning when the teachers were teaching and doing the cooking, plumbing, and registration,” said Linda Spink, who joined the center in 2006 and has served as its executive director for the last two and a half years. “And as things became larger and the demands on the organization became greater, we really have created a structure that attracts people who are incredibly qualified and committed.”

Tricycle’s web editor, Wendy Joan Biddlecombe, recently spoke with Spink on IMS’s important role in spreading the dharma.

Can you speak about some of the highlights so far during your tenure as executive director and tell us what you’ve got planned for IMS’s 40th year?

The highlights are just coming to work every day. I walk out from the parking lot and come up the hill, and as I do I enter that quiet, silent space of the retreat, and I can feel my body sinking into that energy. It’s pretty awesome that we’ve been here for 40 years offering retreats.

The first 40 years have really been about helping to establish the dharma in the West and understanding what it takes to support people who engage in long-term practice. As I look to the future, I’m inspired, because I think the next 40 years will be about increasing the accessibility of the dharma to all.

Related: Who Knows? An interview with Joseph Goldstein 

What are some of the ways IMS can help increase accessibility?

There are some very specific initiatives. One of them is directly addressing the need for new teachers. A lot of our teachers are reaching a period in their life when they want to cut back on formal teaching and do more personal practice. So we need to be doing all we can to identify, train, and support the next generation.

The teachers in the early days had challenges—I think that was a time when people weren’t even taking meditation seriously. So they had to figure out if people would come and what a retreat would look like. The challenges going forward are different. There’s a proliferation of mindfulness-practice opportunities. We’re trying to increase the dialogue with the new and up-and-coming teachers, increase our financial assistance as best we can for people who are in training programs or are assistants, and really work with them to establish IMS as their spiritual home and a place where they want to teach.

Can you speak more on IMS’s commitment to increasing diversity?

We’re investing energy and resources in creating a safe, welcoming, and inclusive environment for young people of color and LGBTIQ people who will hopefully come to IMS in greater numbers. We have work to do in understanding the place of silent retreat in the lives of young people and what’s going to appeal to them. And for people of color, how to help them feel welcome, respected, and included in the dharma here.

IMS has been offering people of color retreats for the last 10 years. Is the center planning to continue the “separate” retreats or work toward “integration”?

We’ve been very fortunate over the years to have a growing number of people sitting at our people of color retreats, and they are well attended. We’re going to continue to offer those because there’s a need for people to know that they can come and practice with a group of other people who have similar experiences. We’ve started the LGBTIQ retreat for the same reason. If you’re one of three people out of 100 who are persons of color or gay, retreats can be awkward, uncomfortable, and frustrating.

At the same time we’re working so that there’s a greater sense of safety and welcome in the other retreats. We want our white teachers to incorporate diversity issues in their dharma talks to establish that sense of welcome and support. And we definitely need to have more people of color as teachers, because doing so will communicate that “it’s okay for me to come to this retreat because the people up there teaching reflect me and have had similar life experiences that I have had.”

Related: Does Race Matter in the Meditation Hall?  

I was looking back at a Tricycle interview with Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Jack Kornfield for IMS’ 30th anniversary. Joseph said it was “good timing” when they started IMS, because they “caught a great wave of interest.” With the recent surge of mindfulness, are we riding a new wave?

I don’t think the wave has ever gone away; it’s continually grown. Meditation is a hot item. It’s in. And that’s not a problem for us. We’re excited because more people are being introduced to it. What we want to do is to continue offering a deeper understanding of meditation—the teachings behind meditation and how to reduce suffering. We think more and more people will want to come here for deeper practice, versus something that’s just a temporary technique that helps you get through the day.  

Related: Roundtable: Through Good Times and Bad

When Alana Siegel moves into a retreat center in the Santa Cruz mountains of California next month, she will be pursuing a monastic dream that she has been thinking about since she was in college.

Siegel, 30, was first drawn to the idea of going on a three-year retreat while she was still at Bard College, inspired by the experiences of one of her professors and his wife. She decided, however, that she needed to see more of the world and get a job before pursuing a retreat.

“The same intensity that was geared toward going on retreat—all that energy was put into the intensity of being a poet, which is its own strange form of retreat,” Siegel said. “I’ve had to have this whole patchwork of jobs—[I’ve been a] substitute teacher, I sit for art classes, I’ve been a hostess— trying to do whatever I can to get by.”

Since moving to the Bay Area five years ago, Siegel has sat on 10-day and shorter retreats and focused her efforts on connecting with the Nyingma lineage and tradition.

So far, Siegel has raised more than $4,000 of the $40,000 she needs for room and board for the next three years. She is building a pool of monthly sponsors and has also applied for two grants that she hopes will help with the costs. 

“The monastic impulse has always been really strong in me, the choice of isolation,” Siegel said. “And hopefully, I can live a long life and carry on what I cultivate in retreat.”

Siegel is accepting donations on her Indiegogo page. For a $100 pledge, Siegel promises to write you a 100-word prayer on any subject that you choose, and you’ll receive a copy of her book, Archipelago. Siegel is also writing briefer poems and prayers, as well as giving away packages of her personal library for smaller donations.

“People in academia get sabbaticals, but people in other jobs don’t get what could be equivalent to a sabbatical, and I wish people could . . . I feel that it would strengthen relationships to work,” Siegel said. 

Buddhist “rock star nun” Ani Choying Drolma is playing two concerts in the United States to raise money for the victims of Nepal’s 2015 earthquake.

Nepal continues to rebuild following a series of major earthquakes last April and May. With the death toll exceeding 8,500, the disaster was the deadliest on record, Reuters reported.

After the earthquake, everyone became active,” Ani Choying said in an interview with Tricycle. “People on the street would say: ‘Where are you going next tomorrow? Can I join?’”

Ani Choying said that the main obstacles to rebuilding are government bureaucracy and a lack of roads and other infrastructure.

“It’s taking time,” said the nun, who lost her home in the earthquake. “But . . . just being angry [at the government] and criticizing is not enough. [The slow process of rebuilding] actually gives us more energy and enthusiasm to become more active.”

The concert is organized with Grassroot Movement in Nepal (GMIN), a nonprofit that has worked in 126 villages and assisted 7,563 households. A series of concerts through the summer will help GMIN continue fundraising.

Ani Choying will perform at 8 p.m. on March 26 at Queens College’s Colden Auditorium in Flushing. Tickets range from $25 to $100.

She is also scheduled to play at 7 p.m. on April 2 at the Lisner Auditorium in Washington D.C. 

Tickets for both the New York and DC events are available at http://www.anichoyinginusa.com.

Watch Ani Choying discuss the largest obstacles for the relief effort:

Ani Choying Drolma was filmed at New York Insight Meditation Center

Related: Topping the Charts for Freedom: Ani Choying Drolma, Nepal’s famous “singing nun,” speaks about childhood abuse, the joys of doing good, and her Top 10 hit as a recording artist

Many Buddhist sculptures, paintings, and other works in the Rubin Museum of Art’s collection have a long and varied history, with some used for meditative practice in shrines or as a visual focal point for the faithful.

This inherent contemplative tradition makes the Rubin’s collection a perfect fit for Slow Art Day 2016, an international celebration held on April 9 that encourages visitors to slow down and view different pieces of art for a full 10 minutes each. There are 166 museums participating this year, and Slow Art Day started in 2008.

Dominique Townsend, the assistant director of interpretation and engagement at the New York City museum, said the idea is a “radical shift” from the way many people relate to art in galleries. Recalling last year’s Slow Art Day, she said it was “clear [visitors were] operating on a different mode than the people who pass through the galleries.”

The museum has selected five pieces of art to contemplate. Visitors can view the art with a guide and attend a formal talk afterwards. Townsend said visitors are also encouraged to view the art at their own pace, perhaps setting a timer on their smartphone and engaging with other gallery visitors about their experience.

Townsend, who has given countless tours to visitors of varying ages, said she had a completely new experience when she spent 10 minutes with one of the pieces featured in Slow Art Day: “Tara Protecting from the 8 Fears,” a 19th-century cloth painting from Kham Province in eastern Tibet.

“I was aware of things like movement in paintings—the almost subtle quality of animation in some figures—and the sheer magnetism of the central figure. I knew I had plenty of time, I was not rushing, and the central figure really held my gaze in a powerful way,” she said. “Most people sit for 10 minutes and have the feeling that they’re ready to move on, but it’s interesting to challenge yourself to see where you go when you go deeper.”

Slow Art day is free with admission. More information on the event is available here. 

Burmese Vipassana master Sayadaw U Pandita died last Saturday at a Bangkok hospital. He was 94 years old, and served as the abbot Panditarama Monastery and Meditation Center in Yangon (Rangoon).

U Pandita gained many Western followers after he traveled to the United States in 1984 to lead a three-month silent retreat at Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. IMS co-founders Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein remain deeply influenced by his teachings, which were characterized by rigorous attention to the present moment and an uncommon perseverance. U Pandita is the author of several books, including In This Very Life: The Liberation Teachings of the Buddha.

“Within minutes of meeting him at the Mahasi Meditation Center in Burma in 1979 I knew that I had met the reason I was born,” Alan Clements, one of U Pandita’s first Western students, told Tricycle. “He engaged me in truth, beauty and freedom like no other; bringing out the best in me, inspiring the courage to polish the rest. He remained my most trusted source of wisdom-guidance for the next 37 years.”

In February, Clements spent eight nights interviewing U Pandita at the monastery, and Clements said his teacher spoke about lovingkindness in action and his student Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s de facto leader, whom he supported spiritually during her house arrest.

Devotees can pay their respects at Shwe Taun Gon Sasana Yeiktha until April 20. After that, his body will be taken to the Panditarama Hse Mine Gon Forest Meditation Center for his cremation and burial on April 22.

Read more from Sayadaw U Pandita:

A Perfect Balance: Cultivating equanimity with Gil Fronsdal and Sayadaw U Pandita

Cutting to the Case: Sayadaw U Pandita provides straightforward instructions for the personal interview process typical during a Vipassana retreat 

When you walk into MNDFL, the bustle of New York City melts away.

The meditation studio, in Greenwich Village, is fragrant, clean, white, minimal, and modern. Before class, practitioners sit on couches, mingle, and sip tea. The gray cushions are embroidered with MNDFL’s logo. There’s a small retail area where you can purchase scents and T-shirts, as well as books written or recommended by MNDFL’s nearly 30 teachers.

Is this what practitioners are paying for? The meditation center, which describes itself as “nondenominational,” charges $10 for a first-time class and $15 for a drop-in. Monthly memberships cost $150 (MNDFUL previously charged $200 but lowered the price in March), and if you complete a 30-day meditation challenge, your next month is free. A subscription also gets you unlimited access to one of the meditation rooms for self-guided meditation. Classes are either 30 or 45 minutes, and meditators can choose from more than 10 different themes, including breath, sound, movement, intention, and meditation for mothers and children. Students receive an introduction and a guided meditation and are encouraged to ask questions at the end of the session.

MNDFL opened its doors in November 2015. Chief Spiritual Officer Lodro Rinzler, who teaches in the Shambhala tradition, and Chief Executive Officer Ellie Burrows, a writer and personal development coach, think of MNDFL not as a dharma center but rather as a “midpoint” for those interested in learning meditation from a variety of teachers and techniques.

“We’re always in service, no matter what that means day to day,” Burrows said. “We want to service any New Yorker who struggles with practice and wants to explore meditation in a contemporary context.”

Rinzler and Burrows knew there would be criticism from the outside meditation community regarding the center’s fees.

“I think if people come in here they’ll know our intentions are not based on money; they’re based on making meditation as accessible as possible,” Rinzler told Tricycle. “We’re able to do a lot because of this model that nonprofits are not always able to do. It’s a little bit of a misnomer to say that dharma is free. If someone has a benefactor who would like to buy this location [for us], we would be happy to charge nothing. But this is a Western society, and there are people happy to pay what we think is accessible [affordable].”

MNDFL is likely New York’s first for-profit meditation studio (others already exist on the West Coast). Rinzler and Burrows said that subscriptions to the meditation center allow MNDFL to offer occasional free classes, including classes taught in Spanish, and to provide a place for recovering addicts to meet and meditate. Neither Rinzler nor Burrows takes a salary, but they say they are committed to paying all their teachers—including one monastic—in hopes the instructors will be able to teach meditation as a primary occupation.

“We want to create a space where people can come back every day,” Burrows said. “And that space has rent and lights.”

But—at least within the Buddhist community—the practice of charging for meditation classes has been frowned upon, whether or not the meditation center explicitly identifies itself as Buddhist.

“In terms of history there’s always been patronage,” said Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, abbot of the Village Zendo, referring to the traditional structure of Buddhism in Asia, where monastics are financially supported by laypeople and political leaders in exchange for their religious services. “But patronage was based more on reciprocity than exchange. So I think that’s the huge difference, and we have to get used to it, and make distinctions and be clear about it. I think that’s why it’s so offensive to some people. . . . [It’s becoming like yoga] or your gym.”

Enkyo Roshi said that because we live in a capitalist and monetized society, it’s “incumbent on dharma centers, and not on MNDFL necessarily, to always make clear that this is not an exchange, but a reciprocal giving.”

At the Village Zendo, as at most other dharma centers, practitioners are asked at the end of every practice period to donate for the center’s rent and other expenses. “I think it would make a difference right there—call it a donation, call it dana. Then it’s less defined as a transaction,” Enkyo Roshi said.

For David McMahan, professor of religious studies at Franklin & Marshall College and author of Buddhism in the Modern World, the apprehension that charging for meditation provokes “might be rooted in a somewhat misguided idea” that many Western Buddhist practitioners have of an “idealized, pure Buddhism” of the past that “floated above all economic concern.”

“I’m working out my own attitudes toward it [paying for meditation classes], because it’s new, and it’s something that a lot of people are talking about and a lot of people are asking me to talk about,” McMahan said.

A larger problem might be that meditation without Buddhism, which is being taught in studios such as MNDFL, lacks a “wider context of attitudes, ethical orientations, or philosophical ideas,” according to McMahan. “Without some richer context about what we’re doing when we’re sitting there watching our breath, the effectiveness of mindfulness is diminished,” he said.

For Enkyo Roshi, a sense of community is another part of the context that is lost in an entrepreneurial meditation center. Walking through the Village Zendo, she points out photos of her teachers and members of the sangha who have died.

“This is community. . . . [When] someone’s uncle dies, we put his name on the altar for 49 days and have a memorial service. And sometimes we chant and light incense and give our condolences.” This, Enkyo Roshi said, is something that individualized meditation centers might not be able to offer.

Another issue with the “stripped-down” meditation taught in nondenominational studios, McMahan said, is that meditation has “been presented to the West and the general public like a dry sponge that then soaks up all the values of the mainstream culture.” The potential result, he explained, is that instead of being a “radical tool” for self-reflection, meditation reinforces existing mainstream values.

But the leaders of MNDFL feel that being able to offer a variety of traditions and practices can both help beginners try out what works for them and point those curious for more explanation in the right direction.

“The classes are like a translation process. If I’m sitting there and speaking about the six qualities of the paramitas [perfections], I’m not saying ‘paramitas,’ I’m saying these are six qualities that can help us cultivate compassion,” Rinzler said. “I’d like to think of us as making these traditions jargon-free. And in some sense, we’re totally acknowledging the fact that there are going to be people coming in for meditation who find a spiritual tradition and go deep with that. We may never see them again, or we may see them because they like to sit with us. And there will be some people who just want to do meditation, and we’re here for them. We’re here for both.” 

Pairoj Pichetmetakul doesn’t need a studio. The 33-year-old Thai painter and former monk finds his subjects on the streets of New York City; his muses are the people who sleep on cardboard boxes and in tents, brave the city’s shelters, and depend on spare change to survive.  “My studio is on the street, and I have a very big studio,” Pairoj said.

Pairoj has been painting homeless people on the streets of New York and San Francisco for the past three years. The inspiration for the project, which he calls “The Positivity Scrolls,” started when he saw a homeless man being beaten on a deserted street in San Francisco. He was new to the United States, his English wasn’t strong, and his cell phone had died, so he went home, returning to find the man—unsuccessfully—after a sleepless night.

Ever since then, in an act of penance that has become an artistic exercise, Pairoj gathers his supplies and walks the streets at least once a week. He loads his giant canvas scroll—which weighs more than 100 pounds—into a cart with his art supplies and boards a train to Manhattan from his home in Queens.

Unlike the rest of the city, Pairoj seeks out homeless people, crouching down, introducing himself, showing them photos on his phone of other portraits he’s done, and inviting them to be a part of the series.

Tiffany Thompson agrees to let Pairoj paint her on a cold January day as the sun is setting on a busy corner of 34th Street. After putting out a donation box with a sign that reads “hope for her donations,” Pairoj starts to paint, capturing her furrowed brow and the deep creases in her face with blues and purples.

Thompson says she has been on the streets a few weeks, unable to work because of her breast cancer treatment. She has worked since she was 14, but was recently cleaned out of her savings by one of her children. “If you told me two months ago I’d be here, I’d say, ‘Yeah, right,’ ” Thompson says.

Pairoj paints Thompson for more than an hour. Many people stop to watch. Some give money and leftovers and even help him paint; a few chide him for blocking half the sidewalk during rush hour in one of the busiest intersections in Manhattan. By the end, Thompson is helping Pairoj paint too, adding a flower and a bee as her signature. 

As they hug good-bye, Thompson digs in one of her bags and tosses Pairoj a pair of gloves. “They’re too big for me, and your hands must be freezing.” 

This time last year, Nepal continued to rumble with aftershocks from the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that hit on April 25, killing nearly 9,000 people and leaving an estimated 900,000 homeless.

In the hours, weeks, months, and year since, we’ve heard eyewitness accounts from survivors, and about the bureaucratic obstacles and lack of infrastructure that make the rebuilding process a slow one.

What we haven’t heard, however, are the stories of Nepali and Tibetan women living in America who were deeply impacted by the traumatic event. On Wednesday, 11 women will tell their own stories at an event at the Rubin Museum called “A Letter Home.”

“They got calls asking for assistance from relatives [in Nepal],” said writer Meera Nair, who worked with the women storytellers. “Nobody has any idea of what life is like in America and that [these women] don’t make a lot of money … everyone thinks we’re living in paradise here.”

Nair recently partnered with Nepali social justice organization Adhikaar and Asian American arts programmer Kundiman to teach a four-week writing workshop. Several of the 11 women in the program work in nail salons or as domestic workers. The idea was to process the devastation of the earthquake through writing, and also tap into the strong history of South Asian storytelling—even if the women did not have a formal writing background.

There were a lot of tears during the first of four workshops.

“They talked about leaving home, memories of home, and what ‘home’ means,” Nair said. “It was a huge cathartic moment. One woman told us ‘no one asks us about our home’ and others shared painful stories about not seeing their children in more than 10 years.”

Throughout the four-week workshop, Nair prompted the women using oral history techniques and guided them through writing a letter.  

Two of the women have shared their stories at a reading. The group of 11 will read their letters home for the first time at the Rubin event.  

“These are voices you don’t hear in this country. These women are invisible people who come in and out of your house to clean,” Nair said. “These are people with real stories and they want to tell their stories so people will not see them in the same way ever again. They are so aware of what their role is.”

Tashi Chodron, the Rubin’s assistant manager of Himalayan cultural programs, will lead a tour through the museum before the reading, stopping at strong female Buddhist pieces.

The reading is part of a monthly series called the Himalayan Heritage Program that helps the Himalayan community share their living culture and tradition, and for the friends of the Himalayas to connect with the gallery’s art, Chodron said. 

“A Letter Home” will take place from 6:30-8:30 p.m. on May 4 at the Rubin Museum of Art. Tickets are $13.50 for museum members and $15 for nonmembers. More information at http://rubinmuseum.org/events/event/a-letter-home-05-04-2016.

Every day since early March, cartoonist Vishavjit Singh has slapped a stamp on a postcard and mailed it to Trump Tower in New York City.

Now that Trump’s competition has dropped out, Singh plans to keep mailing the postcards—which include an original message, drawing, or inspirational quote—every day until the November election. (He has yet to receive a response.)

And for Singh, the main rule he has set for himself, and the others who have joined his campaign, is compassion.

“You hear so much anger and vitriol from both sides. Trump is essentially meditating on anger and how to divide people,” said Singh, 45, a cartoonist and performance artist who lives in New York City. “People want to respond [with anger], call him names and his supporters names. I just feel that if you respond with anger, that’s an emotion you’re going to have to live with as well. So I thought it’d be interesting to drop some humor and compassion at times into this whole conversation.”

But Buddhism plays a larger role in Singh’s postcard campaign and personal faith than inspirational quotes. About 15 years ago, Singh’s exploration of Buddhism helped him reconnect with the religion of his birth.

Singh was born in Washington, D.C., to a Sikh family that he said culturally identified with their faith—with men wearing the traditional turban—but not practicing and rarely going to the gurdwara [temple].

Singh said he has lived through two major waves of discrimination in two different countries—first in 1984 when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards, and after 9/11. After moving back to the United States, Singh decided to take off his turban and blend in.

Identifying as an atheist, Singh said he fell in love with books in college, and began exploring philosophical writings of Plato, Nietzsche, and Alan Watts.

“At Berkeley I went to a beautiful book store and I discovered the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, and that had a profound impact on me. It just opened me and my heart to things that are spiritual in nature,” Singh said.

Singh kept exploring Buddhism, and credits that as the first step to reconnecting with Sikhism. About two years after reading Sogyal Rinpoche’s book, Singh donned his turban again in 2001. 

“We might look different and practice different faiths but in our hearts it’s the same light, and the connection I’ve found between Sikhism and Buddhist philosophy is this whole focus that inside our hearts we’re pretty much the same. We’re connected to this presence that permeates everything,” Singh said.

Singh started his #SendSikhNotetoTrump in March. Some postcards include inspirational quotes and words of wisdom from Pema Chödrön and Harriet Tubman. Others are in the style of satire and political cartoons, and not all ooze equanimity.

The first postcard reads:

Dear Mr. Trump.
Your latest business venture is wicked.
Trump Meditation Inc.
Inhale deeply
Imagine all the problems
Visualize an external source
Exhale
Let out your fear and anger
Target President Obama, immigrants,
Muslims and whoever else
Repeat cycle until Election Day
Vote Donald Trump
Kind Regards,
Lucifer

Others show book covers with Trump listed as authors of books such as Frankenstein, Lolita, Confederacy of Dunces, and the Holy Bible.

“There is a tongue and cheek humor in there at times that might be a little less compassionate,” Singh said. “But sometimes we have teachers who have different styles, some are pretty gentle and others are very harsh or stern. So there might be some messages where people say this is not compassion. I’m poking fun at him. I also find the humor does work, rather than calling someone a horrible name.”

If you have a note to send to Trump via Singh, you can do so on his submission page. (And you can tell us what you would write to Trump in the comments below.)

Ultimately Singh says the only way to stop Trump is for Americans to get out and vote. But he hasn’t given up on the power of persuasion.

“Words have an impact. I know my life has changed because of certain words or books. He might seem like someone who is full of himself and his ego, but perhaps he is someone who can be impacted by words, you never know,” Singh said.

Zenkei Blanche Hartman Roshi, the first woman to lead the San Francisco Zen Center, died early this morning. 

Hartman, 90, passed away at a hospital surrounded by her family, according to the San Francisco Zen Center. 

Hartman was born in Alabama in 1926 and started to practice Zen in 1969 at the Berkeley Zen Center. She was a student of Suzuki Roshi, was ordained as a priest in 1977 by Zentatsu Baker, and received dharma transmission from Sojun Mel Weitsman in 1988. 

“Her name was ‘inconceivable joy,’ but I would have also called her ‘fierce joy,’ said Susan O’Connell, president of the San Francisco Zen Center. “She was totally devoted to zazen.” 

Before ordaining, Hartman studied science and engineering and worked as a chemist in California. O’Connell said one of the reasons she was such a successful first female abbot was in part because her educational background and training helped her understand and relate to both the “male and female language.”

Hartman was devoted to training diverse students that would later become “the new faces of our lineage,” O’Connell said. 

“When you see a picture of her disciples, you see a picture of diversity,” O’Connell said. “And they are like her: fierce and kind.”

Chinese authorities recently ordered that Larung Gar, the massive Buddhist village in eastern Tibet, must reduce the number of its residents to 5,000 by the end of September 2017.

Larung Gar is home to 20,000 monks and nuns and at times houses up to 40,000 people. The community was started by Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok (1933-2004) in the early 1980s to revive the educational tradition of Tibetan Buddhism after the Cultural Revolution.

A document outlining the eviction orders was posted by Human Rights Watch reads in part:

By September 30, 2017, the population of the encampment must be limited to 5,000 persons; the numbers of expelled persons and demolished buildings should basically correspond; correspondence between numbers of residents and residence buildings should be checked; masses of ordinary believers must be separated from monks and nuns; the monastery must be separated from the institute; the conduct of social administration within the monastery; the conduct of general services within the monastery.

The order specifies that 2,200 people have to leave this year—1,200 of them monastics.

“The 5,000 overall limit must be managed by 2017,” the document reads. “If it is discovered that it has not been done by September 30, 2017, the number of those to be expelled will be increased, in accord with the register of those present. The government will strictly check the numbers and residences of [expellees].”

Larung Gar is one of the most popular centers of Buddhist education. Chinese authorities previously cracked down on the encampments between 2000 and 2004. During that time, thousands of people were forced to leave and many dwellings were demolished. 

This weekend, more than 400 people are expected to travel to western New York for a celebration honoring Rochester Zen Center’s 50th anniversary.

The center, started in 1966 by Roshi Philip Kapleau [1912-2004], is among the oldest Buddhist meditation centers in the United States. The anniversary weekend is expected to draw former Zen center members from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, many of whom haven’t visited in many years.

Below, Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede, who has served as abbot of Rochester Zen Center since 1986, talks about the center’s changes under his leadership, how Zen in America has changed since then, and what he hopes to see happen in the next 50 years.

—Wendy Joan Biddlecombe, Web Editor

Tell me about when you transitioned to the role of abbot. What do you remember most about that time? 
There were a lot of growing pains; a lot was happening in those first 20 years. In these last 30 since I’ve been the abbot, things have settled down a lot.

In 1986 I was getting my footing. I had some big shoes to fill with Roshi Kapleau having preceded me, and I had to find my own way. I am forever grateful to what he provided here, but we’re not the same. He was 35 years older than me and had been imprinted with his Japanese training quite a bit. When he asked me to take over I said, “Yes, but I’m going to have to make some changes.” And he agreed. One of those changes I saw early on was to make the center less Japanese. He was always clear that we had to Americanize Zen just as the Japanese had Japanized it and the Koreans had Koreanized it when it came to those cultures.

But it’s a much bigger leap. Those three major Zen countries in Asia share a Confucian ethos. Confucian means, for example, hierarchical. And I recognized that this is not a perfect fit for Americans. Yes, there’s a place for hierarchy and for seniority, but we also had to acknowledge that Americans are much more oriented to egalitarianism. So that was one of the early changes I made. I can’t actually tell you right now how I did it!

How has the residential training program changed over the years? 
When I took over there was still a fairly strong martial quality to the everyday residential trainings here as well as the sesshins [retreats]. And I came to feel that it was also just a little too much for Americans. Having spent just six months in training in Japan, I came to see how much of what I thought was Zen was actually Japanese!

I came back from Japan with more clarity about what we should hold on to in the way of traditional forms and what we could let go of. I would have to say that it’s a kinder and gentler Zen center than it was under Roshi Kapleau. He had his own kindness, but it was wrapped in a more fierce quality.

We have never done monastic training in the traditional sense; we don’t have people who have taken lifelong vows of celibacy. We’ve followed the Japanese way, which is that once you become ordained, then you still have the option of getting married. The residential training here is kind of a semi-monastic style. One of the things we’ve struggled with for 50 years is how to integrate the residential training with the parish quality of the larger membership. So we have maybe 450 members, but only 20 to 25 are living in residence and following the schedule full-time.

And when you say you struggle, you mean that you would like to see the number of people living in residence go up?
Yes. Residential training has always been my own affinity. It’s what I’ve been doing since I was 22, but it’s simply not for most people. At this time in Buddhism’s history, it’s still largely a householder’s practice. So I wanted to make the opportunity available for people who feel drawn to residential training, but I also need to make the center more like a parish, available to most people.

You mentioned earlier that there were more growing pains in the early years. Why do you think that is? Is it perhaps because Buddhism isn’t the radical new Western phenomenon it was back then?
I suppose with founding any organization there is a lot of learning to do. This may have been especially so for Roshi Kapleau because he had been out of the country for 13 years in Japan and had to get reacquainted with his native country and shed some of the unnecessary Asian elements.

But then in those first 20 years we had a lot more young people. When I first came here and got started almost all of us were in our early 20s. And now there are many more gray hairs in dharma centers than there used to be. And so with all these young restless people from the drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll scene there was a lot more going on here temperamentally—they were still playing out family issues and father issues with Roshi Kapleau. And now I think it’s a much more mature sangha. Not just with age, because about a third of our membership includes people younger than 40.

It’s hard to have a conversation about the state of Buddhism in America without addressing the mindfulness movement. Has the popularity of mindfulness changed the people who are coming to the Rochester Zen Center?
Yes. About seven times a year we have daylong introductory workshops. And what we’ve seen in the last couple years is that more people coming to these workshops have some experience in meditation. A lot of them are more versed in the vocabulary of mindfulness and have been exposed to mindfulness. But then what I have to do is make clear—maybe not explicitly—the difference between secular mindfulness and Buddhist meditation.

In Buddhism we have the eightfold path, and the seventh and eighth steps are right mindfulness and right concentration. If I’m asked to compare Zen meditation with secular mindfulness, I will sometimes say that mindfulness is just one of seven elements of the path and that Zen is something where concentration is given equal importance to mindfulness. I’ll point out that what I don’t see in secular mindfulness is anything about awakening. The experience of awakening—not just for oneself but for the sake of all beings. The bodhisattva vows are also paramount. We can’t be doing meditation just for ourselves. If there’s any purpose to this meditation, it’s to help and be of service to others.

But I am delighted that the practice of mindfulness has become so widespread. I really am. I mean, who wouldn’t want more people in this world practicing mindfulness?

Sanghas across the United States have been working to become more inclusive. Can you tell me about how your center is addressing diversity?
The lack of diversity is a thorny issue that we’ve struggled with and is something I know that other Zen centers have struggled with as well. It’s something we have racked our brains with here in Rochester. I continue to ponder how we can attract more people of color. I think the number one thing is for people of color to see people of color at a center, but how do you get that started? We’ve tried different things, we’ve experimented, we’ve done more outreach, but we still have only a handful of members who are black, for instance. An ongoing thing in our agenda is to figure out what we can do about it. The problem we always face is that there’s no place in Zen for recruitment. This is one of the traditional features of Zen that I think is valuable. We don’t want to go out and recruit people. We want people to initiate their interest in the center. In spite of that we did some outreach, putting up posters in black communities, which we’ve never done anywhere else. So how do you find that balance? That’s one of these koans that I continue to face. It’s an open question.

What do you hope the state of American Zen will be 50 years from now? 
I would want everyone in the world practicing either Zen or some other kind of Buddhist meditation. It’s the secret to life and the ultimate resource to finding our way. Coming to terms with our lives and our deaths is practicing meditation. So, I hope it comes to appeal to more and more people, and I would love to see more people drawn to monastic or residential training, because there’s no substitute for it. There are very few people at Chapin Mill [Rochester Zen Center’s rural retreat center] right now. It’s used primarily for our sesshins, which draw between 50 and 60 people. But then when people go home there’s a skeleton crew left there. And there’s so much land and so many resources there that I would love to see the community grow and have more people doing residential trainings.

Rochester Zen Center’s 50th anniversary celebration continues this fall. Jon Kabat-Zinn is scheduled to give the 50th anniversary lecture on October 15.

On Father’s Day 2016, a small group gathered to celebrate Lhakpa Sherpa, who had returned to West Hartford, Connecticut, less than a week earlier after climbing to the top of Mount Everest for the seventh time.

Lhakpa, 43, broke the record she set herself back in 2006 for the highest number of summits by a woman. Her return to the mountain marked a new beginning after a tumultuous divorce from the mountain climber George Dijmarescu, whom she met at an Everest base camp in 2000 and married two years later. His abuse is documented in a series of Hartford Courant articles by Michael Kodos, who accompanied an Everest trip organized in part by Dijmarescu in 2004. After attempting to leave her husband more than once, as well as a trial, Lhakpa was granted a divorce by a Connecticut judge in early 2015.

Since then, Lhakpa has cared for their two daughters, as well as a son from a previous relationship, as a single mother with sole custody. She works as a housekeeper.

The people at the celebration included Lhakpa’s daughters—Sunny, 13, and Shiny, 9—her lawyer, Ramona Mercado-Espinoza from Greater Hartford Legal Aid, and Iris Ruiz and Jennifer Lopez from Interval House, a local domestic violence shelter where Lhakpa lived for eight months (the average stay is about three months). She has had her own apartment for the last three and a half years and still stays in touch with the group that helped her get back on her feet. The women are fiercely protective of Lhakpa, whose name is not widely known outside the climbing community, and her achievements.

“She’s grown so much. When we first met her she didn’t speak any English,” said Lopez, a supervisor and advocate at the shelter. “She knows how to get things done and she works for everything she gets. We’ve gotten attached to her because she’s humble . . . and she continues to see her future as something more.”

“She’s ready to share her story now,” Mercado-Espinoza said. “Now’s the time. She’s ready. She’s amazing. I think just getting away from her ex-husband and living her life freely has changed her.”

When Lhakpa leaves the U.S. and returns to Nepal and Mount Everest, she’s in a place that makes sense.

“[In West Hartford], I feel like I’ve been thrown in a big ocean and nobody is coming to rescue me . . . I’m very confused here. At Everest, you go up one way, you come down one way. So many roads I see here,” Lhakpa said. “In my heart, I want to climb this mountain again and again. I have some problems and I think, ‘ah, mountain season is coming. I want to get my boots and run away in the mountain.’”

Lhakpa doesn’t climb Mount Everest just to set another world record. When she helps guide a team, Lhakpa earns $6,000, with a $1,000 bonus if they summit. The money comes in a lot faster than in the United States, where she works a minimum wage job to support her children.

Lhakpa grew up in a Sherpa family in the village of Makulu, which lies in a valley about 12 miles south of Mount Everest. The village, she says, still lacks a school and a doctor. Many of her siblings are accomplished climbers as well, and her sister, Ming Kipa, previously held the record for being the youngest person to summit Mount Everest when she made it to the top in 2003 at age 15.

Lhakpa said that she understands the mountain better than anything else in her life, and that the only training she did before leaving for Nepal this year was walking all over Hartford. Once in Nepal her brother, who works for an expedition company, had her train much more intensely by walking between the camps at approximately 19,000 feet and 22,000 feet (Everest’s peak is 29,029 feet) to get her up to speed for the summit.

Last year, Lhakpa reached Everest’s base camp before having to turn back after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Nepal on April 25, 2015. Back home, her lawyer and the women at the shelter didn’t hear for a month after the quake that she was alive and well, Mercado-Espinoza said.

Every time she summits, Lhakpa carries multiple flags of things she “likes and respects” in her pack. This year, she packed the American flag, as well as flags for both of her daughter’s schools and the domestic violence shelter.

Lhakpa said her children don’t have any interest in climbing. They understand that going to school is their job and that summiting Mount Everest is hers.

“My son tells me, ‘This is your job mama, because you don’t have an education. You keep going. We go to school.’”

Although Lhakpa is barely back from her record-breaking summit, she is already hoping to reach the top again in 2017. She says that both she and her children believe that she will come back every time, even though Lhakpa frequently witnesses dead bodies on the mountain.

“I’m not scared to die; I believe in the days coming I can die here [in Connecticut],” Lhakpa said. “My Buddhist culture says death is coming, but I’m still OK. I could have died many times, but my day hasn’t come yet.”

Want to learn more about Lhakpa Sherpa? Read our interview with her in the 25th anniversary issue

Age: 43
Profession: Mountain Climber & Housekeeper
Location: West Hartford, Connecticut, originally from Nepal

In May 2016, you summited Mount Everest for the seventh time, and you’ve held the women’s record for the most summits since 2006. How did it feel to be back at the top after a ten-year break? I was at Everest last year and I reached base camp. Then the earthquake came. So I wasn’t able to summit, even though I did start to climb. I’m very sad, because we lost many people, many climbers. Everything was affected: my family’s village, all of Nepal is very bad.

But it wasn’t any different climbing this time. In my heart, I like living in the mountains. I have some problems and I think, “Ah, mountain season is coming. I want to get my boots and run away to the mountain.” I’m leaving my two girls here in the U.S., and it’s hard, but in my heart I want to climb this mountain again and again.

How long did it take you to summit? Two months. My expedition was on a very tight budget—we had ten Sherpas and nine climbers, and we reached the summit at 5 in the morning. We were up all night. This year I counted seven dead bodies.

When I go to Everest, the tourists who hire me as guides pay me $6,000, and if we get to the top of Everest it’s another $1,000. If these people don’t summit, I don’t get the bonus money to give to my children.

When I’m on the mountain, I’m quiet. On the mountain, only my team knows that I’ve summited seven times. I don’t tell other people, other groups. But this time, one woman who had read about me on the Internet said to me, “You are Lhakpa. You are Super Mom!” And all the people called me Super Mom! No one believes I have three children [Nima, 20; Sunny, 13; Shiny, 9]. Climbing Mount Everest is my job, my passion. Women can do anything—they can have babies, they can cook, and they can climb mountains.

You carried banners from both of your daughters’ schools to the summit. Why? I carry things with me that I like and respect. These schools give so much education so that many smart children can become doctors and lawyers. This education is very important for my children. I have never been to school, but I can carry the banner of the school to the top.

I know how the system works. If you don’t have an education, you have a problem with jobs. In Sherpa culture, Sherpas work in the mountains because they don’t have an education—they must go up. They must go to dangerous areas. People die, they keep going. I must keep working, like a yak. For $6,000, I could give my life. Maybe I die, maybe I can bring $6,000 to my children. This is my job.

It seems like you live two different lives—one in Nepal as an accomplished climber and another in Connecticut as a housekeeper. It is a different life. I’m very confused here. On Everest you go up one way and come down one way. But here I see so many roads. I feel like I’ve been thrown in a big ocean and nobody has come to rescue me.

Do you think your children will want to climb? Would you like that? My children never say that they want to go to Everest. But my girls say, “Mama, you summit many times, I know you’ll come back.” The little one [Shiny], she is a little bit worried. My son doesn’t want to climb, either. He says, “You go to mountain, we go to school.”

What is the role of Buddhism in your life, both in Connecticut and when you go to Nepal to climb? I practice on the inside. If I go to the temple I would be in big trouble, because it has been a long time since I went. I just keep it inside my heart.

I have a big respect for Everest. In my culture, the mountain is a mother. When I see Mount Everest, I pray. I say, “Please, Mother, I have three children waiting. Don’t kill me. Please let me come back.” And I know in my heart, I believe that this mother, this mountain, won’t kill me, because I have to be with my girls here. My children are waiting. When you’re on Everest, it fights you, but I believe I’m fighting Everest back. 

For more on Lhakpa Sherpa, visit www.tricycle.org/trikedaily/lhakpa-sherpa.

Over the past 25 years, Tricycle has covered the mindfulness movement from a variety of perspectives. We’ve shared practice instructions by Buddhist teachers, interviewed a neuroscientist about how mindfulness meditation research is being portrayed in the media, and published a point-counterpoint debate about whether mindfulness belongs in public schools, among many other pieces.

Along the way we’ve tried to strike a balance between exploring critical issues for the Buddhist tradition and advocating for a practice that enriches people’s lives. In the following pieces, we continue this tradition by offering an essay from scholar Jeff Wilson that examines the nominally “secular” mindfulness movement as a religious phenomenon and a series of personal reflections from real-life MBSR practitioners.

–Sam Mowe, Contributing Editor

The Religion of Mindfulness

by Jeff Wilson

Not long ago, I was at an academic religious studies conference presenting research on mindful sex. Among all my vaguely pornographic slides and details about how Buddhist-derived mindfulness meditation techniques are being used to assist with orgasm and sexual performance anxiety, I tried to make a coherent argument that this represented a natural—if perhaps eyebrow-raising—evolution of Buddhist practice in a culture that values indulgence over renunciation and considers sexuality something to actualize rather than to overcome. During the subsequent discussion period a Buddhist studies scholar commented with disgust, “But this is all just secular, it isn’t Buddhist.”

His objection was that I was presenting research on mindfulness at a conference on religion, to an academic session dedicated to Buddhism. From his classical Buddhological viewpoint, the mindfulness movement couldn’t possibly be worth investigating in relation to Buddhism, since it lacks sutra analysis, adherence to vinaya rules, traditional monks, nirvanic ambitions, and other elements that he felt were nonnegotiable features that needed to be present for something to be called Buddhist. Although I didn’t agree, I could see where he was coming from. As I carried out the research for my book Mindful America a few years ago, I had many occasions to ask myself just what sort of phenomenon I was investigating. As a scholar of Buddhism and American religion, I am intrigued by the mindfulness movement as an example of the transformation of religion in the 21st century. When I look at the mindfulness movement, it seems very religious to me, in part because of its frequent claims to be secular.

In recent years I’ve voraciously consumed as much literature as I could by and about the mindfulness movement in all its varied facets. I’ve read hundreds of books promoting mindfulness, pored over thousands of articles and Web features, watched countless online videos, followed the discussion on television, Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, besides talking to many practitioners about their experiences with mindfulness. From all of this, I’ve noted that the mindfulness movement is staggeringly diverse. It would be hard for anyone to make any statement that would be truly comprehensively accurate about everything that makes up the movement.

However, there is a very common narrative that I encounter across the mindfulness movement. This story is especially prominent in the language of teachers of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, in the pages of magazines such as Mindful, and among proponents of meditation applied to practical concerns such as depression, anxiety, poor eating habits, parenting, and work. Basically, it goes like this:

Buddhism may include mindfulness, but mindfulness is not Buddhist, or at least not exclusively so. Mindfulness is an innate human quality, something that all people have as their birthright. What MBSR and other programs are teaching is really dharma, not Buddhism, and dharma is universal. Dharma is just the way things are; therefore, it can’t be the property of any group or sect. In fact, mindfulness is the heart of the dharma, and the aspects of Buddhism beyond mindfulness can potentially be dropped—indeed, it might be best for them to go, since they may hold back the actual substance, the true essence of what is correct in Buddhism, which is meditative awareness and the wisdom and compassion that result from seeing things as they really are. Don’t forget, the Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist. Mindfulness is secular, because it isn’t taught with religious words like buddha and prajna and you aren’t required to believe in things like reincarnation or engage in rituals like devotional pujas to gods and bodhisattvas. Ultimately, mindfulness isn’t a religion, a doctrine, or an ideology—it is a way of life, a way of being that is good and positive and potentially transformative for self and society alike.

I find this narrative compelling, as a vision. I too want to live in a world that is healthier and saner than what we have right now, and I wish for more awareness and insight for myself and those around me. But as a scholar, I also have a role-specific obligation to analyze such statements and understand their dynamics. And the thing that continually strikes me is just how religious “secular” mindfulness really is.

To claim that something is dharma is to make a religious argument. The very term dharma is a religious label that comes to us in the English-speaking world primarily from Buddhism and secondarily from Hinduism as well. Dharma is a word with many possible meanings and uses in differing contexts, but fundamentally it is used to indicate the speaker’s view of the state of things in reality—to paint a picture of existence. It also refers to teachings and practices that are in accord with that ultimate reality, or which help us discover that reality—in other words, it separates things into favored (according with reality) and disfavored (out of accord with reality) categories. Furthermore, to claim that something is the heart of the dharma and that other things can be discarded is to make a religiously sectarian argument. Others will have different views of what dharma is, what should be retained, and what can be abandoned. Defining dharma as universal and above or beyond any particular religion is, of course, itself a religious statement about the nature of dharma.

To say that mindfulness is an innate human quality or capacity is to make a truth claim about human nature, one that is not empirically verifiable (the mind boggles at the question of how we would accurately test all seven billion human beings to see if each one has inherent mindfulness). The real purpose of this truth claim is to express values that define human nature. Claims about human nature and values are religious, or at least they are philosophical claims that clearly overlap with religious concerns. When you say that something is a birthright, you are talking about essences and natures, the very stuff of religion.

Claims of being secular are tactics of legitimization, attempts to exorcise the ghost of religiosity that persistently haunts mindfulness. This originates in the fact that the mindfulness movement springs directly from Theravada Buddhism, with significant contributions from Zen and Tibetan Buddhism as well. For that matter, mindfulness is a part of all the lineages of Buddhism in Asia, though not all practice the sort of meditation techniques that have become associated with the mindfulness movement. Additionally, MBSR incorporates postural yoga (a practice derived mainly from Hinduism), and yoga itself has become deeply inflected with language about mindfulness in recent decades.

If I were to write an article pointing out that groceries, clothes, boxing lessons, and law school textbooks are secular, the reaction would likely be that it was a weird choice of topic, if not actual evidence that I have a screw loose somewhere. But as the historian R. Laurence Moore noted in Selling God, “‘Secular’ as a category for understanding historical experience depends for its meaning on the existence of something called ‘religion,’ and vice versa.” The simple fact that the assertion that mindfulness is secular must be repeated constantly demonstrates its ongoing entanglement with religion.

Talk of the secular is really talk about religion, for the purpose of setting the limits of what should be allowed to be perceived as religious and not-religious. Defining beliefs about reincarnation as disposable religious elements, rather than as dharma and simply the way things really are, is a form of boundary drawing and in-group making, the sort of thing that religious movements excel at. Furthermore, terming something a way of being or a way of life, over and against being religious, implicitly claims that religions somehow are not ways of being or ways of life—and most precisely, that Buddhism is not somehow a way of life. There are probably many Buddhists who would dispute that point if it were made explicitly. Indeed, I quite commonly hear Buddhists describe their religion in precisely these terms.

The vast mindfulness industry certainly operates as an evangelical apparatus for promoting certain beliefs, values, and practices. I have said that it is nearly impossible to find something that applies universally to every individual phenomenon in the mindfulness movement, but there is at least one: I have never yet found a mindfulness promoter or practitioner who feels that mindfulness isn’t good and positive, or who doesn’t believe that mindfulness can transform self and society. In fact, a whole world of values is bound up with the package of mindfulness as it is disseminated in the West: mindful people are aware; awareness is good; everyone should be aware; unaware people are at risk of being bad or acting badly; mindlessness is destroying the planet; mindfulness can save us; and so on.

Leaving aside the question of whether or not something genuinely is religious (as if this were ever more than a subjective claim from a particular perspective), I find as a scholar that analyzing the mindfulness movement as if it were religious is quite productive, providing insights derived from the study of other religious movements that seem to accurately and usefully explain phenomena we see going on with mindfulness. From a religious studies standpoint, what I see before me is a movement of people who share common values and visions about human beings, life, society, and reality, who place great faith in a particular set of practices and engage in a ritual meant to bring about self-transformation and liberation from suffering, who are convinced of its worth for themselves and enthusiastic about promoting it to others, who react defensively to critiques and police the boundaries of who properly and improperly speaks for and about their movement, and who engage in an ongoing discussion about religion. Maybe that doesn’t meet your definition of a religion, but it sure seems pretty close to being religious to me. 

Mindfulness Practitioners Speak

by Wendy Joan Biddlecombe

In recent years, mindfulness has swiftly spread far beyond the meditation retreats that originally introduced Westerners to this practice of living in the present moment. Secular meditation classes, many of which don’t mention mindfulness’s Buddhist roots, have cropped up in schools, gyms, prisons, and corporate offices.

Critics within the Buddhist community as well as in the world of academia have been at times quick to dismiss these classes, denouncing them as a trendy commodification of ancient practices, an unwitting tool of capitalism, or a troublesome promotion of ethics-free mind training.

Such critiques can be convincing; Tricycle has published a number of them over the years as the mindfulness movement has grown. The issues they point out are meaningful and worthwhile. But they also have a tendency to ignore the on-the-ground, real-life experiences of people who have taken a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course. How have these people’s lives been impacted? What do they have to say about the effects of mindfulness practice?

Below, we talk with just six of the tens of thousands of students around the world who have taken an MBSR course. Our respondents, who include a police lieutenant, a stay-at-home mother, and a psychiatrist, speak about their experience in the eight-week classes that combine meditation, body scanning, and yoga poses.

Elizabeth J. Coleman  
Age: 68 | Poet, lawyer, MBSR teacher

In 2001 I had endometrial cancer. I was home recovering, and a friend came to visit and brought me a brochure. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center had just started teaching MBSR (it was a short-lived program). I looked at the brochure and said, “This is the gift I’m going to give myself.” It had never crossed my mind before to do something like this. But I took the course, and I felt transformed from the get-go. It was like a stroke of lightning. I just felt, “Oh my god, where has this been?” A colleague from work came to visit me after I had taken the course, and he said, “You’re different. How do I get what you got without getting what you got?”

Other than that, I had a rift in my family when I started MBSR. It has healed, and I totally owe that to years of doing lovingkindness meditation. My relationships are so much better and more compassionate. I don’t think I would be a poet if it were not for MBSR. I don’t think I would be able to perform if it were not for MBSR. Meditation lets me have a calm that I never had. I am a Type A personality, very driven. That’s just who I am, and I like that self, but meditation allows me to respond and not react. I wasn’t an awful person to start with or anything, but it’s given me this tool that I’ve then been able to give other people.

Talia Sherman
Age: 27 | Associate Fashion Director for Center Core and Shoes at Macy’s

I didn’t know what to expect when I started taking MBSR, but I truly think the class rewired my whole brain in the way that I think, the way that I carry myself, and the way I feel about myself. What I learned through it was that it’s OK not to be perfect, and it gave me a lot of self-confidence as well as the ability to stand up for myself and change both my work and interpersonal relationships. I think I came out of it a very empowered person, and it was awesome.

Last year I was diagnosed with Cushing’s Syndrome, and shortly after that my health fell off a cliff. I gained about 30 pounds and had a bunch of other nasty symptoms. I couldn’t sleep; I was uncontrollably hungry. They found a tumor on my right adrenal gland, which meant that my body was overproducing cortisol. So my body thought it was stressed all the time. I had surgery in September of last year and have been in a yearlong recovery since then. And I believe 100 percent that my mindfulness training was like a black belt for me this year. It helped with both the mental and physical pain. It was easier to be patient; I know that the pain is transient and is not going to be here forever.

Richard Goerling
Age: 47 | Police lieutenant, retired Coast Guard reservist, police reform advocate

I didn’t have a tipping point of “this happened to me, so I sought out mindfulness.” What I had was a journey as a leader in policing and in the military reserves. In 2001 I was recalled to active duty after 9/11. I don’t have any horror stories about going into combat, but I had a front row seat to the problems that affect a lot of police and first-responder organizations: the fast-paced work tempo, the stressors, the pressures to define what we were supposed to do after 9/11, group-think, and so on.

Mindfulness spoke to my warrior soul. Mindfulness training taught me to cultivate a level of awareness in body, mind, and health that allowed me to take care of myself and to develop a greater capacity to regulate my own emotions and experiences. In uniform, I could have anger and compassion in the same space while dealing with someone in crisis. Mindfulness gives me the awareness of the suffering of the people I’m trying to help.

My original objective in learning mindfulness was to improve the police-citizen encounter, because I didn’t like the outcomes that I was seeing. I approached this from the human performance perspective. The only way that an encounter between a police officer and a citizen is going to go well is if that police officer is resilient in heart and mind and body; if they have the capacity to be self-aware and aware of others; and if they have compassion and empathy and don’t judge the people they encounter. Then their performance is going to have a more acceptable outcome.

Cristina Profumo
Age: 53 | Psychiatrist

Mindfulness helps me to figure out that I have a mind. I know that as a psychiatrist it sounds strange to say that, but I’ve never sat down and observed my mind the way I do with mindfulness. I was kind of terrified of some of the thoughts and feelings that could come up. But little by little, doing it on a daily basis, it has helped me see that feelings and thoughts come and go. It’s the impermanence of all the things that we do in life—if I feel a certain way in a certain moment, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to last. And noticing that it does not last gives you a sense of being able to feel more—not more in control, but more aware of what’s going on, and to respond in a way that is more present rather than reactive. In my work and in my life, mindfulness has improved my attention, my presence, and my patience.

You don’t have to convince me that mindfulness is a spiritual experience. I’m not religious, because I feel that in religion you have to blindly trust an entity, and that’s not what I can do, that’s just not who I am. But this practice has given me my own spiritual road, whereas before mindfulness I had none. This road is making sense of my life and of how I can decrease my suffering and simply accept what is good and what is not good, and work with it.

Kenneth Kraus
Age: 60 | Businessman

What was going on at the time [when I decided to take an MBSR course] was what had been prevalent in my life: a tendency to get caught up in worrying about things, whatever they would be. And wanting to find a discipline or a place that could calm that tendency, or channel it.

This is a very, very gradual thing. This is not the type of thing where you go for a course, and then you have an experience, and you bring meditation to it, and suddenly a whole new world opens up. For a lot of people, and for me, it’s very incremental.

Some days are better than others. I’ve been working at this for 11 years. It helps me do things like sleep better, slow down circling thoughts, or at least have the ability to observe myself. And there are absolutely times where I say, “Gee, I wonder if this is having any effect.” And then there are other times where I can tell, “OK, my power of self-observation or being able to disengage is a little better than it would have been if I hadn’t taken the course.” Sometimes my thoughts are grabbed and they’re off, and at least I can see it. But it’s still a challenge to slow them down.

Sarah Robertson
Age: 40 | Stay-at-home mother to four children, former journalist

I had already been meditating through Transcendental Meditation. And then mindfulness took me to a whole other level. I love it. I meditate every day and use the practices that I learned there. And I’m sharing them with others and my own family. I’ve meditated with my oldest son; I do the body scan with him a lot. I get all my kids to try to breathe mindfully, and I do walking meditations with them.

I went into the class with two goals: one was to be less attached to technology, and the other was to be less reactive to my children. And I am not perfect by any means, but I’ve definitely gotten better, and it’s made such a huge difference in my life. I’m able to roll through negative or stressful situations in a calmer way and realize that they’re going to pass and that they’re not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. I’m much more present at home. I’m not attending events or meetings that I don’t need to or don’t want to attend. Instead I’m at home, reading, cooking, listening to my children. I’m just aware of being a more present listener and a more thoughtful responder. 

Yoko Okumura was born in a Buddhist temple in Japan and moved to the U.S. as a child. Her father, Shohaku Okumura, is the abbot of Sanshin Zen Community in Bloomington, Indiana, and a respected translator of Eihei Dogen, who founded the Soto Zen school in the 13th century.

But it wasn’t until Yoko Okumura, 28, started filming her family that they started talking about the Buddhist tenets that tie them together.

Okumura is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, producer, director, and performer whose work has appeared at numerous festivals. Her film Kimi Kabuki won first place at the 2014 Director’s Guild of America Student Film Awards for the western region Asian American category.

SIT, a short documentary about Okumura’s family, premiers today on our blog, Trike Daily. Okumura recently spoke with Tricycle about the film, how it has grown and evolved over nearly 10 years of shooting, and what she hopes viewers take away from it.

You put yourself in your own work in other films. Was your family already used to you filming them, or did it take some convincing?
Because it’s been such a gradual process, they didn’t really know the subject matter, other than that it was about them, until it was finished. I don’t know if they ever had a moment to say yes or no! But they’ve been supportive through the whole process and in humoring me. I’ve had a video camera ever since I was little, so they’re used to that.

This project went through several iterations. I originally started shooting when I was an undergrad at Cal Arts in film school in 2007, so I’ve been shooting my family in one form or another for nearly 10 years now. This version of SIT has a lot more production value and took about four years of shooting and editing.

How did the film evolve throughout the filming process?
Initially it was a quasi-narrative documentary hybrid that I was doing during college, but then it became very specifically about my Dad and Buddhism. It was supposed to be about him and how he sits and what that means in the context of sitting in America. We started shooting that movie in 2012 and realized after interviewing my brother that there was a much more compelling story comparing the two of them together.

Your brother mentions in the film that he doesn’t sit zazen. Do you have a practice?
I have. I don’t regularly practice, but I have sat a couple times at the San Francisco Zen Center when I was filming my Dad. I definitely don’t call myself practicing compared to my parents—nothing like what they do. But I’ve always called myself a philosophical Buddhist because being raised by two Buddhists, you can’t help but see life through that perspective and through their practice. Even if I don’t sit zazen consistently, I definitely think the way I see the world is the way they see it as well.

We learn about what your father hopes for you and your brother—the space to grow—in the film. Is that the first time you had heard him express these ideas?
This is absolutely the first time I heard that from him. In a more traditional Japanese style, we all get along fantastically as a family but we never really talk about anything. We don’t get into personal stuff—ever. We’re very casual. So these deeper questions were only discussed because I was making a documentary. I’ve learned things about my parents and my brother that I never would have if I weren’t making the film.

The story about why my Dad wanted to give us room to grow is actually a bigger story that has to do with the origin of my name and my brother’s name, but it didn’t fit into the film, which is too bad. My name, Yoko, and my brother’s name, Masaki, they both have to do with plants. My brother’s name has to do with a tree and my name has to do with a leaf. When my Dad was younger and in Massachusetts practicing, he was hitchhiking to get into town and go do some work, and he encountered a student who with a tapestry that his mother had made. The tapestry had a big tree on it and said, “to love is to leave room to grow.” He thought that was true, and from that experience years ago he decided to name his children after tree and plant-oriented things, instilling the idea that love is leaving space for them. And that’s a story I never heard until last year when we shot, when I was 27. I kind of doubt I ever would have heard that story if I wasn’t making a film . . . these are things we would never think of asking.

You’ve put yourself in other films that you’ve made. Did you make a conscious decision to stay off camera except for a few parts in SIT?
At the very beginning when we were shooting the first version, I was adamant that I wouldn’t be present at all. Not even a little bit; I didn’t want to exist. So it kind of seemed like a three person family. But then eventually it evolved and we realized that the perspective of me as the filmmaker having access to this family as a family member was important. So slowly I started to put myself in there a little bit more and a little bit more. It took my collaborators to convince me to do that; that me being in there would make it a much more emotional perspective than just a neutral filmmaker.  

What do you hope that viewers take away from your film?
Initially, I was hoping to subvert the traditional expectations of what people in America think a monk is. Whenever I tell people that my Dad’s a monk, the first thing they say is “I didn’t know monks were allowed to have children or have a family.” For me, it was about giving a perspective of being a human being as well as a monk, because growing up I always saw him as a Dad, but I also saw the people who studied with him who saw him as more than human. I just wanted to show a multidimensional representation of a monk in the West. So I guess I wish people can watch this and find something to relate to, find some humor in it, and learn a little bit about a different side of a Buddhist monk.

Watch SIT here

84000, the ambitious project that is working to translate the entire Tibetan canon into English over the next 100 years, has launched a “reading room” with 10 newly translated texts.

The endeavor started after a 2009 conference, hosted by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, that in part addressed the concern that less than five percent of the Kangyur [the words of the Buddha translated into Tibetan] and Tengyur [Tibetan translations of Indian commentaries on the scriptures] had been translated into modern languages.

Since then, 84000—named for the number of teachings said  to have  been given by the Buddha—has become a nonprofit organization and grown to include 201 translators.

“In Tibetan Buddhism, the Kangyur is not very well known, it’s not something that is studied on it’s own in the traditional monastic colleges,” said John Canti, 84000’s editorial director and chair.

Canti explained that though the Kangyur is “respected and revered,” the text has previously served as a source of isolated quotations. He hopes that having the full text available will shed some well-deserved context for students and scholars.  

“A lot of people studying Tibetan Buddhism don’t really read the narratives and where the context arises from. It’s very interesting to find a quotation and realize the history behind it and how they came about.”

One of the flagship texts on the relaunched site is the Lalitavistara (The Play in Full), an important text in Mahayana Buddhism on the life of the Buddha that Canti said is heavily quoted but rarely read and studied in full. Canti said another important text in the collection is The Basket’s Display, which explains the origins of the Om mani padme hum mantra.

84000 is a long-term project. Canti said the translation teams are on track—or perhaps slightly ahead of schedule— to finish the Kangyur in 25 years and the Tengyur in 100 years.

Canti said the organization wants to make sure that the texts are free and accessible to all, no matter what kind of device they access the teachings from. They’ve used an open-source program that will make the text accessible in the future as software programs change.  

“We’re committed to having this as open source, so that the texts are available for scholars or anyone else to get at them for research or studies. This will be a huge resource in the future . . . it’s not up to us to close it off,” Canti said.

Read the newly translated texts from the Tibetan canon 

Author and contemporary Buddhist teacher Stephen Batchelor has entered the world of opera, writing the libretto for Mara: A Chamber Opera of Good and Evil.

Batchelor recently spoke to Tricycle about his involvement in the 75-minute opera, which premiers in Florence, South Carolina next month, and how the historical Buddha’s struggle with evil and suffering can appeal to a modern audience who might not otherwise be familiar with the canon.

This is the first time that you’ve written for opera. How did you become involved with the production? 

In 2004 I published a book called Living with the Devil, which was a study of the figure of Mara in Buddhist thought and practice. A couple of years later the British composer Julian Marshall contacted me. He had read the book and was interested in collaborating on a musical work based on the material. This led me to begin writing some of the Mara stories in verse. But for various reasons we both moved on to other projects, and the idea fizzled out. Some time later I met the American composer Sherry Woods at Gaia House, a retreat center in England where I work. Sherry had already set some of my translations of Nagarjuna’s Verses from the center to music, and wondered whether I had anything else she might be able to use. So I gave her the Mara material I had started writing for Julian. Over the next few years, in fits and starts, we eventually managed to complete the chamber opera that will be performed this October in Florence, South Carolina, where Sherry and her family live and work. I have never written for opera before, though Philip Glass did set some of my translations of Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life to music for his choral symphony.

What was different and rewarding about the writing process for opera?
I am not a particularly musical person, though I do enjoy going to the opera. I particularly like the combination of text, theatrical performance, and music, which, for some reason, I find deeply moving. It was both a delight and a challenge to transform the traditional texts on Mara—all of which are taken from the Pali canon—into a series of verses, organized into scenes and acts, which tell the story of Mara’s interactions with the Buddha. The opera is made up of two acts: the first tells the story of the Buddha’s temptation by and conquest of Mara, while the second depicts the last months of his life in which he succumbs to illness and finally death. In many ways, I found that by telling this story in words and music, the grandeur of the Buddha’s life is revealed in such a way that it transcends “Buddhism” to present a profoundly human story that can speak to an audience irrespective of religious or spiritual beliefs.

Mara is billed as “going beyond its Buddhist origins to address the concerns of all.” What are some of the lessons we’ll learn about the devil in our lives despite our religious or spiritual background? And what Buddhist lessons will be new to people of other faiths?
The wonderful thing about the texts on Mara is that we find “Buddhist” teachings presented in a mythological rather than a psychological way. This has the effect of fleshing out and humanizing many central Buddhist concepts and doctrines. The figure of Mara, for example, symbolizes death—the very word Mara means something like “the killer.” This makes us reflect on how craving and egoism are in some ways a kind of inner death that prevent us from being fully alive. When the Buddha “conquers” Mara, I take this to mean that he liberates himself from the powers within him that render his life static, lifeless, and dull. Yet as a human being, he is still subject to the inevitability of physical illness, aging, and death. Thus the second and final act of the opera shows how despite his having defeated Mara through his enlightenment, he is still subject to Mara as a personification of his own mortality. Since the opera is able to show such things visually and musically, it has no need to make any overt references to Buddhist teaching or belief. The result, I feel, is that in letting Buddhism fall away, we are able to discover the deep humanity at the heart of the dharma.

Mara: A Chamber Opera on Good and Evil will be presented at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 28 and 29 at the Black Box Theatre of the Francis Marion University Performing Arts Center in Florence, South Carolina. Tickets can be purchased online at fmupac.org or by calling (843) 661-4444.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand the Buddha’s teachings.

So says David Nichtern, a musician and senior teacher in the Shambhala lineage who began studying meditation with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche soon after the revered lama arrived in the United States in the 1970s.

In his first book, Awakening from the Daydream, Nichtern has written an accessible guide for the reader to better understand karma and the six realms of existence—god, jealous god, human, animal, hungry ghost, and hell.

These realms, Nichtern writes, depict the “diverse experiences” of our daily dramas. The bhavacakra, or “Wheel of Life,” is a visual representation of the six realms that adorn the walls of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and temples, and the cover of Awakening from the Daydream features a contemporary take.

Nichtern recently sat down with Tricycle to discuss how the realms provide us with a ripe opportunity for practice and transformation.

You’ve been practicing for a long time, but this is your first book. Why did you decide to write about karma?
I had no particular intention to write a book, but this topic has been on my mind. In a way it’s haunted me since I took teachings on it from Trungpa Rinpoche in the summer of 1971, and I thought, “Oh, this is really colorful, vivid, juicy stuff.” The way I said it in the book is that I felt like it was “killing me softly with my own song” because it just hit target after target.

The wheel of life, the cycle of existence, is a portrait of samsara. You ever wake up in the morning and think, “Oh, here we go again?”—it’s that kind of cycle. It’s Groundhog Day. Our experience is not cyclic, but becomes cyclical because of our tendency to imprint patterns on our way of being. So what’s the problem with that? No problem, except that sometimes they are painful or people say, “I’m in a rut. I’m caught in this cycle.” So the six realms in the Wheel of Life are six ruts in a way.

Tell me about the cover of your book, which features a contemporary image of the Wheel of Life.
The original Wheel of Life image has people being flayed alive and having molten iron poured down their throats in the hell realm. On the cover of Awakening from the Daydream we have a kid covering his ears while his parents are screaming at each other. So we’re trying to make the imagery more accessible to contemporary people. I’m hoping that readers think, “Oh, I get that. I know what that feels like.” These realms are states of mind. Since you woke up this morning you’ve been in every one of them.

Is it possible to be in more than one realm at the same time?
It’s possible. A very wealthy person could have an external form of a god realm, but their state of mind could be hungry ghost or hell realm. We think, “Why? What’s the problem? You have everything; you have your own private plane, you have servants.” But the mind is not tracking to that. So some part of their karma got them to that realm and then another part is activating a different set of possibilities.

When you read about the realms there is a kind of self-diagnosis going on—what realm am I in?—almost like when you turn to Google or WebMD to find out what’s wrong with you physically.
Buddha was described as the “great physician.” As far as I’m concerned the entire Buddhist program is a remedy. It’s not intended to unnecessarily create more fabricated material for us to have to deal with. It’s addressing what we already have in front of us.

But first you have to look and say, “Am I stuck anywhere?” Easy to say if you’re in the lower realms—the hell realm or the hungry ghost realm—where you’re addicted, suffering, miserably depressed, or horribly enraged. In the god realms you feel like you don’t have any particular complaint and things are going extremely well. So it’s a much subtler trap. You can think of it like a golden mousetrap. It’s tricky to present the dharma to somebody who is in the god realm, because they just say, “I don’t get what the problem is.”

But the Buddhist view is using extreme discernment, or prajna—that’s your main weapon or tool to accurately look at a situation. The idea is that with a discerning eye you can look at the situation and be open and honest about it. Without self-reflection there is no dharma.

You said that Trungpa Rinpoche taught about the transformational quality of the six realms and the opportunity to practice while in them. Which realm presents a great opportunity to change?
The hungry ghost realm is the best. Craving has so much possibility to wake you up—that moment when you’re reaching for the refrigerator is one of the most powerfully flippable. You can use the energy to reside in that space instead of going for the object, such as a dessert. It’s not easy . . . but desire presents a very vivid opportunity to wake up.

What do you hope that readers take away from your book?
Is buddhadharma really that complicated? Is it something that only rocket scientists should be talking about? There is an almost oppressive feeling that some part of it has been shepherded into that domain.

But the great teachers that I have met are so accessible. The dharma is sometimes called “grandmother’s wisdom,” because the best teachings are so earthy and practical. Part of what I want to do is try to reach the people who are intelligent enough to understand the teachings but are too wrapped up in the mad scramble of their everyday lives to prioritize it. 

There is a rocket science dimension, however, in regard to how the mind occurs. They say a mental imprint is about 124th of a second long. So you’ve had 124 mental imprints in the last second alone, like frames of film. Within the tradition, people who have cleared their minds have become very precise about what’s going on in the mind and how it’s constructed. They can go deep into their minds and not get hung up or feel trapped. They can slow down, be kind, and develop some curiosity about how their situation has evolved and can evolve.

Awakening from the Daydream is available from Wisdom Publications on Oct. 4.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

In March 2015—eight months before her death—Rita Gross was interviewed at Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in India about her feminist roots, finding a teacher, and gender identity in Buddhism.

Gross, a Buddhist scholar, dharma teacher, and frequent Tricycle contributor, was the author of numerous books that included Buddhism After Patriarchy and Feminism and Religion: An Introduction.

The two-part video series is now available from Yogini Project, a nonprofit organization that was started in 2011 by Michael Ash—with the blessing of his teacher, Tsoknyi Rinpoche—as a way to showcase women in the dharma.

“Now is quite an interesting time: the majority of meditators in the world are women; greater numbers are practicing now than ever before,” Ash told Tricycle. “I feel often that the Yogini Project is there to announce a vast movement that is hidden even to its own members . . . There are truly many stories to tell and lessons to be learned from women at all stages of the path.”

Other teachers who have been filmed for Yogini Archives include Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo and Ani Choying Drolma.  

“What I loved about this interview was how Rita gracefully pointed out the way to a transgender space is through the mindfulness of gender,” Ash recalled. “Her intent was clearly on removing the cause of suffering. And so her focus was on becoming aware of any reified self-identity, and that, as she points out, is unavoidable to some degree with gender. Only by becoming aware of it—not by passing it over—are we actually able to apply the teachings and move beyond any latent or immediate suffering it may be creating.”

Watch a 15-minute clip of Gross’s talk below:

The post What Does Gender Have to Do With the Dharma? appeared first on Tricycle.