Is there anything we can do to prepare for the inevitable?

Next week, the San Francisco Zen Center will host a panel to discuss just that: how do we confront old age, sickness and death?

Panelists will include Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, a widow and physician; Grace Dammann, a Buddhist physician; and Lennon Flowers, founder of The Dinner Party, a community of young people who have experienced early loss. Jennifer Block, an interfaith minister and Buddhist chaplain, will moderate.

This week, Tricycle spoke with panelist Lucy Kalanithi, a Stanford University internist and clinical faculty member. Kalanithi, 37, has been promoting her late husband Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s book, When Breath Becomes Air, released earlier this year. Authoring the epilogue, Kalanithi guided the book through the publication process. When Breath Becomes Air went on to become a New York Times bestseller, with more than one million copies sold worldwide.  

It was in 2013, when Paul Kalanithi was finishing up his medical training as a neurosurgeon, that he was diagnosed with advanced metastatic lung cancer. During his treatment, he returned to work, wrote his book, and lived to see the birth of his daughter, Cady. He died two years later.  

“We learned a lot of lessons about acceptance, and sitting with suffering. This is the entree that I think a lot of people have to Buddhism” Kalanithi said. “During Paul’s illness we knew he was dying, but so uncertain of when. Uncertainty is its own form of pain.”

Kalanithi said this is the first time she will speak about her husband’s book and her experience navigating his death for a Buddhist audience.

One of the lessons Kalanithi hopes to share with the audience is the comfort that comes with continuing to talk about a person after their death.

“When someone dies people become afraid to mention their name, they think they’ll make you feel sad, but you’re sad anyway,” Kalanithi said. “Continuing to talk about a loved one is so powerful and important. I’m doing a book tour this fall, and strangers come up to me and want to talk about Paul, which I find so comforting and helpful.”

Kalanithi, who has shared her story extensively with the medical community, said that her experience has made her feel “more connected to other people’s suffering.”

“I didn’t know how to sit with other people’s confusion and pain. I still don’t know the perfect words to say, but I also realize that is not actually the task at hand,” Kalanithi said. “And now, even with the way I’ll raise my daughter, I think about raising a compassionate and resilient child, which is a deeper thing than raising a happy child or a successful child.”   

The two-hour talk will also include breaks for the audience to reflect and respond to the topics of conversation.

“Sickness, Old Age, and Death: A Conversation,” will take place from 7-9 p.m. on Nov. 2 at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Tickets and more information are available here.

The post Lucy Kalanithi to Speak About Death and Dying at Upcoming SFZC Panel appeared first on Tricycle.

The third Buddhist Contemplative Care Symposium was held at the Garrison Institute earlier this month, bringing together 170 caregivers and healthcare practitioners for the weekend-long event to discuss ways to make sure patients’ wishes are kept in mind as they navigate the dying process.

Tricycle’s web editor, Wendy Joan Biddlecombe, sat down with conference organizers Robert Chodo Campbell and Koshin Paley Ellison, co-founders of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, which offers the only accredited contemplative-based chaplaincy program in the U.S. Their book, Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care, was released by Wisdom Publications in April and is in its third printing.

Here’s what Chodo and Koshin had to say when asked if the holidays are the appropriate time to have the tough conversations about what we want out of our life (and death): 

Koshin: Now is always a good time for meaningful conversations.

Chodo: Death is always present. It doesn’t stop for the holidays. But I wouldn’t necessarily raise the topic over Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas lunch unless there was someone in our presence transitioning toward death. In that case, then I would want everyone in the room to be open to a conversation. Because why would we be sitting around and bullshitting and not talking about what’s in front of us?

So I don’t think it should be barred from the holidays, but it’s also not something I’d put on the menu in particular: turkey, cranberry sauce, death.

Koshin: One of the things that’s particular about this symposium is that we’re gathering together to share the challenges and joys of being with people in their death process. Most of the people here are not clinicians—75 percent of end-of-life care comes from family members and friends. How do we have the meaningful conversations that make our wishes known, and how do we allow ourselves to really be open to these conversations? Have you told everyone you love that you love them? Are there people in your life who are you most grateful to? Who haven’t you told that you love them or are grateful to them? Are there relationships you would like to repair? What are you waiting for? It’s amazing that we don’t often take these risks because of our own nervousness or distractedness.

Chodo: Speaking of the holidays, a great party or after-dinner game would be to have everyone write down the five most important people in their life.

Koshin: And why.

Chodo: And why. Who is the person you could call at three o’clock in the morning if you really needed something? Most of us don’t have five people. We might get one or two.

Koshin: Who would drop everything to show up for you.

Chodo: And that can be quite shocking: “Wow, I need to tend to my relationships. I need to write more, call more.”

Koshin: Those relationships are like the refuge of sangha. We live in a time where isolation is one of the greatest indicators of morbidity and early death.

Chodo: It could be simply looking around the table and thinking, “Yeah, no, yeah, no. Maybe, yeah, no. Yeah, definitely”—those are the people that are important to me in my life.

Koshin: It’s also who you don’t want to be there. Because when we have very little time, seeing certain people can be too complicated, too charged, too traumatic. It’s important to just be able to know who you don’t want to be there and if you want to address that relationship . . . or not. Our practice is to investigate everything.

Read Robert Chodo Campbell’s essay, “Death is Not an Emergency,” from Awake at the Bedside

The post Turkey, Cranberry Sauce, Death appeared first on Tricycle.

Writers who haven’t had the opportunity to study with Dr. Charles Johnson during the past 40 years are now in luck. The novelist, essayist, cartoonist, and philosopher has collected the creative lessons he’s learned along the way in a new practical and semi-autobiographical guide called The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling.

Johnson is professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle, and has been given a MacArthur Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. His novels include The Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award; Dr. King’s Refrigerator; Dreamer; Faith; The Good Thing; and Oxherding Tale.

The Way of the Writer was conceived during a year-long correspondence between Johnson and poet and activist E. Ethelbert Miller. The two spoke daily about Johnson’s work as well as topics ranging from Buddhism to fatherhood, the state of black America, and sex for the 2015 book The Words and Wisdom of Charles Johnson. Through the revision process, Miller and others saw the potential for a book on the craft of writing.

The writing lessons, organized into 42 short and accessible chapters, also provide a glimpse into Johnson’s rigorous creative process, which has included working through the night for the past four decades after his family has gone to sleep, Sanskrit study, weightlifting, and Choy Li Fut martial arts practice.

Johnson, who is a Tricycle contributing editor and Soto Zen practitioner, recently spoke about his new book and the role of meditation while he’s writing.

You mention the importance of keeping a writer’s notebook throughout The Way of the Writer. Can you tell me how that figures into your own writing and your instructions to students?
Charles Johnson: I started with a diary that my mother gave me when I was 12 years old. With a diary, you record your thoughts and feelings about things. It’s very autobiographical. When I got to college the diary evolved into a journal and in there I would write poetry and brief essays that were for my eyes only. When I started writing fiction seriously and continuously in 1972, I began to keep a writer’s workbook. And that’s different from either a journal or a diary. I will still put down thoughts and maybe a brief essay to myself, but the main thing is to be aware of what’s happening in the world around me—scraps of dialogue that I hear during the course of the day and thoughts about plot and characterization. If I see something that is striking to me, or if an image comes to me descriptively, it will go into my writer’s journal for later use. I never read a piece of writing without taking notes on anything wonderful that happens. It might be the structure of a sentence. It might be a thought.

My writer’s workbooks easily take up 30 inches on my bookshelf. I go through my notebooks every time I do a story or a novel, because I might have heard a great line from a friend 30 years ago that is perfect for a work in progress. Whenever I go through the notebooks, it’s almost like looking back over my own life. I look at something and think, “Why did I find that interesting in 1974?” Or in 1980 I might have had an interest in describing things in a particular way and a lot of my entries might be bent in that direction. But now I have different interests, in the sciences, for example, which I try to incorporate in my most recent fiction. You evolve over time. I would recommend that my students take a look at the notebooks of Albert Camus, Anton Chekhov, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, because they are rich. This is not finished work that we have from those writers, but rather scraps and pieces of their thoughts and emotions over the years.

You write about your process for reviewing books, which includes temporarily forgetting everything you’ve learned about the craft of writing over your career. How is reading this way like beginner’s mind?
One of the things I write in the preface is that I appreciate what the great literary critic Northrup Frye called an “educated imagination.” And as Henry James once said in an essay called “The Art of Fiction”: “We should be the kind of people on whom nothing is lost.” Writers are naturally lifetime students. You’re always trying to learn more about your craft as well as whatever else is happening around you in the world.

But when I sit down to do a book review I don’t bring that baggage with me. I know I have presuppositions or assumptions that I’m going to make. I’m going to read the first page, the first paragraph, and the first sentence and let that work guide my meditation as I read the book. Every new story that we read teaches us what the possibilities are for how one can tell a story. There’s a freshness in consciousness that one wants to have when approaching any work of art. And I call that “beginner’s mind”. You bring no conceptual paint to layer over the phenomena, as Bhikkhu Bodhi says. You bracket all that—you set all your knowledge aside and try to experience the work in a fresh way. Later, when you do the book review, you can bring that knowledge back. But when you experience a book for the first time you should bring a kind of clarity and innocence to it.

In the book you describe these very intense periods when you’re writing. Where does your meditation practice fit in when you’re totally consumed by a project?
It’s in the process itself. One of the things that we learn as meditators is how to concentrate. The first stage is holding the mind steadily on one object. It might be our breathing, or it could be another technique that we use to reinforce our capacity for long periods of concentration. There is a Sanskrit word for this, ekagrata, and it’s composed of two words: eka means one and grata means to hold or to grasp. In concentration practice you’re grasping or holding one thing for a long period of time. That’s extremely similar to what happens when we are focused on writing or creating. Every artist knows what this is. When you’re creating you don’t care about everything else in the world except the story unfolding before your eyes.

Every artist is familiar with that first stage called “concentration” and that very often leads artists to the practice of meditation and sitting in a spiritual way. And there’s nothing about the artist’s process that will lead to awakening or enlightenment, but it is a stage along the way.

You write in the book about your mentor, John Gardner, and how he initially disagreed with your growing interest in Buddhism. What lesson is in this story for writers searching for a mentor and then also searching for a guide who may not tell you everything you want to hear?
John Gardner was easily the finest teacher of creative writing in our time, maybe in all of the 20th century. He once said: “Writing is the only religion that I have.” I’ve never known an artist to work as hard or to be as focused as John. He produced three books on the craft of writing: On Moral Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist, and The Art of Fiction, which I gave to my students every year for 33 years. He had a very strong personality, as many artists do, and there came a point where his path and my path diverged. And it was actually over Buddhism, because he was very Protestant and he thought Buddhism was wrong. That’s a quote. He thought it was wrong, because Jesus is all about love.

But I realized in my second novel, Oxherding Tale, which is a slave narrative in the form of a philosophical novel with a heavy emphasis on Eastern thought, that Buddhism was central to my life. I first meditated when I was about 14 years old. And then I studied Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism all the way through graduate school. And I was thinking, “Okay, let me write this book and get all that out of my system. By the end of the book I realized, “I will always be involved with this. This is one of the most beautiful visions that I can think of in the world.” But it just didn’t feel that way at the time I was working with him. I think he modified his position over time as he came to understand that there were Buddhist works he saw that were beautiful. And even though he didn’t understand why they were beautiful, he wanted other people to read those books, too. The takeaway is that if you’re honest and you want a mentor in someone like John Gardner—a literary lion who will clear a path for you—there will come a time when your voice and vision may differ from that individual. You have to have the courage to stand on your own.

You write about serving younger writers in the book by promoting their work and helping them publish. It sounds like you’re talking about a writer’s sangha. What advice do you have for writers who might have to be driven by ego to start their career?
You’re asking a very important question, which is how do you become an artist who is going to hopefully be working for decades? Some of the greatest artists I’ve known in my lifetime were working right to the last day of their life and that includes people like John Gardner, who tragically died in a motorcycle accident in 1982.

Being an artist is a particular way of being in the world. You don’t choose it the way that you choose a job or a vocation. It chooses you. You find that because you love art and you love philosophy, you love ideas, you are ready to make personal sacrifices in order to enrich literary culture. And that’s just the attitude that you have to have. You’re not doing this for the money or for ego reasons like fame or fortune. You’re doing this because you have been enriched yourself by the beauty that you found in writing and the arts and you want, if you’re lucky, to contribute to that.

Naturally, you want to help your students to contribute. So you provide them with courses in writing and then you try to help them get published in the spirit of enriching literary culture in America.

What else do you want Tricycle readers to know about your new book?
Whether they’re just readers or they’re writers, whether they’re beginners or veteran writers, I hope they will find something useful on the pages for their own creative practice. And maybe their spiritual practice, too, because I come at this book from a very Buddhist perspective. I hope it’s kind of book that will inspire people who are doing creative work and give them also useful and practical tools for their own writing lives.

The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling is available from Scribner on Dec. 6.

Read E. Ethelbert Miller’s interview with Charles Johnson, “Black Coffee Buddhism,” from our 25th anniversary issue

More Tricycle articles by Charles Johnson

The post A Master Class with Charles Johnson appeared first on Tricycle.

MNDFL, the secular meditation studio that allows busy New Yorkers to book their cushions ahead of time, is expanding to two new locations, one in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the other on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Lodro Rinzler, MNDFL’s co-founder and Chief Spiritual Officer, told Tricycle that since opening in November 2015 in Greenwich Village their mission “has always been to make meditation as accessible as possible.”

“When we opened we made a commitment to proactively responding to the needs of the community who came. At first that meant making sure that everyone’s first class was always $10. Then it was adding classes in Spanish, LGBTQ events, and once a month free classes,” Rinzler, a teacher in the Shambhala tradition said. “Once we started seeing consistent sold out classes each night, we realized we needed to expand our physical offerings too. We’re really excited to bring the same faculty (plus some fresh faces) and the same super kind and warm staff, to these new locations.”

MNDFL’s Upper East Side location at 239 East 60th Street is scheduled to open on Jan. 3, 2017. MNDFL’s Williamsburg location at 208 N 8th Street plans to open shortly thereafter in early 2017.

The post Secular Meditation Studio MNDFL Expanding to Two New NYC Locations appeared first on Tricycle.

2016 was a milestone year at Tricycle.

What started 25 years ago as a modest effort around founding editor Helen Tworkov’s kitchen table is now an international publication that reaches hundreds of thousands of readers in print and online. This year, we also launched a sleekly redesigned, user-friendly website and online course platform to help you better engage and learn from influential Buddhist teachers.

At 25, our commitment to help you learn from and engage with the Buddhist community is as strong as ever.  

As 2016 comes to a close, here are 16 articles, videos, and dharma talks published over the last 12 months that we think are worth a read (or a second look) before the year is up:

From the Magazine

Where the Thinking Stops
How prayer can put us in touch with something that is infinitely greater than we are—the mind itself
By Ken McLeod

Revisiting Ritual
Modern Buddhists often resist embracing ritual practice. But by working with our resistance, we can open ourselves to ritual’s liberatory potential.
By Anne C. Klein

Black Coffee Buddhism
An interview with writer and philosopher Charles Johnson
By E. Ethelbert Miller

Death is Not an Emergency
A Buddhist chaplain at the bedside of a Catholic patient
By Robert Chodo Campbell

Doing, Being, and the Great In-Between
Can putting an end to the endless pursuit of becoming someone imbue our lives with meaning?
By Christina Feldman

Our Common Thread
A Nichiren priest resists the idea that meditation is the unifying factor across Buddhist traditions.
By Myokei Caine-Barrett

Does Mindfulness Belong in Public Schools?
Two views
By Candy Gunther Brown and Saki Santorelli

From Trike Daily

Meet the First (and Only) Woman to Summit Mt. Everest Seven Times
Lhakpa Sherpa works as a housekeeper in Connecticut and climbs to provide for her three children.
By Wendy Joan Biddlecombe

Finding Refuge in a Time of War
This election cycle had been a condensed version of everything a child of immigrants learned to fear. The difference now is that she has a community.
By Daisy Hernández

Jhana: The Spice Your Meditation Practice Has Been Missing
Why jhana meditation is a transformative and vital part of the eightfold path
By Jay Michaelson

An Ethical Insurrection
French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard talks about why we’re due for radical change in how we treat animals.
By Marie Scarles

Why a Buddhist Yoga Teacher Heard the Call to Save 135 Rabbits
How Wendy Cook, who had never considered herself an animal activist, coordinated the “Great Rabbit Liberation of 2016.”
By Lakshmi Gandhi

Watch: SIT
A short documentary about Soto Zen priest Shohaku Okumura and his family.
Directed by Yoko Okumura

My Stoop Sangha 
If my Harlem block is my sangha, then the stoop provides two opportunities for seeking refuge: privacy and participation.
By Lauren Krauze

How a Monk-Turned-Street Artist Sees New York City’s Homeless
Pairoj Pichetmetakul hopes “The Positivity Scrolls” help teach New Yorkers compassion.
By Roi Ben-Yehuda and Terence Cantarella

From Dharma Talks

Using the Buddha’s Teachings to Overcome Addiction
With Valerie Mason-John (Vimalasara)

The post Tricycle’s Top 16 of 2016 appeared first on Tricycle.

Thirty years ago, the Village Zendo didn’t celebrate with a grand opening. The community started much more organically and modestly. For the first 14 years, the group met at Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara’s two-bedroom New York University faculty apartment in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Since then, the community has moved to the nearby Soho district and has grown to about 100 members, 80 of them formal students. Over 200 have taken their precept vows at the zendo.

“For our 30th anniversary celebration, a few students put together a slide show that brought back so many memories. Because, you know, this is New York City and lots of people have practiced with us and now live everywhere in the world,” recalled Enkyo Roshi, the Village Zendo’s abbot. “And there are quite a few people who started practicing with us 30 years ago and are still practicing with us. And quite a few who came 15 years ago, or 10 years ago. That’s kind of unique in the sense that if this is your flavor, this is a place you can stay.”    

Tricycle’s web editor, Wendy Joan Biddlecombe, recently sat down with Enkyo Roshi to talk about the last three decades and how the sangha has come to define itself.

The Village Zendo has been in its current location for about 10 years. How has your walk here every morning changed? How has the neighborhood changed?
Soho used to be a place for artists and musicians, and now many people are being priced out. It’s changed, and we have to recognize this change is happening. If you’re constantly resisting, it puts a wrong feel to your life. Sometimes there are great things: this building [next door] has a lot of dot coms, a lot of young people. But we may be priced out, we don’t know, so it’s kind of scary to be in a high-rent district. Location is so important for people to be able to practice. Here we have all these subway [lines], so it’s easy to come from Brooklyn, from New Jersey, from uptown on both sides. So I would hate to have to move somewhere that would isolate the community.

What are some great opportunities to practice in the city?
Just walking down the street and observing how one is in relation to the other people walking on the street. Are you with the stream or against the stream of people? Can you open your heart to those who are bumping into you? Can you just notice that they’re like beautiful flowers flowing down the street (if you’re having a bad day, not so much!). And to recognize those changes in the mind. How our minds are set is the heart of Zen and all Buddhist teachings; it’s not so much about what is out there. And when you’re in a place where there is so much change, the practice really balances you. It’s amazing.

Of course, living in a city is challenging. Traditionally, we think of Zen as a monastic form, but I really like what has happened to us—it hasn’t been conscious, but the urban environment has necessitated that we develop a flexibility in order to maintain a community. We’re clear about using ritual in an appropriate way, not in a crazy way or in a way that moves against the flow of life here in the city. So though I’ve been ordained, and we have some ordained priests, our practice at the Village Zendo is primarily a lay expression of the dharma. And even all of us priests essentially live lay lives—we don’t live together, we all have separate apartments, and some of us are married. There is a tension to some of the ritual aspects that draws a certain kind of person to the dharma. Not everyone is interested in bowing at your cushion and bowing at the community.

What are some of the things, then, you wouldn’t find at the Village Zendo?
Traditionally, we say don’t move, sit quietly. When many people first begin to practice any kind of meditation, they suddenly become very twitchy, because when you have a thought that you don’t like, it’s easier to reach up and scratch your ear than to stay with that moment. So there’s a powerful teaching in don’t move. But if someone is in pain, they should move. I have been trained in certain places where that wasn’t allowable. Here, there is an awareness that many people are new to the practice, and it’s going to take them time to adjust to the form.

We used to have 45-minute meditation periods, and we now have 30-minute ones. That’s a doable amount of time for most people. I think that’s a big change—many Zen centers still hold the 40- and 50-minute meditation periods. And we’ve cut back on the services. With the time that people have to come and to practice—say two hours in an evening—I think it’s more important for them to sit in meditation and be able to see a teacher privately than it is to be standing and chanting some words that they perhaps don’t understand. We’ve cut back, though we still do liturgy on retreat, and we’ll use chants that are translated into English. So it’s less old-school liturgy. Once a month we’ll do atonement ceremonies with a lot of bows, and that’s always fun—there are people who like that and the place is always full. And there are people who don’t like that, and don’t have to come to that if they don’t want to.  

A huge thing about Zen is finding your practice in your life, finding practice in the work you do, and appreciating the work you do. So when you’re emptying the garbage and when you’re shopping to prepare for a dinner, to take the mind of zazen, the mind of meditation, into those acts. To take that energy of awareness, precision, and appreciation into what you’re doing is very cool.

Can you take me through the three decades of the Village Zendo and tell me the highlights that come to mind?
During the first 10 years I was still teaching at NYU, and I began the practice not as a teacher but as a dharma student who wasn’t very disciplined and wanted community around me. I thought well, you invite people over . . . what are you going to do, you’re going to practice, right? I’d say the first 10 years was about establishing the early community and sharing all of the aspects of building community together. That was during the time of the AIDS crisis. We had several members who had AIDS, who died of AIDS, and we had a sangha at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, so that first 10 years is also very colored by mourning, and sadness, and awareness of the preciousness of life that maybe we wouldn’t have had if we hadn’t had those sitting next to us who were sick and dying. It was a very scary time. We probably had more gay people in our community then than we do now because there was so much less acceptance [in society]. It wasn’t a gay sangha, there were many people in it who weren’t gay, but there was a sense that gay people were welcomed here. And during that time everyone was pretty new to Zen practice. I was studying intensely with Maezumi Roshi in California. I took a sabbatical year from the university to study with him, and I went every summer.  So I was becoming the de facto teacher before I was actually a teacher. I did not consider myself a teacher, I considered myself a leader of a community. But then Maezumi Roshi pushed me to take more of a teacher role, and when he died I began working with Bernie Glassman. I had never studied with Bernie because I thought, well, I’m a political activist already, I know how to do that. But I didn’t.

I learned a lot from Bernie about the integration of our Zen principles in social action, and I would say the second 10 years were a lot about integrating social action—street retreats, Auschwitz retreats—at a time when it was really needed. There was so much anger around 9/11 and a need for people to stand up and show some compassion and awareness. We did a lot of that work, and at the same time maintained ordinary, day-to-day meditation. To me, that’s the success of this place, the morning, noon, and evening sits that never cease. And during the second decade some of my colleagues were beginning to mature and become able to dedicate their time to teaching. Now, in the third 10 years, those teachers are excellent veteran teachers. I have two therapists, a professor from NYU, and a potter. And coming along I’ll have a deaf man who is an art therapist, a jazz musician, and a Unitarian minister—those three are our junior teachers now. So I’m not concerned if I decide to take a vacation and go and live on an island somewhere that this will stop. It will continue.

If we’re talking again in 10 years, what would you like to be saying about the Village Zendo?
That we have a place that is large enough to accommodate all the people who want to come and to be able to continue to offer the dharma, both with new teachers and younger teachers. The “marketplace dharma” that’s going on now has its good aspects and its scary aspects. One good thing is that more young people are coming. Zazen centers can be a bit geriatric, but now we certainly have young people here. That’s a benefit.

We’re in the midst of a lot of political fear and uncertainty. Where can a dharma center fit in?
This is definitely a place to come and settle and prioritize and understand that while you can’t do everything, you can mobilize in a particular area. We’re big on disability rights here, and we also have a strong prison program. We have a group that goes to Sing Sing every weekend and sits and has dharma talks there. We had our first precepts ceremony there recently. We also have a group that writes letters to prisoners in solitary confinement all over the country, and they also write letters to Congress and so forth to put pressure around prison reform.

What distinguishes our group is a strong political action component. Everybody comes to dharma because they’re suffering. We all have different personal things, but we start to practice because we want to be free, we want to be clear, we want to conduct our lives in a good way. Once we begin on that path and we have a community that supports us, we can begin to make a difference. And I think that’s what distinguishes us from some places that might be more interested in a theoretical understanding of the dharma.

The post The Village Zendo Celebrates 30 Years as a Community appeared first on Tricycle.

Nearly 49 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told a crowd of more than 3,000 people at Riverside Church in Upper Manhattan that “a time comes when silence is betrayal.”

Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

During his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, King outlined a five-point plan for the American government to untangle itself from the war that had been going on for more than a decade. He also spoke about the injustice of black and white soldiers fighting side-by-side more than 8,000 miles away from the U.S., where they would not sit together in the same school, and how America’s occupation of Vietnam destroyed families and villages—“their two most cherished institutions.”

Early on in the speech, King said that he felt compelled to break his own silence and address those who questioned the “wisdom” of his “path.” ‘Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?’ ‘Why are you joining the voices of dissent?’ ‘Peace and civil rights don’t mix,’ he said, quoting his detractors during his talk.

And while King’s message is prescient today, at the time he was publicly criticized for the speech, denounced in 168 newspapers the following day and disinvited from a White House visit.

Time has shown that peace and civil rights not only coexist, but depend on each other. King’s words are particularly powerful less than a week before Donald Trump will assume the presidency, reminding us that it is our responsibility to speak out against government policies that we disagree with and not to be “mesmerized by uncertainty.”

In this spirit, and in honor of Black History Month, Tricycle is presenting a special video series throughout February called “Teachings for Uncertain Times” on our blog, Trike Daily. The videos are free to watch.

The series has been organized along with Vimalasara (Valerie) Mason-John, chair of the Vancouver Buddhist Center, and features 13 teachers of color who will give the following dharma talks: 

• Jan. 27: Vimalasara (Valerie) Mason-John on the barriers that people of color face when entering the Buddhist path
• Feb. 1: Tuere Sala on the power and importance of community
• Feb. 3: Larry Ward on seeing America’s racial karma as samsara
• Feb. 6: Mona Chopra gives a Black Lives Matter lovingkindness meditation
• Feb. 8: Myokei Caine-Barrett on the concept of ichinen sanzen—3,000 realms in a moment’s time—as a foundation for healing
• Feb. 10: Mushim Patricia Ikeda on why now is the time to practice and “dig in”
• Feb. 13: Viveka Chen on cultivating a strong sense of purpose  
• Feb. 15: Dawa Tarchin Phillips on developing trust despite cultural differences
• Feb. 17: Ruth King on exploring the relative reality of racial distress and how to polish the third jewel—sangha
• Feb. 20: Ven. Pannavati Bhikkhuni on celebrating our connectivity through inner conviction
• Feb. 22 Lama Rod Owens on recognizing our intersectionality, or different identities
• Feb. 24: Rev. Dosung Yoo on understanding non-self as people of color
• Feb. 27: Kaira Jewel Lingo on using the dharma to address habits inherited from our ancestors

Please enjoy a sneak peek of the series below, and be sure to tune in: 

The post Presenting “Teachings for Uncertain Times” appeared first on Tricycle.

An estimated 200,000 people are expected to attend the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday to “send a bold message to our new government on their first day in office . . . that women’s rights are human rights.”

There are also more than 600 “sister marches” planned in cities across the United States and internationally. The idea of the march—which started as a Facebook post following Donald Trump’s victory in the election—has expanded beyond women’s rights to include immigrant, LGBTQ, environmental justice, and other groups.

Tricycle recently spoke with five Buddhists about their decision to march in the historic event.

Name: Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
Age: 42
Location: New York City
Occupation: Author

Where do you practice?
The Village Zendo

When did you first hear about the Women’s March and when did you decide to go?
I think I heard about it just days after the election, and I decided to go right away. It just seemed like the obvious thing to do.

What’s the main reason you’re marching? 
Even as a feminist who is up on women’s rights and how far we still have to go, I was devastated by what the election results said to me as a woman. An infinitely qualified woman lost to an unqualified man. This man openly brags about sexually assaulting women, and still we chose this man. Even though he lost the popular vote, [the results] should not have been this close. I want to make sure women’s voices are still heard in this new era, one way or another.

What’s one message you wish you could send to President Trump?
It makes me sad that I am so skeptical that any well-intentioned message to him would connect. But if it could, I would ask that he please be careful with the country we love and the freedoms so many have fought for.

Name: Ryan Acquaotta
Age: 29
Location: New York City
Occupation: Musician

Where do you practice?
The Village Zendo

When did you first hear about the Women’s March and when did you decide to go?
Information about the march came to me from many different channels and groups not too long after the election. My band was already scheduled to play in Maryland the night before, so as soon as I heard about the march I decided I would stay overnight in the area and go to the march in D.C. the following day.

What’s the main reason you’re marching?
It’s not often that members of my family, my friends, my band, my religious community, and fellow anti-racist activists are all attending the same march. I want to show up and show them all love and support and empowerment in this moment, because I’d like it to happen more often!

What’s one message you wish you could send to President Trump?
The organizers of this march have put a lot of effort into articulating a vision for women’s rights that we are all showing up in support of on Saturday. We demand that you use the power this nation is vesting in you to show up for that vision every single day that you are president.

Name: Jasmine Hollingsworth
Age: 37
Location: Baltimore
Occupation: Founder and director of Liver Mommas, a nonprofit organization

In what tradition do you practice?
I’ve tried a bit of Zen. My uncle is a professor of religious studies at University of Cincinnati and a Mahayana Buddhist. I’ve learned a lot from him. I think I prefer the Zen tradition overall, but I’m still exploring.

When did you first hear about the Women’s March and when did you decide to go?
I heard about it in December. Some friends of mine were going. I wanted to go right away, but I have a child with a life-threatening illness and things come up unexpectedly with her, so I had to wait until closer to the march to make plans.

What’s the main reason you’re marching? 
I’m marching against the hateful and exclusionary rhetoric that President Trump has fueled his campaign with, which I believe has been used as an excuse by many to commit acts of hate and violence. As a Buddhist, I feel it’s important to leverage my right to peacefully protest against these acts and the rhetoric that has incited them.

What’s one message you wish you could send to President Trump? 
All people deserve equal rights and respect as humans, regardless of gender, race, religion, who they love, their economic status, or where they live. Hateful and divisive speech is not OK.

Name: Trisha Turiano
Age: 54
Location: Glen Ridge, NJ
Occupation: Artist

In what tradition do you practice? 
Mahayana

When did you first hear about the Women’s March and when did you decide to go?
When I heard about the New York City march a few weeks ago, I thought about going but did not commit, as part of me felt it was disrespectful. When Trump continued his petty, childish behavior I felt I could no longer stay silent. I feel it is my patriotic duty to rally.

What’s the main reason you’re marching?
To show the incoming administration that there are many people who are deeply concerned about Trump’s administration and human rights issues, and that if need be we can quickly organize ourselves into action.

What’s one message you wish you could send to President Trump?
Although sadly I do not believe he is capable of doing this, I would ask him to consider incorporating compassion in his presidency and personal life. I do have to thank him, though, as he has given me many opportunities to exercise showing compassion in my own practice.

Name: Traven Fusho Rice
Age: 36
Location: New York City
Occupation: Publisher and Filmmaker

Where you practice? 
The Village Zendo

When did you first hear about the Women’s March and when did you decide to go?
I saw something about it on Facebook shortly after the election and immediately felt a burning desire to go.

What’s the main reason you’re marching?
I was disheartened by the tone and messaging that arose during this maelstrom of a presidential election. It felt to me like many women’s voices were disparaged. l believe that it’s time, yet again, to stand up for women’s rights, to demand to be treated equally and to support women in leadership positions in this country.

What’s one message you wish you could send to President Trump?
Words matter.

Learn more about the Women’s March

The post Meet Five Buddhists Attending the Women’s March appeared first on Tricycle.

We’re going back to the Buddhist basics with Dr. Alexander Berzin.

After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972, Dr. Berzin spent the next 29 years in India studying and translating for Tibetan Buddhist lamas from all four traditions, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama and his tutors. Berzin returned to the West in 1998 with a “treasure trove” of rare teachings that he wanted to share with the world. To do that, 15 years ago he launched a website called the Berzin Archives, a resource free to the public. Since then, Berzin’s project—now called Study Buddhism—has grown to include thousands of articles and audio and video materials translated into 21 languages.

Berzin’s four introductory videos below will discuss the historical beginnings of Buddhism and the modern benefits of following this traditional path. These videos, Berzin says, are a good place for a beginning Buddhist to start.

Below, Berzin talks more about what next steps beginners can take:

What next steps do you recommend for beginning Buddhists?
I would recommend to beginners that they simply keep on studying. This could mean working with a teacher in person if there are Buddhist centers around, as well as reading books and using websites like ours. His Holiness the Dalai Lama always says that education is the key to self-development, so try to get as much correct information and knowledge of the Buddhist teachings as possible. Then, as Buddha advised, don’t accept the teachings out of blind faith, but examine them critically to see if they make sense. See for yourself if they are of help, and if indeed they are, then try to apply them in daily life. Everything that Buddha taught was intended as practical advice to benefit our lives. Meditation is important but not as an end in itself; it is a disciplined method for building up beneficial habits to carry over into daily life.

The Tibetan tradition wisely provides a graded path with a time-tested order of study and practice. To attempt more advanced practices without first establishing a sound foundation is inviting trouble and confusion. With such a bewildering array of Buddhist material easily available nowadays, newcomers to Buddhism often have no idea where to begin. Lacking sufficient background, many find that even the graded path begins at too advanced a level. It is hard to fathom how to relate many of the teachings to modern life. To help deal with that problem, traditional presentations need to be supplemented.

To provide easier access to the teachings, we have designed Study Buddhism with three levels of material. “Buddhism in Daily Life” is for beginners and anyone seeking Buddhist tips for everyday life, “Tibetan Buddhism” is a sequence of study for learning the basics, and “Advanced Studies” provides a wide panorama of articles spanning the extraordinary world of Tibetan Buddhism for readers to freely explore and deepen their study. Although Buddha never taught in the manner of “one size fits all,” we hope in this way to help guide seekers through the maze of 21st-century Buddhism.  

What books do you recommend for beginners?
There are many books by His Holiness the Dalai Lama especially suited for beginners, such as The Art of Happiness and An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life. By Western teachers, I would recommend Thubten Chodron’s Buddhism for Beginners, Jack Kornfeld’s A Path with a Heart, and Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

What else do you want our readers to know about Study Buddhism and how the project can support their Buddhist studies?
In our busy world, people are often too exhausted after work to pay attention during evening classes at a dharma center. They want to be able to study in small chunks when it comfortably fits into their schedules—any time, any place—and be able to pursue their studies conveniently through their handheld devices. Because of that, online education has gained wide success in many fields. In keeping with this trend, Study Buddhism aims to provide a modern online educational platform for Buddhism as well.

The post Introduction to Buddhism with Dr. Alexander Berzin appeared first on Tricycle.

In honor of Black History Month, Tricycle is presenting a special video series, “Teachings for Uncertain Times,” featuring 13 teachers of color, here on our blog, Trike Daily, throughout February. The videos are free to watch.

In our first talk of the series, Vimalasara (Valerie) Mason-John, a teacher in the Triratna Buddhist tradition, explains how practitioners of color can face barriers to entering the Buddhist path.

“We live in times where there is a disproportionate amount of black people being killed by the police, a disproportionate number of black people incarcerated in prisons and mental institutions. We walk into meditation halls with this painful load,” Mason-John says.

Watch her full talk below for her recommendations on creating an inclusive community.

The post Teachings for Uncertain Times: Barriers to Entering the Buddhist Path appeared first on Tricycle.

In honor of Black History Month, Tricycle is presenting a special video series throughout February called “Teachings for Uncertain Times” on our blog, Trike Daily. The videos are free to watch.

The series has been organized along with Vimalasara (Valerie) Mason-John, chair of the Vancouver Buddhist Center, and features 13 teachers of color who will give the following dharma talks: 

• Jan. 27: Vimalasara (Valerie) Mason-John on the barriers that people of color face when entering the Buddhist path
• Feb. 1: Tuere Sala on the power and importance of community
• Feb. 3: Larry Ward on seeing America’s racial karma as samsara
• Feb. 6: Mona Chopra gives a Black Lives Matter lovingkindness meditation
• Feb. 8: Myokei Caine-Barrett on the concept of ichinen sanzen—3,000 realms in a moment’s time—as a foundation for healing
• Feb. 10: Mushim Patricia Ikeda on why now is the time to practice and “dig in”
• Feb. 13: Viveka Chen on cultivating a strong sense of purpose  
• Feb. 15: Dawa Tarchin Phillips on developing trust despite cultural differences
• Feb. 17: Ruth King on exploring the relative reality of racial distress and how to polish the third jewel—sangha
• Feb. 20: Ven. Pannavati Bhikkhuni on celebrating our connectivity through inner conviction
• Feb. 22 Lama Rod Owens on recognizing our intersectionality, or different identities
• Feb. 24: Rev. Dosung Yoo on understanding non-self as people of color
• Feb. 27: Kaira Jewel Lingo on using the dharma to address habits inherited from our ancestors

The post Teachings for Uncertain Times appeared first on Tricycle.

In honor of Black History Month, Tricycle is presenting a special video series, “Teachings for Uncertain Times,” featuring 13 teachers of color, here on our blog, Trike Daily, throughout February. The videos are free to watch.

In the following video Tuere Sala, a co-guiding teacher at Seattle Insight Meditation Society and retired prosecutor, explains how taking refuge is an essential step to developing trust during times of turbulence.

“I have, over the years, come to develop an enduring trust—in the dharma and in my practice—that will support me no matter what situation I encounter, no matter what comes before me,” Sala says. “This trust did not come from someone else telling me what to do or someone else telling me how to believe. This trust came out of my own practice, my own working with the practice in my everyday life. It’s called taking refuge in the dharma, the Buddha, and the sangha. It’s this refuge that we take when we apply these teachings to our own life.”

Download a transcript of this retreat. It has been edited for clarity.

Watch other videos in the “Teachings for Uncertain Times” series

The post Teachings for Uncertain Times: The Power and Importance of Community appeared first on Tricycle.

In honor of Black History Month, Tricycle is presenting a special video series, “Teachings for Uncertain Times,” featuring 13 teachers of color, here on our blog, Trike Daily, throughout February. The videos are free to watch.

Larry Ward, director of the Lotus Institute and a senior dharma teacher ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh, talks about seeing America’s racial karma as samsara in the following video. 

The post Teachings for Uncertain Times: America’s Racial Karma appeared first on Tricycle.

In honor of Black History Month, Tricycle is presenting a special video series, “Teachings for Uncertain Times,” featuring 13 teachers of color, here on our blog, Trike Daily, throughout February. The videos are free to watch.

In the following video, Mona Chopra, a meditation teacher and acupuncturist, offers a lovingkindness meditation inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. 

“It can be so easy to polarize, to begin to blame, and to increase our sense of distance from other human beings. We so easily say that we would never do that, so easily close off our hearts to a whole group of people whether they are a race of people or a group of people such as police officers,” Chopra says. “This practice is offered as a way of looking within to see what seeds we can address. Those same seeds that lead to violence, aggression, and the kinds of behaviors we’ve been seeing that have ultimately led to killings, particularly of black men, in this country.”

Learn more about Mona Chopra 

The post Teachings for Uncertain Times: A Black Lives Matter Lovingkindness Meditation appeared first on Tricycle.

Age: 60
Profession: Director and producer
Location: West Los Angeles

The post This Buddhist Life: Denise Di Novi appeared first on Tricycle.

The post Meditation App Roundup appeared first on Tricycle.

In honor of Black History Month, Tricycle is presenting a special video series, “Teachings for Uncertain Times,” featuring 13 teachers of color, here on our blog, Trike Daily, throughout February. The videos are free to watch.

In the following talk, Myokei Caine-Barrett, current bishop of the Nichiren Shu order of North America and resident minister of Myoken-ji Temple in Houston, Texas, introduces the “bare bones” of a complex practice—Ichinen Sanzen—that asks us to view 3,000 realms in a single moment.

“In our tradition, we talk about the mutual possession of the 10 realms. That means simply that the realm of hell is also the realm of buddhahood as well as the realm of humanity . . .

We can think about a realm as something each of us fundamentally has but may not know about. Mine used to be anger, which came about as a direct result of spankings that I got as a child. It was something that I carried with me for a long time without realizing. The more I got into practicing, the more I began to understand the nature and the source of that anger. Because of that, I was able to heal from that anger,” Caine-Barrett says in her talk.

The post Teachings for Uncertain Times: Viewing 3,000 Realms in a Single Moment appeared first on Tricycle.

After 12 years of offering a weekly Buddhist program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, the Village Zendo has given the first precept ceremony at the maximum-security prison north of New York City.

“It took a long time for the group to have the maturity,” said Randall Ryotan Sensei Eiger, who has coordinated the program since its inception in 2005. “There was a growing interest in that side of the practice, and I finally decided it was time.”

The precepts are a set of ethical guidelines in the Buddhist tradition, and the 16 Bodhisattva Precepts of the Village Zendo include the three refuges (taking refuge in the Buddha, his teachings, and the community), the three pure precepts (not-knowing, bearing witness, and loving the self and others), and the 10 grave precepts, which include abstaining from killing, stealing, and taking or giving drugs.

Volunteer teachers from the Village Zendo travel to the prison in Ossining every Sunday to meet a core group of about 10 practitioners. Many of the members have very long sentences, Eiger said, and one of the members has been with the group since its beginning.

Eiger declined to give the name of the inmate who took the precepts, citing privacy reasons required by the Department of Corrections as well as his personal policy.

“I was very happy when he took the precepts. He was really ready, he was going through some really positive changes in his life,” Eiger said.

Eiger and other teachers from the Village Zendo spent six weeks preparing for the precept ceremony, which took place on Oct. 23, 2016. Eiger said that although the group meets in a prison, the program is very similar to what is offered at the Village Zendo—periods of zazen [sitting meditation], a ceremony, and a dharma talk.

Still, the practitioners and teachers have to contend with Department of Corrections regulations and the often-violent reality of prison life.

“It was out of the question that he’d be able to sew his own rakusu [a Zen garment worn around the neck], so that part we fudged,” Eiger said. “Their main concern was that the rakusu might become some kind of gang identification. So they were OK with [him having it] as long as he didn’t take it back to his cell.”

Except for two hours on Sundays, the rakusu, as well as other religious supplies from the different faith groups that offer services at the prison, are locked up in a cabinet.

And while Sing Sing might seem to offer a different set of challenges regarding the vows, Eiger said the way he teaches the precepts is “they’re not separate from the environment that you’re living in.

“They’re going to be different if you’re living in a monastery in India or if you’re in a monastery in the United States, or if you’re working in a law office or if you’re incarcerated in a maximum security facility. The precepts are the thing,” Eiger said. “[In prison], sometimes other guys will confront you, challenge you in some way. They call it ‘being punked.’ And if you back down or flash them the peace sign you can expect to be in danger of your life. So the question we work with at Sing Sing is how you keep the precepts in this environment.”

The post Village Zendo Offers First Precept Ceremony at Sing Sing Correctional Facility appeared first on Tricycle.

In honor of Black History Month, Tricycle is presenting a special video series, “Teachings for Uncertain Times,” featuring 13 teachers of color, here on our blog, Trike Daily, throughout February. The videos are free to watch.

Zen teacher Mushim Patricia Ikeda’s talk references the presidential election and the “sharp increase in already existing fears” among African Americans, undocumented immigrants, Muslims, and people of color communities.

“The question is what is going to change and how will it change,” says Ikeda-Nash, a meditation teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California. “Dharma practitioners have always formed communities and deep spiritual friendships that have helped us to weather the winters of hard times and to bask together in the warmth of good times . . . Now is the time to ask ourselves, ‘what have we been practicing for?’”

Download a transcript of this talk. It has been edited for clarity.

Watch Mushim Patricia Ikeda-Nash’s Dharma Talk, “Real Refuge: Building Inclusive and Welcoming Sanghas”

Watch other videos in the “Teachings for Uncertain Times” series

The post Teachings for Uncertain Times: What Have We Been Practicing For? appeared first on Tricycle.

In honor of Black History Month, Tricycle is presenting a special video series, “Teachings for Uncertain Times,” featuring 13 teachers of color, here on our blog, Trike Daily, throughout February. The videos are free to watch.

In the following video, Dawa Tarchin Phillips, resident teacher at the Bodhi Path Buddhist Center of Santa Barbara and director of education at the University of California Santa Barbara’s Center for Mindfulness and Human Potential, offers eight teachings to appreciate our inherent value. 

“We live in times when many people are led to believe that they are incomplete and that they don’t share in the basic wholeness, in the basic equality of our human species, of our human family,” Phillips says in his talk. “Whether that is because you feel disadvantaged due to the gender, race, sexual orientation, or class that you are born into, our culture makes it easy to believe that somehow you are less than. The premise for the teaching that I want to share with you is based on the fact that all healing starts in an appreciation for our basic wholeness.”

Download a transcript of this talk. It has been edited for clarity.

Watch other videos in the “Teachings for Uncertain Times” series

The post Eight Principles for Uncertain Times appeared first on Tricycle.