bodhi tree swaying

I don’t know if anger, rage, and frustration are getting more common, but it certainly seems like they are. As we find ourselves snarled in impossibly heavy traffic, overloaded with life’s complexities, dealing with technology that we think should work but sometimes doesn’t, and struggling to survive in a precarious and heartless economic system, it [...]

Right at the very beginning of my meditation practice I was introduced to both mindfulness of breathing and the development of lovingkindness meditation. It was explained to me that both of these practices were equally important, that they were complementary, and that alternating these practices prevented imbalance in our approach. It was stressed, in fact, [...]
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Charles M. Blow has a short but interesting column explaining that the vast majority of Americans believe that good people who are not Christians can go to heaven. The sub-plot of the article is the disbelief that some people experienced when they learned this finding. That suggests to me that the tenets of hard-right evangelicalism have come to be seen as normative, when in fact they are a minority position that happens to have a lot of political traction and a direct channel to the media.

In June, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life.

This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved

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We had a good class in prison today. Rich was talking about how much the practice of metta bhavana and an awareness of Buddhanature had changed his life. I shared how I’ve become substantially less critical through the practice of metta, and said that although an awareness had had a profound effect at times on how I’ve seen myself, I don’t think it’s penetrated very deeply (he thought the same about himself). I find that sometimes I still get frustrated by people’s actions and judge them not on their potential but on how they behave.

I contrasted this with how I view my daughter. She may sometimes have tantrums or in an attempt to play she’ll throw food or utensils around the kitchen, but I don’t get angry with her. I take the view that she’s still growing up, and that this is just how she is at the moment. …