Blog Posts

It’s tricky – we want our spiritual communities to be places of refuge from the over-stimulation and conflict in the world outside our temple walls. No one wants to come to practice at the Zen center only to participate in a political debate, or be told what they should be doing as a good Buddhist. And yet… if we don’t challenge our comfort levels as a Buddhist community in order to witness and respond to the often acute suffering in the world around us, especially of...

For millennia, spiritual traditions have recognized that greed, hatred, and ignorance cause suffering in the human heart. Now it’s time to recognize that greed, hatred, and ignorance inevitably cause suffering at whatever scale they manifest: individual, family, community, national, or global. For too long we have separated our values from our economic and political systems...

How do we remain open when we witness incredible suffering without being overwhelmed with despair? If we close ourselves off, we deactivate our conscience, hide out in denial and ignorance, reduce our sense of intimacy with all life, and let our heart atrophy. How do we walk the middle path that is neither denial nor despair? It's possible, although it's not easy...