As I am getting ready to leave Clear Sky Retreat Center after being part of the Karma Yoga team, Cata and Sensei discuss with me some of the biggest challenges to maintaining an ongoing practice of Karma Yoga, or meditation in action through service. Their teaching...
Or getting paid to undertake spiritual training Spiritual training Historically, spiritual training took place almost exclusively within the monastery or convent. Nowadays few of us spiritual practitioners enter that kind of orthodox context. What then? We suggest...
Awakening, the great healing. The ongoing, mapped process of awakening is the ultimate spiritual healing. With awakening, the self is transcended, and thus the troubles of the self, of “me,” “my troubles,” are healed. Though any organism is inherently subject to decay...
An Interview with Dharma Teacher Achariya Doug Duncan on Exploring, Transcending, Surrendering & Awakening. Article by Brendan Joseph Ries, as Published in the Kyoto Journal Online Magazine, February 2014. Download the Kyoto Journal article Click to download...
Quantum physics as well as tradition Buddhist philosophy teach us that nothing in the universe remains the same for even a second. Thus we know that everything we hold and cherish will also pass on and out of our lives, if only at death. This may feel frightening...
I dream, I hope, I work, I love, I play, I dream, I eat. These verbs are all about me; working, hoping, dreaming, loving, eating all continue, even when there is no ‘me’. Who is this ‘me’? Or is it a what? Is ‘me’ a person, a thing, an idea, a feeling? It’s all of...
When you wake up in the morning you leave behind one world — the dreaming world — and find yourself in another world — waking life. These two worlds or states share similarities. In Tibetan Buddhism they’re two of six states termed ‘bardos’, or ‘in-between states’....
We once asked Namgyal Rinpoche if trust was awakening. His response was: ‘Complete trust is complete awakening’. So the question may be, what (or whom) are you trusting? We need to remember of course that the ego only trusts itself, which is a very poor choice, as the...
