A few weeks ago, I posted a graphic on my Facebook page: “Voting is the expression of our commitment to ourselves, one another, this country, and the world.” I thought of it as an earnest call to action, and a simple way to show people with whom my work resonates how much I care about voting.

The tendency for most of us each day is to focus on life’s problems. More often than not, we find ourselves lamenting the prickly patch of our long-term relationship rather than stopping to appreciate its strengths; the moments of incredible boredom at work seem to outweigh the interesting aspects.

In the past several months, upsetting stories in breaking news have seemed ubiquitous, chaotic, and panicked — fraught with vitriol and anxiety. Perhaps it is always this way or perhaps it’s the U.S. election.

There’s a common (relatively speaking) “Buddhist joke” about how much better it would be if we celebrated Interdependence Day, rather than Independence Day.

Recently, a student of mine told me a story about babysitting her five-year-old cousin. They watched a children’s sitcom in which the adolescent female protagonist is characterized as a sweet, morally upstanding A-student.

About a month ago, I had the chance to attend the Skoll World Forum on social entrepreneurship in Oxford, England.

My teacher, Saydawgyi U Pandita, died on April 16, 2016. He was 94, yet he was so resolute, so indomitable, so mountain-like that his ever dying seemed unthinkable.

In Buddhist psychology, the word “equanimity” is commonly used to describe the idea of balance. Being able to find equanimity is essential for all of us — particularly when overwhelming emotions arise.

Many years ago, a friend of mine, someone very committed to self-awareness and passionately committed to social justice activism, said to me,

During a retreat I was teaching in Los Angeles on faith and Buddhism, I opened the discussion with some Buddhist definitions of faith — offering your heart to someone or something — and dedicated some time for questions from the participants.

The Buddha pointed out thousands of years ago that suffering is a fact of life. Or, as I sometimes put it: Some things just hurt.

One of the trickiest myths about meditation is that it’s a way to clear your mind of thoughts. Many people (myself included) start out meditating with the unrealistic expectation that the practice will stop their thoughts from arising.

I was born in the 1950s into a Jewish family. Particularly given the aftermath of World War II, the idea of Jewish identity — even in a relatively secular household in the States — was an intense and complicated one for me growing up.

In the early ‘80s, I traveled to teach in Zimbabwe. The landscape there was breathtaking.

Taking refuge is not at all the same as declaring yourself a Buddhist, or rejecting anything else. It doesn’t involve adhering to a dogma or adopting a set of beliefs.

My first meditation teachers came from a Burmese tradition. My later teachers were from a Tibetan lineage. Within a year, I had been exposed to quite different traditions, lineages, and ways of practicing.

Munindra-ji once gave me a wonderful piece of advice. I went to my meditation teacher very upset about something. I’m not quite sure I even remember what it was about; I just wanted someone to talk to.

The idea of “having faith” in someone or something — to trust a person, to believe in a particular idea or feeling, to live according to a certain religion or ideology — is often tied to stories, to assumptions, to specific and pre-determined ideas of what faith should be.

One of the main conditions that causes suffering to become worse is denial. You know the feeling: we get in an argument with a friend, but pretend we are not angry and swallow a whole bunch of feelings until resentment bubbles to the surface in a different cont

One of the main conditions that causes suffering to become worse is denial. You know the feeling: we get in an argument with a friend, but pretend we are not angry and swallow a whole bunch of feelings until resentment bubbles to the surface in a different cont