CJ

We’re all given the same twenty-four hours a day. We can spend our time feeling hurried and harried, overwhelmed by chores and demands, distracted and burned out . . . or we can awaken to Buddha Standard Time, the realm of timelessness where every choice, every action, and every breath can be one of renewal and infinite possibilities. By learning to live in this dimension—Buddha Standard Time—we reduce the amount of stress in our lives and find greater focus, fulfillment, creativity, and even wisdom

About our Guest:

Lama Surya Das, who the Dalai Lama affectionately calls the American Lama, has spent forty years studying with the great spiritual masters of Asia. He is an authorized lama in the Tibetan Buddhist order, and the founder of the Dzogchen Center. Surya Das is the author of the international bestseller Awakening the Buddha Within: Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World and twelve other books, including his latest release, Buddha Standard Time: Awakening to the Infinite Possibilities of Now. His blog “Ask The Lama” can be found at www.askthelama.com. To see Surya’s lecture and retreat schedule please visit www.surya.org.

Show Highlights

• Segment 1: Living Buddha Standard Time- Despite modern technological advancements focused on saving us time, why is it that most people never have enough time in the day?  What would happen if we spent less time looking at our watches and more time truly experiencing time by being present? Lama Surya Das talks about the big time (eternity) versus small time (clock time).   Time is subjective, which is why time takes forever when we were waiting for our first kiss. Learn how to reconsider your perceptions of time.  http://www.thedrpatshow.com/shows/cj-120112-das_seg1.mp3
• Segment 2: The Best Therapy Ever. How do we easily switch between linear and divine time? Learn from Lama Surya Das how being in the HOLY NOW can be the best therapy ever. How do you deal with your internal sense of panic when you feel like you are running out of time? How can we remind ourselves to tune into Buddha Standard Time?  http://www.thedrpatshow.com/shows/cj-120112-das_seg2.mp3
• Segment 3: Live like a Lama-  How the heck does a Lama live?  Do Lama’s read email from the divine, and listen to Blue Tooth in the car?   How does your life compare?  Why does the younger generation give Lama Surya Das hope?  What are the Baby Boomer’s obligation to the younger generation? How do external subtle energies (moon, body rhythms) effect our inner energy and how to harmonize with the world around us?     http://www.thedrpatshow.com/shows/cj-120112-das_seg3.mp3
• Segment 4: Ask the Lama- Q&A – Is it possible that a person can be born into a computer? What did the Dali Lama say? What are risks of loading our consciousness onto a computer? Does Lama Surya Das ever get pissed off? What does he do when he gets pissed?http://www.thedrpatshow.com/shows/cj-120112-das_seg4.mp3

Resources:

• Lama Surya Das’ website: http://www.surya.org/
• Books: http://www.amazon.com/Buddha-Standard-Time-Awakening-Possibilities/dp/0061774561/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1305111210&sr=8-1
• Book review: http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/books/books.php?id=21165

Loving actions and empathic compassion are both wise and desperately needed in this violent, competitive world. Just how is it that each of us can live in such a way to contribute toward a happier, healthier, and more loving and sane home, school, community, and world? This is a big question, yet the answer is not out of reach.  I well remember a young child once said to me “Martin Luther King was a great leader — he had big words.  When some people said hate he said love.” Somehow this young being already had an idea about what it takes to live in such a way that brings happiness to ourselves and others at the same time. The Dalai Lama of Tibet reminds us, “If you want to be happy, make others happy. Happiness and well being is the purpose of this life. My religion is loving-kindness.”

It is said that in Tibet, every village, valley, and clan had its own red-and-gold robed Lama to act as priest, healer, teacher and wise man. And also every village had its day-lok, or returner from the beyond, the bardo, land of the dead, or intermediate state. These returners understood reality and often came back with hair-raising tales of the “no-good-niks” who had done evil things on this earth, and as a result, were undergoing pain and travails in the world to come. Occasionally the day-lok also reported on the rewards of the honest and generous ones who would reap excellent rewards from their good karma (actions and intentions) in the next life. However, the fire-and-brimstone-like oral day-lok literature is mostly comprised of vivid cautionary tales meant to inspire common folks to follow unfailingly the Five Buddhist Moral Precepts of: no killing, stealing, lying, intoxicants, or sexual misconduct — and to live a good, honest, productive, and nonviolent life.

My late friend, the lama Chakdud Tulku used to tell stories about his mother Ama-la, who was a day-lok. A humble, pious, shy and quiet woman, she devoted herself daily to caring for her family and neighbors, and especially her reincarnate lama son (tulku) who was the apple of her eye.  Never did she raise her voice or gossip and criticize anyone. Unlearned in books, she was skilled in the arts and crafts of traditional Tibetan home and family life.

One day a terrible epidemic spread among the villagers, and carried Ama-la off along with some of her neighbors. She breathed her last breath with the Dalai Lama’s mantra-prayer of compassion and loving kindness on her lips, wishing her family and friends well “Om Mani Pedme Hung!” — the jeweled spiritual light is in the lotus of each of us! Whispering the mantra ever more gently, she breathed her last and then, relaxing back into herself, with the final seed-syllable, “Hung,” she was gone.

A family lama was called to oversee her final arrangements, pray for her and strive to ensure a higher rebirth. How amazed was he to find that she woke up the next morning and seemed to be alive and cured! The entire family rejoiced. But Ama-la was a transformed person, a day-lok, having returned from the land of the dead with tales to tell. Ama-la told whoever would listen that the obnoxious, drunken, old wife-beating Uncle Dorje’s ongoing spiritual being had become stuck beneath a rocky road and was constantly being run over by trucks, and that the spiteful, acid-tongued old Grandmother Cheutso was reborn as a spider in the gloomy, dank local police station basement. Moreover, she’d seen the infamous thief Puntsok reborn as a sore-covered snake, armless, legless, and slippery, being beaten with sticks by local villagers.

“How could this be?!” asked more than a few of Ama-la’s neighbors. The day-lok patiently explained to them again and again that she herself had voyaged there and had seen reality. She knew beyond a doubt that the basic fundamental and ethical teaching from Buddha concerning the law of karma, cause and effect, was undoubtedly true. Ama-la saw that we each reap the results of our actions. While once she had been a meek and mild-mannered woman who kept in the background as tradition required, Ama-la now spoke with great authority, in a calm and clear, Lama-like teacher-Elder voice.

“The flowering, wish-granting Tree of Virtue and Morality,” she exclaimed in an orator’s voice which completely amazed her listeners, “wafts its heavenly fragrance to all who shelter under it, and it is like a blissful and serene flower-garden heaven all around them. The gods and angels themselves are spawned by good karma’s fragrance of this wonderful virtue wafting all the way up to the highest heavens, and delighting the Ultimate Judge of All Karma (actions). Join together with me in this virtuous celebration!”

And so Ama-la regaled them with life-valuable parables about what goes around comes around. We shall reap what we have sown, as many of the Good Books say. This is universal truth, timeless yet timely, good for today and good for tomorrow. Be good and do good, and goodness shall follow you like a shadow follows the body. Wreak havoc and evil, and you shall reap the whirlwind, or at least bad karma… and no one wants that!

This karmic law, what goes around comes around, can help us to understand that for every action there is a reaction. (Science also now tells us this, too.) Things reproduce in kind and not at random. Just as apple trees come from apple seeds and not from lemon seeds; our good habits and excellent character and destiny arise through repeating good, wholesome and helpful deeds, including our actions of body, speech, and mind. This is why it’s important, as my own late grandmother Anne taught me, to practice what you preach, do what you say you’re going to do, keep your agreements, and walk your talk.

Our thoughts and intentions are also very important. If we can train our brains and open our hearts, we become masters rather than victims of circumstances and conditions. For it’s not what happens to us, but what we make of it that makes all the difference; this is what defines our experience, our character, and our destiny. Understanding this, our inner strength and power, helps us to train ourselves into following the good path in life and to assume the high ground. And we find that we do not to have to travel very far from home in order to find the holy land. It lies within and all around us, always. Heaven and nirvana, happiness and well being, love and truth can be discovered in our own backyard if we dig deeply enough into our own heart and mind, and examine our body, soul and spirit to find out who we are, where we come from and how we fit in to this entire marvelous and miraculous universe. We uncover, recover, and discover the god or goddess, the Buddha, the divinity within everyone and everything.

If we can dig deeply into ourselves, we will reach the water table where we are all one, all invisibly joined, the common ground. Then we can both learn and practice naturally The Golden Rule, treating others as we would ourselves be treated. The enlightened teacher named Buddha said, long ago: “What is hateful to you, don’t do to others; what is delightful to you, do for others, too.”

As we mature and wise-up, we can graduate to the second rule, which I lovingly call The Diamond Rule: seeing the Buddha, the divine light, the sacred in everyone and everything. Through this path of self-inquiry and discovery, we grow in insightful awareness, discernment, and unselfish love. We reduce selfishness, and increase altruistic compassion and empathy, and positively transform our inner attitudes in order to be an edifying light and a caring steward — rather than a dark cloud and exploiter — in this, our world. “To know the world is knowledge; to know oneself is wisdom,” as the aged Chinese sage Lao Tzu once said. The mature wisdom of self-knowledge is the universal panacea, the universal remedy. So let’s awaken together from the sleep of separateness and illusion, and lighten up while enlightening up.

Wisdom and compassion, the Buddhist words for truth and love, are like the two wings of a great bird. As a bird cannot fly with only one wing, we need wisdom to know truth and warmhearted loving compassion to live closely together and get along in this world. The word “religion” implies uniting and bringing together, and should not become a divisive force in this world. Each of the world’s major religions has their own version of the Golden Rule, to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And there is only one person we can ask to do this: ourselves. Each of us must focus on our own behavior and let it be good. Let’s learn to love and accept ourselves and each other with patience and tolerance before it’s too late to save this, our endangered planet.

Each of us is unique and significant, and has our role to play in this great pageant. Everything we do makes a difference, whether large or small. It’s not how large our works, accomplishments, and deeds are, or even if they are recognized, seen, and appreciated. It’s how much love we put into them that makes them meaningful and even great in the long run. Even something as simple as being polite is connected to morality and self-discipline, steadying and easing the societal and family wheels. Politeness requires patient attention, alert presence of mind, and conscientious care for others as well as oneself — all factors of contemplation, meditation, prayer, and awakening. Pay attention, my dear friends. If we are not here now, we won’t be there then. This I can guarantee. Developing present awareness by consistently remembering to integrate mindfulness into our actions, rather than mindlessly sleepwalking through our days, helps bring us all that we want, need and aspire to, a better quality of life for ourselves and all our connections.

Let us think globally while acting locally, beginning with ourselves and each other, helping, connecting, wishing others well and acting on the best impulses of our better nature. Let us care for our own garden, as well as the entire environment. Pick up litter, recycle garbage, and refrain from waste. Give the gift of your time and good energy to someone in need, or lend an ear, a shoulder, a helping hand. There are a million-and-one ways and places to kneel and kiss the ground, not just in church. This world of ours is like an altar, and all who walk on it are like gods and goddesses, Buddhas and angels. This we can see through awakening to reality, opening our wisdom eye and practicing with simple clarity these two essential teachings for the heart and mind, body and soul. May these jewels, The Golden Rule and The Diamond Rule, adorn each of us and beautify the world.

Be kind to one another.

Lama Surya Das (Jeffrey A. Miller)

Buddha Standard Time: Awakening to the Infinite Possibilities of Now

We are living in times when everything has been sped up and the result is damage to our bodies through stress and a concerted attack on our souls. Many of us are so addicted to life in the fast lane that we don’t ever want to disconnect. In this timely and wide-ranging book, Lama Surya Das, the bestselling author of Awakening the Buddha Within and Buddha Is as Buddha Does, teaches us how to wean ourselves from the time addictions that sap all our energy and good will. As the founder of the Western Buddhist Teachers Network, he is convinced that Buddhism is a profound study of time management and has much to contribute to the dialogue with its practices of living in the present moment, meditation, equanimity, and detachment.

Throughout the book, Lama Surya Das presents “Mindful Moments” exercises and “Time Out” Meditations. The overarching theme is the experience of the Eternal Now — the realm of timelessness where we can be renewed and opened to infinite possibilities. Among the many topics Surya Das covers here are how to awaken from the tyranny of artificial modern time, the need to create special spaces for nurturing your Higher Self, the art of synchronizing linear Father Time and cyclical Mother Nature, understanding the role of our powers of perception, minding time wisely, mastering living in the moment, creating special refuges in sacred time and space, and learning to embrace loss, death, and the other dimensions of impermanence.

What does it mean to enter Buddha time? Lama Surya Das writes:

“Relax and enter into a timeless zone; nowhere to go, nothing to do, free of scheduling and appointments, free of past and future thoughts and memories and plans. Simply and attentively present, you are cultivating nowness-awareness.

“You can also try removing your watch in your everyday routine. At the office, in the supermarket, out with friends . . . you may be surprised at the new, expansive relationship you have with time when you stop measuring it in small increments.

“The primacy of the moment is one of the first things you discover when you get off artificial clock time. It’s always now. Not earlier, not later, not yesterday, not tomorrow, but right now. Your focus is no longer on your schedule — where you have to be and what you have to do — but in the present. When you think about it, the present moment is the one and only place we are or ever can be. It holds infinite ways of knowing our greatness, our individual genius — infinite resources for solving problems. And we can experience the present moment wherever we are, whenever we choose, just by becoming precisely focused on the breath or on any other equally vibrant, ever-available object of attention.”

We were most impressed again with the variety of spiritual practices shared by Lama Surya Das including a W.O.W. (Wishing Others Well) practice, a Candlelight Meditation, a piece on Right Driving, practical tips for standing in a line, an “I Am I” Meditation, and a “Breaking Old Patterns” piece. There’s plenty of wisdom here for those harassed and hurried by time (which means all of us).

You can visit the author online at www.surya.org. Lama Surya Das is profiled on this website in the Living Spiritual Teachers Project.

reprinted courtesy of Spirtuality & Practice

Buddha Standard Time was selected as ‘One of the 50 Best Spiritual Books of 2011′ by Spirituality & Practice

Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not get bent out of shape.
Blessed are the patient, for they shall be waited on and attended to.
Blessed are the generous, for they shall receive abundantly.
Blessed are the grateful, for their life shall always be bountiful.
Blessed are the wise, for they know not in excess.
Blessed are the lovers, for love is theirs for the asking.
Blessed are the healers, for their world and they too shall be healed and well.
Blessed are those who listen, for they shall be heard and understood.
Blessed are those who choose to be kind rather than right, for they shall have long-lasting beautiful relationships.
Blessed are those mates who have made two lives as one.
Blessed are the open-minded and warmhearted, for they shall receive all they need.
Blessed are the learners, for they shall be edified and fulfilled.
Blessed are those who know how to receive as well as to give, for inexhaustible richness is theirs.
Blessed are the goodhearted, for they shall live long and harmoniously.
Blessed are the curious, for wonderment is theirs.
Blessed are the awakeful, for they shall see things as they are.
Blessed are those who don’t know it all, for they shall discover truth through doubt and inquiry.
Blessed are those without many expectations and appointments, for they shall not be disappointed.
Blessed are the content, for they have arrived and shall be completed.
Blessed are the underdogs, for their loyalty and purity shall be rewarded in all walks of life.
Blessed are those who need little for they shall find simplicity and ease.
Blessed are the forthright, for they shall right the world and speak truth to power in love.
Blessed are the altruists, for they shall usher in the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the leaders who inculcate leadership instead of followership.
Blessed are the servants, for they shall be served and attended to.
Blessed are the pray-ers, for life is fragile, fleeting, precious and needs to be handled with prayer.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall find peace and well being.
Blessed are the joyful for joy and happiness is theirs.
Blessed are the co-meditators, for they shall arrive together.
Blessed are the first rays of the morning, for they bring the gift of awakening.
Blessed are those who notice, for they shall find small delights around every corner.
Blessed is the reader who brings the writer’s creativity alive.
Blessed are the first light rays of each morning, for they convey the gift of awakening.
Blessed is this life we share together; handle with prayer!
Blessed be.
Blessed is.
Blessed does.

by Lama Surya Das

Many people have been asking me of late if Steve Jobs really was a Buddhist. The answer is yes, and for many years.

He was a Zen Buddhist, which inspired his simple, informal, monkish black dress code and the meticulously minimalist yet elegant consumer products he so ingeniously designed. If you look at Vincent van Gogh’s self-portrait as a Zen monk you’ll find many similarities with that other famously difficult creative genius.

Perhaps Steve was van Gogh’s tulku (reincarnation).Like Jobs, van Gogh was also a religiously inclined lay preacher of sorts, full of mystic zeal, creative energy and egalitarian ideals — and an equally volatile spirit who didn’t play well with others. In 1888, van Gogh painted himself as a monk in “Self-Portrait Dedicated to Gauguin.” He describes how he painted it “as the portrait of a Bonze, humbly worshipping the eternal Buddha and made the eyes slant slightly, after the manner of the Japanese.” Some scholars think the painting was meant as an intense affirmation of an ideal: to be the “calm monk” who can discipline and control the “mad painter.” (At the time, van Gogh was imagining founding a community of artists. In representing himself as a bonze [Buddhist monk], he painted himself as an inhabitant of his ideal community.) All these components also informed Jobs’ spiritual search, career path, proselytizing and the new silicon community he helped initiate. In his letters, Theo van Gogh said of his brother Vincent: “It is as if he had two persons in him — one marvelously gifted, delicate and tender, the other egotistical and hard hearted. … It is a pity that he is his own enemy.”

Sound familiar?

Jobs was a late product of the 1960s, who openly admitted that his psychedelic experiences had greatly informed his creative thinking. He’d actually dropped out of hip Reed College in Oregon after one semester, hung out at the Berkeley and Stanford campuses, and tripped around chaotic, cacophonous India for half a year or so as a truth-seeker, meditating and inquiring intently into mystical matters. After returning to the South Bay area in 1975, over the years he sat in Zen meditation retreats at sylvan Tassajara Zen Center near Big Sur and was good friends with some of my hippie vagabond friends, who had also spent time in India.

Some wonder exactly what kind of Buddhist could be so famously impatient, rude and demanding. How could he be so emotional, even throwing tantrums? Relentlessly stubborn, he could be brutal to close friends, family and colleagues, act ruthlessly in both business and personal affairs and claim credit for others’ ideas. Speaking as a fellow Buddhist, albeit of a different lineage, I have no easy answer or apology to offer for him in this respect. I think his having been adopted played into it — the master of design simplicity had some very messy elements of his personal life. We teach what we need to learn, as the saying goes.

Maybe that’s why this very complex and even contradictory personality so assiduously sought and loved simplicity.

As it happened, he became a Zen Buddhist and followed for two decades a Japanese master living in Santa Cruz, Kobun Chino Roshi, and a married Zen monk. Roshi seems to have had an influence on Jobs in one notable respect — as a spiritual leader more interested in the great Zero (of sunyata, the void), than in oneness and other larger, more collective numbers. Kobun seemed focusessed too much on cold and clear emptiness, not enough on warm and empathic compassion, attitude-transforming loving-kindness practice. Too much head and not enough heart, a common critique of some Zen Buddhist lineages.

It was no accident that Kobun Sensei, as his students call him, attracted Steve Jobs. Kobun was buddies with the provocative and controversial master Tibetan lama Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the pioneering founder of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, a valuable teacher to many of us in the 1970s. Jobs could be more of a ronin — masterless samurai — than a saintly sattvic spiritual seeker. In fact, he was the personification of, as one oft-misunderstood Zen saying puts it: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” (Which cautions against believing in any such thing as Buddha, or anything substantial, outside. It has nothing to do with life taking.) Consider the grandiose tone of Jobs’ in-your-face challenge to then Pepsi-Cola chief John Sculley: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to save the world?”

There was method in Jobs’ madness, as Sculley became the head of Apple and the highest paid executive in Silicon Valley.

I don’t use Apple products (for no real reason, other than I got started with DOS) and hadn’t seen Jobs in years when he died, but I did get to know him a bit while staying in his home for a couple of days in 1978. He had just opened his original one-story Cupertino factory, living alone in an empty suburban house with little or no furniture. His bedroom had a double mattress on the floor and two huge stereo speakers, one on either side, and little else. (Steve thought couches were superfluous.) My friend and I slept and sat to meditate on the carpeted floor in another bedroom even barer than Steve’s. I think we ate cold cereal for breakfast and broccoli for dinner, more than once. There was a phone with a cord attached to the kitchen wall. (I could see he was obviously handy, knew carpentry and learned a little Japanese calligraphy — all early influences on his engineering style.)

At the time, Steve was working intensely, as usual, on some kind of new electronics, which was news, as well as Greek, to me. (It was both new and geek to everyone, we’d eventually discover.) Steve said that sitting in meditation helped him focus as well as gain an uber-view of his own inner mind, effects I could certainly relate to. And he wondered how to use this in his work, electronically. It was obvious that he was working very hard, obsessing about his new project day and night.

He also paid a psychedelic relic friend, clad in flowing handmade Indian cotton garb, to walk around the half-empty factory floor and strum his Indian instruments, singing mellifluous kirtan, hymns of divine praise we’d all learned at ashrams in India. He told us Jobs had hired him “to upgrade the group consciousness.” I remember wondering at the time how serious and high-minded Steve actually was, given the electrical engineering shop environment and his alpha-male tendencies and ambitions. To his credit, Steve did help the following year with some much-needed seed-money — a $5,000 donation with no strings attached — for some of us to create in 1979 the SEVA Foundation, (a charity working in developing nations), which is still going strong. I’m grateful to him for that.

So he wasn’t especially generous, humble or kind. Then perhaps the virtuous aspect of the Noble Eight-fold Path taught by Buddha that Steve Jobs did exemplify was Step Five, Right Livelihood and True Vocation, one of the most interesting, challenging and relevant aspects of our life’s journey. How to align our work and our life, our personal and professional lives with (and inseparable from) our home, love and inner spiritual lives? Is this not one of our greatest challenges? Jobs seemed to skillfully blend his occupation and talents into his creative true calling — working wholeheartedly at the intersection of the humanities and the science, as he once said.

Jobs often said he wanted to make something beautiful and not just new, useful or successful. The inner level of Right or Wise Livelihood is doing what needs to be done, something we all aspire to but are often insufficiently aware of or able to achieve. I believe that making this world and life a better and more beautiful place for all is our true work and vocation.

Fairly, some might dispute that Steve’s business ethics and tactics accorded with the principles of Right Livelihood, or even that the compassionate life of the altruistic Enlightened Leader could ever possibly combine running a grand entrepreneurial business with the even greater work of edifying and enlightening the world. I personally would love to hear this further discussed and explored for the benefit of upcoming generations. Suzuki Roshi of San Francisco Zen Center used to say: “You’re perfect just as you are — and still you could use a little improvement.” This is fine wine, heady stuff. How to get from here to truly and totally here is the modern conundrum, beyond linear ideas of progress, where mindful awareness proves indispensable.

Now everyone is talking about and even apotheosizing Steve, which is, like most public discussion, both more and less than the whole story. Seasoned journalist Walter Isaacson’s big new biography of him is an excellent read, and full of stories and historical record (although Isaacson remains tone-deaf to things foreign to him, such as Zen Buddhism’s cryptic teaching and ancient Asian-style chanting and rituals), including those at Jobs’ 1991 Yosemite wedding to Laurene Powell, where his Zen priest-teacher Kobun officiated.

In his 20s, Steve predicted he would die before the age of 40, although no one seems to have known why. What affected me most about his untimely death was how young he was, only 56.

How rarely does such a brilliant shooting star pass through this local universe where people like us live, breathe, walk, wonder, work and play.

In this engaging article in the Huffington Post, Lama Surya Das discusses the late Steve Jobs in Buddhist perspective.  Surya Das suggests Steve Jobs as an incarnation of Vincent Van Gogh, describes his personal interactions with Jobs,  and how he exemplified the virtuous aspect of the Noble Eight-fold Path taught by Buddha: Step Five, Right Livelihood and True Vocation.

“Many people have been asking me of late if Steve Jobs really was a Buddhist. The answer is yes, and for many years...”  Read the full Huffington Post article here

How Do I Not Lose My Marbles Stuck in the Car With My Father-in-Law?

Lama Surya Das is quoted by Style writer Jeff Gordinier of the New York Times in an 11/15/11 article about holiday family challenges titled ‘How Do I Not Lose My Marbles Stuck in the Car With My Father-in-Law?’.  Surya Das gives tips on applying Buddhist wisdom to lessen the stress in holiday family gatherings. Read the NYTimes article here.

Whole Living Magazine

In Whole Living Magazines’s article titled How to Spend Your Time the Way You Want To, Lama offers wisdom quotes such as “Time is life. It’s up to each of us to choose how we spend it.”

“Buddha Standard Time: Awakening to the Infinite Possibilities of Now is a timely and wide-ranging book of Buddhist wisdom on the problems of time starvation, addiction to speed, and distractions.”      - Spirituality and Practice

Read the review

View, Meditation, and Action of the Great Perfection

Spring Awakening Retreat  Mar 25-Apr 1, 2012

Joshua Tree, CA

Together with the wisdom transmission of the Great Perfection, the joyous methods of chanting, loving-kindness, and compassion will be explored at the Institute of Metaphysics in Joshua Tree, CA.  The precious gift of Noble Silence will be practiced outside of the teaching hall, giving participants space to observe the mind and retreat from the busyness of everyday life.  Vegetarian meals daily, Tibetan Energy Yoga, natural meditation sits, walks, and restful retreat. Information and Registration

Tibetan Buddhist Peace Prayer Gathering

June 1-4, 2010

Garrision Institute, New York

Enjoy this special time and space for meditation, exercise, discussion and inspiration, celebration and consecration, as well as short discourses by prominent Dharma teachers.  More information

What can you do TODAY, this very moment?”

– The Dalai Lama, Sept. 11, 2001