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Indrabhuti, the MahaSiddha Politician, refused to leave his kingdom, refused to renounce the world, and refused to give up desire for dharma. Indrabhuti, King of Odiyana, with great devotion and respect, asked Buddha to give him a dharma teaching where … More →

My favorite Buddhist lecture I ever heard started with, “You will never have it all together.” Our whole lives may be spent trying to grasp onto an inherent reality, some thing some it that would finally be our real lives…The day that we could finally relax … More →

We often think of heroism as something that occurs in moments of grave overt crisis, as if the edge of life and death are met only in moments of high drama, quite set apart from daily life. But in Buddhism, … More →

I’ve heard that Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche once gave a teaching called, “Trust Run Wild.” I wasn’t there. I don’t know what he taught. But I was struck by the title and have had my own ideas about what such a … More →

It was 2003 when we had our last public Chod Retreat. We didn’t know it, but by the time we began, a raging wild fire had already been consuming the city for four or five devastating hours. We were in the desert … More →

We spend most of our lives in an altered state, caught up in mind trips, conditioned scripts and habitual patterns. This path returns us to the unaltered state, which is known as realizing our Buddha-nature or finding enlightenment.   Enlightenment … More →

In Buddhism, the quality of our lives are what are known as form and emptiness – the dynamic two-in-one expressions of existence. Our experience is made up of security and insecurity, permanence and impermanence, pattern and chaos, continuity and discontinuity, … More →

The challenge of the path is that our own confusion makes sense to us. Our mind-trips are very convincing to us, even if they are neurotic and cause dissatisfaction and suffering. Our conditioned scripts are very compelling to us. We … More →

In the beginning of the path, our capacity to keep commitments is impaired. We may pledge to never choose that same kind of relationship again, but then find ourselves in it. We may pledge to never be angry or mean … More →

Buddhism is based on the observation that most people’s lives are plagued by dissatisfaction, where things are not as fulfilling as they could be (dukha). At best, this shows up as an awckwardness or a feeling that life isn’t what … More →