Lion's Roar

OCT. 19-21 2018 Facing Life’s Challenges: A Lion’s Roar Buddhist Retreat | Garrison Institute, Garrison NY Now in its 11th year, the annual Lion’s Roar readers’ retreat brings great teachers from different Buddhist traditions together to explore them

ZEN PRACTICE IS A RETURN to the ordinary. It is only in the secular world that Zen is perceived by some as a high and holy practice. The robes are seen as holy, but there is no holiness in Zen. Everything that is done in the temple is of an ordinary

MARTY KRASNEY BELIEVES the world has a habit of gravitating toward polarizing leaders. “Look at our world,” he says. “We have the worst divides we’ve seen in a long time. This is far from the ideal of what leaders can be and do.” Krasney is the execu

Question: Ever since my youngest child left home to go to college, I’ve felt lonely and like life doesn’t have much purpose. How can I come to peace with having an empty nest? Answer: When a child comes into our lives, we devote so much of our energy

AT 3:20 AM, I WAKE UP and amble into Dad’s room. He’s pretty wheezy and raspy. I go to the kitchen and grind up some Ativan between two spoons to dissolve into the morphine I will give him. He lies on the pillow, allowing the putrid liquid to drain d

YOU KNOW THAT MAGICAL moment when you wake up within a dream and know you’re dreaming? That’s lucid dreaming. It’s a skill you can develop and a beneficial meditation practice you can do. A nonlucid dream is a distracted dream, a mindless dream, a fo

I can’t decide if there’s any benefit to identifying myself as a Buddhist. I practice meditation and study Buddhist teachings. Why should I label myself? Only if it helps you. As is famously said, “The Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist.” That came later. The

The characters are like hungry ghosts, says ROD MEADE SPERRY, endlessly consuming liquor, drugs—and each other. WHEN WE THINK OF Matthew Weiner’s game-changing AMC series Mad Men, what do we picture? Smoking, suits, and sex. (Not to mention sexism.)

Sometimes I try really hard when I meditate, and sometimes I forget to do the technique and just hang out. Where’s the line between not trying hard enough and trying too much, between too rigid and too loose? TENKU RUFF: Finding the balance between t

IN 1972, Mirabai Bush traveled overland to India, planning to stay for two weeks. Then one day on a street in New Delhi, she happened to meet a young woman named Sharon Salzberg, who told her about an upcoming meditation course with the Vipassana tea

IN THE AFTERNOON, we meet over tea. Ram Dass says, “When I am afraid of something, I come up as close to it as possible, and I notice my resistance. I allow myself to just notice the resistance, because the resistance intensifies the fear—there’s no

MY SON BODHI is two and obsessed with Halloween. He doesn’t know what the day entails. He doesn’t know about trick-or-treating or costumes. What he knows of Halloween comes from the toddler cartoon he watches—endlessly—about a boy and girl who go int

THERE WAS ONE PARTICULAR experience that really helped me get through my beginning times of being ordained—going to jail. This is how it happened. I occasionally used the temple car to pick up Shrfu, my teacher, go to the printers, or run miscellaneo