Join me for a conversation—and a gentle teaching—with one of the most clear and inspiring teachers I've met. Rebecca Li, the author of Allow Joy into Our Hearts: Chan Practice in Uncertain Times , talks with me about her new book and the inspiration behind it. I used her book—and will continue to use it—to help pull myself from falling into a dark world in my mind and a heart, as a response to the suffering of the pandemic and all the fear and mistrust that came with it. When suffering arises, R...
May 26, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast It seems, sometimes, that when Buddhist and other religious teachers, and serious practitioners get deeper into practice, the more they seem capable of deluding themselves —either in a performative way, posing and positioning for others, or because they have completely deluded themselves about what is really happening within them. They hide their humanness behind the beauty and strength of their words, or their teacher's words, and they hide their brokenness. They hide so well they begin to beli...
Apr 15, 2021•26 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast Buddhist sutras and teachings speak of lamenting only in ways that highlight how it is to be avoided and transcended, so as not to fall victim to the second arrow of suffering. The Buddha's teaching that there is dukkha, or unsatisfactoriness, but suffering is optional through one's internal relationship to that dukkha. He teaches that is enough. But is it? I bet, at some time during the last year, you have cried out in your heart to restore life to how it used to be. We look around and everyone...
Feb 26, 2021•39 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast Join us for this introduction of an Everyday Buddhism spin-off podcast! Follow the conversation of 4 friends: Holly Rockwell, a spiritual director and Ignatian prayer guide; Levi Shinyo Walbert Sensei, a Buddhist Lay Minister and seminary student pursuing chaplaincy and a Master of Divinity; Christopher Kakuyo Ross-Leibow Sensei, a Buddhist Lay Minister and sangha leader of the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship; and me, Wendy Shinyo Haylett, a Buddhist Lay Minister and your host of both podcasts. Li...
Feb 11, 2021•1 hr•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast Join me as I share my struggle finding some peace in the midst of the uncertainties that have chased us from 2020 into 2021. Despite our urge to run, hide, strike out, or curl up in a ball, as Buddhists we need to remember that the Buddha never promised a rose garden. The Buddha never promised an ordered universe. He said life is suffering because we grasp to life being something other than it is. There's a post-modern paradigm that life keeps getting better and better due to technological and s...
Jan 13, 2021•27 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode we are continuing our "How I'm Coping" series but with a bit of a different twist. I've brought together two podcast listeners who expressed a different perspective on how they are coping with the pandemic. Both of them come to their current coping abilities through previous "practice" as people with serious long-term health issues. We share many of the challenges, frustrations, fear, and daily uncertainties that come with serious chronic and/or progressive diseases and injury. T...
Dec 12, 2020•1 hr 29 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast In this podcast, we'll explore finding ways to say "thank you" in this time of loss, fear, despair, and uncertainty. I take some time reflecting on the Buddhist teachings of the gift of our "precious human life." Our lives are a gift. We did not plan, arrange, or have any control in making our births happen. We were gifted them. And, for that gift, despite how rocky our lives sometimes seem, we say "thank you!" Listen to how you can use mindful awareness to shift your focus to what's in front of...
Nov 26, 2020•24 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast Join me in conversation with Kimberly Brown as we discuss her new book, Steady, Calm and Brave , a handbook of healing tools to help us through the fraught times of 2020—and beyond. In a delightfully honest and personal conversation, Kimberly shares how seeing students, friends, neighbors, and family afraid, disheartened, and sad, at the beginning of the pandemic was the motivation for writing the book. Kimberly shares her personal experience with trauma and how metta, body-based, and self-compa...
Oct 26, 2020•1 hr 11 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast "When you look around you it feels like the world is going crazy.... Is this normal or have we all fallen under some spell?" ~Tristan Harris In this episode I take a Buddhist view on the spell we've fallen under— and it is the spell of a self-involved culture, swallowed by social media and focused on the hatred of "the other." We are largely living in a world of the extremes of ignorance and false certainty. "The more fixed we get about things, the more confusion, emotional disturbance, and conf...
Oct 17, 2020•25 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast Join me for the first of a series of interviews with podcast listeners on how they are coping with the pandemic. In this episode, David Farley, a travel and food writer who lives in New York City, joins me for a conversation. David wrote a blog post where he mused about our seeming missing future. He wrote: We can't envision what life is going to be like in, say, a year or what we'll be doing.... It's seriously anxiety-producing for many of us.... The only way we can maneuver, even survive witho...
Oct 08, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep 49•Transcript available on Metacast Announcing a new Everyday Buddhism feature for the Membership Community: A lecture series/workshop on mindful writing! In this series I hope to introduce you to a new way of practicing mindfulness through writing. As Gary Snyder wrote, meditation can put you totally into the world even as it takes you out of it. Mindfulness and meditation are practices of deliberate attention that can create a spacious awareness of what is and help us escape the narrow box in our heads where the thinker lives. F...
Sep 26, 2020•17 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast Join me as I share some insights from an article by Tara Haelle, Your Surge Capacity is Depleted—It's Why You Feel Awful, and some insights of my own, that may help you find new attitudes and practices to help you keep going. Help you go the distance of this pandemic, even though we don't know how long that distance is—or what's at the end. This time of ambiguous loss can cause feelings of helplessness and hopelessness because our solution-oriented culture is actually destructive when faced with...
Sep 20, 2020•27 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast We're currently faced with a global pandemic, which reminds us how uncertain life really is. So what do we do? How do we cope? Join me in conversation with Gregg Krech, who uses the concepts of acceptance—active acceptance—to understand how we can't take effective action until we've accepted the reality of the situation we're in. Gregg talks about how a large portion of the population has not accepted the situation and others whose impatience pushes them to make bad decisions. Is there another w...
Aug 12, 2020•2 hr 37 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast Join me for a short episode check-in and sharing of how I am taking personal action despite living in our current reality of uncertainty. Awakening to the fact that I was spending too much time anxiously looking "out there" at what was or could be coming ... or focusing on the horrible feelings inside me, I decided to turn my personal boat around. As Gregg Krech of the ToDo Institute reminds us "Everyone is dealing with losses but ultimately it's an individual thing.... It's not a mass issue. It...
Jul 27, 2020•16 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast Join me for an episode that is part autobiographical, part solidarity with Pride and Black Lives matter, part poetry, part science, and part Buddhism. Sounds a bit chaotic, doesn't it? Yet I hope you find some relevant order. Sharing a recent experience with my own revisiting of internal trauma sparked by the external trauma of pandemic politics and social unrest, I tried to find order in the chaos through poetry and, of course, Buddhism. Every life has some chaos because as the poet Gregory Orr...
Jun 23, 2020•29 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast Join me for a special guest episode with Dr. Christiane Michelberger, a retired physician, psychoanalyst, and past spiritual seeker who currently mentors seekers in their quest to awaken. Christiane talks about how more than 10,000 hours of meditation and 40 years of studying Buddhist scriptures didn’t help her deal with debilitating fear when she was faced with the reality of breast cancer. It was then t hat she took steps to escape from a habit of "spiritual sleepwalking" and find a way to see...
May 28, 2020•2 hr 41 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, I reflect on our responses when we find ourselves in life situations that don't make sense and that are out of our control. As we make our way through the global Covid-19 pandemic we see humbling examples of courage and compassion. And we also see examples of people responding in fear and anger. The symptoms of fight, flight, or freeze—our natural responses to perceived threats—are everywhere you look. We have been smacked in our collective and previously comfortable faces with ...
May 11, 2020•33 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast Join me for a special guest episode with Duncan Ryuken Williams, the author of American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. 125,000+ Japanese-Americans we rounded up and placed in internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Many of these were Buddhists who persevered despite their imprisonment. Circumstances that were no fault of their own but because of their "Japanese faces" and their faith in a non-Christian religion seen as anti-American. And they kept going ...
Apr 16, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast The whole world is afraid. A tiny piece of biological stuff—this virus—brought the world to its knees. A contagion or plague of this level is not new to the world but new to most of us living today. We have very little experience dealing with this level of uncertainty. This makes protecting the health of our minds and hearts as important as protecting the health of our bodies. There has never been a better time to develop a practice of finding a healthy balance between being informed and torment...
Mar 28, 2020•23 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast There is a view of Buddhism that is idealistic. That it's all about meditating and chanting in an incense-filled room, hidden away from the world. That the peace promised in Buddhism comes from being away from, above, or different from, the troubles of the world. If your mind is full of what you think Buddhism or spirituality "should" be, no matter what teaching is placed at your feet, the grip of your expectations will prevent you from absorbing it or finding a new perspective that might bring ...
Feb 16, 2020•28 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast This is a special episode dedicated to the life of our good friend and neighbor—too soon lost. It focuses on the haiku by Issa: This world of dew is a world of dew, and yet, and yet. Listen as I read writings of my grief and how I come to the realization that maybe "and yet" is not just "nevertheless it hurts" but also "but yet." It's all in how you show up for yourself and for others. In that showing up, false borders of belief and concepts disappear in our shared precariousness. In our shared ...
Feb 02, 2020•17 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast Join me for a special episode and conversation with Ken McLeod , author, translator, and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. Ken and I talk about his innovative approach to teaching and writing about traditional Buddhist texts and practices. I reached out to Ken because I connected on a deep level to the material in his books and in the written and audio presentations on his website, unfetteredmind.org . Ken McLeod's ability to accomplish a sort of direct pointing to a knowing experience beyond the wor...
Jan 15, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Ep 37•Transcript available on Metacast 2020 seems like something out of Sci-Fi. But here we are. And from my perspective—approaching my 67th birthday in a little under 2 weeks—we ARE living in what was the sci-fi from my childhood perspective. I imagine, though, that for most of my podcast listeners, how we are living today doesn't seem like sci-fi to you. It's not that new for you. It all depends on where you stand—your perspective. Here we are. From where you sit, listening to this podcast, you may be filled with hope or despair. Y...
Dec 31, 2019•21 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we celebrate Bodhi Day, the traditional celebration of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni's enlightenment. Yet, listen as we discover how it is a celebration of our enlightenment, too. The message of the December darkness is a messenger of our own enlightenment. Without darkness, we couldn't know light. Shakyamuni's enlightenment experience is ours. He proclaimed, "I and the great earth, and all beings are naturally and simultaneously awakened." We don't chase the darkness away th...
Dec 08, 2019•23 min•Ep 35•Transcript available on Metacast In this special episode, I celebrate with podcast listeners the publication of my book Everyday Buddhism: Real-Life Buddhist Teachings & Practices for Real Change . The book officially launches on Monday, November 26th. In this special episode, l'll share a bit about why I wrote the book and a few snippets from the book, plus announce a special offer to the Everyday Buddhism podcast tribe about a special, 1-day offer on the Kindle eBook valid only on Sunday, November 25th. So check out the podca...
Nov 23, 2019•23 min•Ep 34•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we'll look at the overlaps between the pagan origination, rituals, and concepts of Halloween and Tibetan Tantric or Vajrayana Buddhism ... and also examine it all from an Everyday Buddhism perspective. What scares you? What do you NOT want to look at? What masks do you wear? Do you show yourself as someone without a shadow or demon side? Is the so-called "spirituality" we want, we crave, and grasp onto something that is both grounded while reaching to the sky? Buddhism is about ...
Oct 29, 2019•28 min•Ep 33•Transcript available on Metacast Join me and round the bases for a look at baseball as a metaphor for the Buddhist teaching of the Three Marks of Existence: Impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and the lack of a discrete self. Life, like baseball, is a team sport. In baseball, it's not just about the pitcher. In life, it's not just about me or you. All the players and contributing causes and conditions come together to score runs in a dominating offensive win or through a defensive no-hitter. In life, we can't do anything on our o...
Sep 28, 2019•20 min•Ep 32•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we talk about Bodhicitta. Bodhicitta characterizes the path of a Mahayana practitioner. It is Bodhicitta that creates a Bodhisattva and it is Bodhicitta that ultimately creates a Buddha. In Tibetan, compassion is translated as the nobility or greatness of heart which implies wisdom, discernment, empathy, unselfishness, and abundant kindness. Bodhicitta is compassion working with a mind awakened by right view. It is the joining of compassion and emptiness. We'll examine how to us...
Sep 14, 2019•41 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast In this special guest episode, join me in a conversation with Dena Moes, the author of the book The Buddha Sat Right Here: A Family Odyssey Through India and Nepal . Listen as we share some laughs, talk deep Buddhist philosophy, explore the difference between Indian and U.S. cultures and the way children are raised, and how in India there is a complete incorporation of interdependence as a reality, not a spiritual concept. Sample a taste of Dena's award-winning book that is equal parts travelogu...
Aug 04, 2019•55 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast In this special podcast, we'll revisit the topic of "Right Speech" through a reflection and practice tip from my upcoming book. We'll focus on how right speech depends more on listening than speaking. Speaking is dualistic. Listening is a non-dual activity of Oneness. Most of the time, the reason we speak is to speak TO or AT someone, expressing ourselves to the other. And, frequently, expressing how they ARE the other. And so much speaking is completely unnecessary. The trick is to maintain an ...
Jul 28, 2019•22 min•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast 
