I graduated from Columbia College in 1968, and had been working professionally as a musician for several years. In the fall of 1970, I decided that I needed further training in music and so I got in my car and drove up to Boston for my first semester at Berklee College of Music.

I had been interested in Buddhism, yoga, consciousness expansion, you name it for several years, so it was a natural for me to seek out a yoga studio in Boston. I found the East-West Center under the direction of Patricia Harvey, who was a wonderful teacher and friend at the time. Coincidentally, she was one of the people who helped bring Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche to the United States, and so not long after he arrived here, he came to her studio to lead a workshop — Work, Sex and Money. (These workshops are just now available in a new book called Work, Sex, Money: Real Life on the Path of Mindfulness.)

I had heard he was a high lama from Tibet and nothing could have been cooler at that particular time, so I signed up for the workshop. I was surprised to see him enter in a western business suit (not robes), and that first Friday night he gave a rather straightforward and somewhat “flat” talk. In no way shape or form was it spiritually “titillating,” or even non-spiritually titillating (even though the title might have left the door open for some sizzle). As I remember that talk, it was reasonable but dry and maybe even a little bit boring.

As I walked home that evening, I thought to myself, “Hmm… I really am wound up on all this stuff and that guy just let the air out of my tires.” I remember laughing at myself a bit as I had my first (but not last) experience of what Rinpoche would famously later call “cutting through spiritual materialism.”

When I went back the next day, I began to really appreciate the quality of his presence, his directness, the subtlety of his mind and the depth of his training.

He gave each person one to one meditation instruction in a room upstairs from the yoga studio. I remember asking him for a mantra, saying that I was a musician, and that I thought I could relate to sound easily. He said that mantras are good but they are like medicine and you can use them but then you have to wean yourself off them, so maybe it was better just to relate directly with the mind.

He taught a very open style of meditation that is still presented In Level 1 of the program he created called Shambhala Training, which I later realized was a mixture of shamatha (mindfulness with effort) and dzogchen (a more open style of awareness practice). Many of his early workshops were, in a Buddhist sense, very advanced in terms of how he presented material to us. I think later on he cut back and taught the fundamentals of Buddhism in a 3 month seminary we all had to attend before being introduced to the tantric (more advanced) teachings.

For me to be able to present a workshop now based on these earliest teachings is a big thrill. (Ok, I’ll try to be a little boring too.) This material at the time was so juicy, and it still is. It’s about making everyday life the root of your dharma practice, not just some incidental events that happen while you’re trying to get enlightened.

The Shambhala Centers are still here 41 years later, still thriving, and we’re still here (most of us) relating to work, sex (occasionally) and money, trying to wrap our dharma framework around these things. But what Rinpoche was saying at the time and what we all still need to hear is that how we handle our lives isour dharma.

This quote from Rinpoche sums it up completely and I personally live by it:

There are many people who are more learned than I and more elevated in their wisdom. However, I have never made a separation between the spiritual and the worldly. If you understand the ultimate aspect of the dharma, this is the ultimate aspect of the world. And if you should cultivate the ultimate aspect of the world, this should be in harmony with the dharma.

(From Chogyam Trungpa’s unpublished diary, 1966.)

I was having dinner Sunday night with a dear old friend, a singer-songwriter of some repute, and I happened to mention the recent film by Martin Scorsese about George Harrison, “Living in the Material World.” Somehow this led to a discussion about fame, and whether it was a blessing or a curse.

I took this opportunity to introduce, as further fodder for our conversation, my theory of the “5 Seducers That Steal Our Awareness and Contentment” — a riff on a formulation that seems to exist in every major religion, philosophy and code of ethics since the beginning of human society. These are the things we are supposed to watch out for, that can lead to moral degradation and spiritual depletion. In my variation they are:

Fame
Money
Power
Sensual pleasures
Intoxicants

Actually the list doesn’t sound that bad, right? Quite possibly many of us would pick out two to three items on this list and say, “Yup, that’s what I’m going for in this life. That’s when I feel most alive, most vital, most fulfilled.”

Interestingly, in Buddhism and other religions, if you live the simplified life of a monk or nun, these are exactly the temptations that you are renouncing. But is it possible to live IN this world and relate to these seducers without having our peace, our presence of mind and our compassion for others destroyed?

The allure of these experiences is that they create a heightened state for us and thereby a craving to return to that state when our “ordinary” reality re-asserts itself. I have rarely heard anyone say, “Yes, I have enough fame, enough power, enough money, enough delicious food and drink.” When we hear the siren’s song, we want more.

So coming back to my friend the singer-songwriter, he admitted that he had always wanted more fame. But he also saw it as a toxic substance and couldn’t think of anybody who had it who didn’t seem messed up by it.

By the way, that was one of the most interesting aspects of the George Harrison film — it seemed that toward the end of his life, he was less interested in fame than in practicing meditation and creating a beautiful garden around his house. George seems to have been a kind of worldly yogi — mixing temporal success with spiritual growth.

As with fame, wealth and power also seem to create a kind of vacuum for those who have them. Honest feedback, a critical channel for personal growth, gets scarcer and harder to trust. Clear vision and open-heartedness can be trumped by ambition and pride.

Sensual pleasures can certainly be appreciated and enjoyed in the moment, but they also can tend to produce dissatisfaction and craving. It can be challenging to separate the memory of pleasurable experiences from the fantasy and longing to recreate them.

Our relationship to actual intoxicants can be moderate, but can also lead to a downward spiral of abuse and over-indulgence, often accompanied by a sense of denial and obfuscation.

In most spiritual traditions renunciation and austerities are considered essential practices to highlight and put our craving in perspective. Most religions (think Lent, Ramadan and Yom Kippur) have some period of fasting or abstinence or at least moderation as part of their portfolio for spiritual development.

In Buddhism, during retreats, we have oryoki (monastic style of mindful eating) and one bowl contemplative meals — both intended to foster mindful eating and restraint.

All of us living in the world have to deal with these five seducers in one form or another. We may not be as famous as Lady Gaga, but somebody knows who we are and respects what we do. We may not be as rich as Donald Trump, but we do have to manage our finances and for sure there are others far worse off than we are. To them we actually appear to be rich.

We may not be as powerful as Barack Obama, Dick Cheney or Tim Geithner, but we do have to make decisions that influence the lives of other people, like our family or co-workers. We may not be as rich as the Sultan of Abu Dhabi, but we do regularly feast our senses by eating good food, making love, listening to music, going to the movies, taking a hike in the mountains or a walk on the beach.

And we may not be a substance abuser, but we do periodically ingest intoxicating substances, even if it is only the occasional cocktail, refined sugar desert, coffee or tea.

The $64 question is, can we maintain balance, awareness and open-heartedness while we engage fully in the activities of this world? Can we make the five seducers work for us or will we work for them?

If we work for them, our history tells us personally and collectively that we will be out of balance — dreaming of future fulfillment instead of enjoying what we already have. That is exactly the Buddhist definition of suffering. Your thoughts?

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(originally on the Huffington Post 10/10/11)

When we practice mindfulness meditation, one of the first things we notice is how un-mindful we are. It is like going back to the gym and realizing how out of shape we have become. It can actually be a little irritating. We might think, “I don’t know about this meditation thing” because at first we mostly notice how out of sync we are.

Some people get frustrated right away, but this is actually a great place to start — just like going to the gym with our little pot belly and oxygen-deprived body is also a great place to start. We just have to be patient, kind to ourselves and willing to try.

To practice mindfulness properly, we have to cut through a kind of daydream quality in our mind. Often we are engaging in some activity — riding the subway, driving a car, having a business meeting — but our mind is somewhere else, lost in a daydream. If you look at people sitting on a bus or on a train you can often see this quality in their eyes. Whether we’re having a pleasant or unpleasant daydream, we are cutting through all of that with mindfulness practice.

The awakened mind is sharp and clear. Sometimes the gateway to it can be an experience of irritation, or even shock — not entirely unlike waking up suddenly from a dream. “My goodness, I’m on the subway here. That’s a human being walking by with one leg and a cup … and a strong smell”. Suddenly we become completely present with whatever is actually around us — whether it is pleasant or not. At these times, it’s as if our world is shaking us and waking us up with a kind of sharp edge.

Our world can also wake us up in a peaceful and beguiling way. We might notice the details of a beautiful flower, or the delicious smell of a bakery as we walk by daydreaming about our troubled economy.

In either case, there is a regular and recurring invitation to bring our attention back to the present moment and relate to what is right in front of us. Practicing mindfulness is simply recognizing this invitation to be present, and being willing to accept the invitation when it comes.

In the Buddhist tradition, one recommendation for practicing mindfulness is to lean into its sharp edge — so that we’re not seduced into going back to sleep, back into our daydream. It’s like the movie “The Matrix” — the red pill or the blue pill — one will wake us up and the other will let us continue in the dream world. Do we want to go back into that daydream, or do we want to wake up? When we become aware it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re waking up into a paradise.

Is this world a paradise? Well, yes and no, right? It depends on our attitude. But the point is, it’s not a dull paradise where everything is perfect and comes easily. It’s a sharp paradise, with edges and clarity. It’s vivid and poignant.

When looking to see if somebody is trained in mindfulness, sharpness and wakefulness are the mark to look for — more so than a blissful, spaced-out quality in which they love everybody, but don’t remember exactly why. Mindfulness is the core practice of the Buddhist teachings, but it can be practiced by anybody — and it has an edge.

To explore this practice further, here are basic instructions from an article I posted a while back.

As usual all comments are welcome.

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(This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post 7/28/11)

In Buddhism, the law of karma describes how causes and effects interact in our world. The point of understanding how karma works is to see the nature of things as they are, beyond any kind of delusion or wishful thinking.

What does the law of karma have to do with the current economic crisis? Maybe our national economic policy could use a good healthy dose of seeing “things as they are.”

In our individual meditation practice, there is no magic bullet, no fantasy transformation, no gimmicks — we have to work through our karma, brick by brick — it is manual labor.

With meditation practice, we can see how our mind works — what creates positive karma (compassion and wisdom), and what creates negative karma (aggression, attachment and ignorance). That is how we get clarity about how certain causes create certain conditions — how did we get where we are and what we can do about it.

With the same approach, with real scrutiny, perhaps our current debt ceiling crisis can be seen to be nothing other than our national money karma coming to fruition. There are some basic principles at work here, immune from any kind of fancy talk or manipulation. Certain basic causes and conditions have created the current situation:

1. We have borrowed too much money.

Just as many of us have done as individuals, as a nation we have simply borrowed too much money, and now our creditors are knocking at the door. I don’t think you need an advanced degree in economics to figure this out. Sometimes common sense is more valuable than intricate theories. It’s time to pay some of this debt down, just as we would (and as some of us have) if this were our individual problem only.

2. We have been too greedy.

As a nation (and many of us as individuals) we have been willing to sacrifice long-term prosperity for short-term gain, over and over again. Many of us are addicted to a hyper-extended materialistic lifestyle (certainly by global standards) and have been willing to go deeply into debt to maintain it. Additionally, a tiny percentage of extremely wealthy people are now in a position to manipulate our entire economy to further their own self-centered, limited agenda, which they are now doing on a global level.

3. Our national political arena has become overrun with personalized agendas and bad manners.

We seem to have a chasmic divide amongst our so-called “leadership.” Creative friction can sometimes be very effective in flushing out different points of view and perhaps reaching a higher fusion. But we seem to have gone well beyond that kind of creative friction in our national politics to the level of some kind of permanently feuding mentality.

Like the Hatfields and the McCoys, we now see our two “parties” immersed in an ongoing tit for tat, with nobody being very clear about the origin or the point of it all. There seems to be a crescendo of personalized agendas in the public sector. Temporal leaders, just like good spiritual teachers, could be invited to check their ego at the door. Wouldn’t that be refreshing?

The solution? We need bigger vision.

Let’s think about what would be good for ourselves and others. Are these really two completely different things? Perhaps we bring out the best in each of us and are also happier individuals when we have a feeling of contributing to a common cause beyond self-aggrandizement. If we are arguing about what would be the best outcome for the larger good, that could be a healthy argument to have. If we’re going to keep playing the “me, me, me” game, we might be spinning on this particular wheel of karma forever — like a giant Ferris Wheel with all of us on it.

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(article originally on The Huffington Post 6/20/11)

Last week Cyndi and I found ourselves in Hamburg, with a two day respite between teaching yoga/meditation workshops in Berlin and Copenhagen. What a beautiful and wonderful city!

Hamburg is one of the biggest ports in the world (seventh to be precise) and is also a major center of commerce and culture. One of the highlights of our stay there was a boat tour of the docks, which gave us a close up view of the industrial shipping operation. Having never seen this setting before, I found the magnitude of it to be truly mind-boggling.

Even in this day of rapid fire information transfer and worldwide high speed air travel, there is really no other way to conduct the transfer of large scale goods around the world. When we buy Danish furniture in New York, toys or books made in China, put gas in our car from Saudi Arabia, drink Colombian coffee, eat kiwis from New Zealand, all those goods have been transported via freighters, much as they would have been 50 years ago.

The size and scale of the docks, the ships, the cranes, and all the technology for loading and unloading the crates is awesome. After exploring this elaborate and massive setting for a while, I looked over at our guide who was describing what we were seeing (in German, but we had a loose and occasional translation). He was a reasonably fit, normal-looking male human being, maybe 6 ft. tall. I looked at him and then looked back at these massive ships, cranes and platforms and thought “Yikes! This person, or people like him anyhow, somehow conceived of, built and are operating all of that.” It seemed incomprehensible for a moment how such a thing could be possible.

Obviously at the physical level our species built all that with our relatively little bodies, but somehow it is really our big minds that enabled us to put such a massive and elaborate system together. If I were from another planet I would surely assume that this was a brilliant, clever, capable and resourceful species and that surely a civilization that could accomplish all this must have the resources, the capability, and the vision to solve any and all problems confronting their race and their planet.

It felt so clear to me that with the right motivation, the right intention, the right leadership, the right mobilization of resources, we could and would be able to solve all of humanity and this world’s problems in time, and live a wonderful, creative and vibrant existence that could be shared by all. It just seemed completely obvious that this kind of positive outcome was within the realm of possibility for us (usually I’m a bit more cynical, but this was a clear burst of optimism!).

So that led to a contemplation about where are we missing the boat (so to speak) as our species marches forward into what could turn out to be the most innovate century in our history (think genetic engineering, virtual reality, nanotechnology, a universal translator and a complete revolution in information access and exchange). Where are we missing the ship? Why is there so much trouble, poverty, heartache, war, struggle, disease, ecological disaster, ideological conflict and outright lack of compassion and wisdom in our world? Why does our world appear to be in crisis?

I shared this musing with my friend and dharma brother Krishna Das who in the spirit of shameless promotion I will mention is on a U.S. tour this month and who I will be joining him on guitar for the last week of the tour. In any case, KD’s email response said it all, summed it up, and brought it all together — so I wanted to share it with you:

“Yes, isn’t it amazing the amount of stuff that is actually moved around this world.. if only the motivation was compassion instead of greed!”

So simply and eloquently stated (I guess all that chanting can make you a man of few words!).

At this new frontier of our ongoing journey as the human race, we will need to pause and check our motivation. If we mix our technological capacity with our spiritual evolution as a species, we can turn this world into a beautiful place. If we don’t, we might have a powerful nightmare on our hands. It is going to be up to us. Compassion and wisdom might be the most valuable commodities we can ship around the world in the coming century!

Your thoughts?

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In mindfulness meditation practice, we are instructed to rest our attention on our breathing as a way to focus and stabilize our mind. This is an ancient and time-honored approach that clearly has relevance for those of us living in the modern world — often racing around, feeling stressed out, and having a hard time catching up with ourselves!

For those of us practicing in this way, several questions seem to come up over and over again — one of them is usually expressed something like this:

“I see the point of trying to develop more steadiness and ease in my state of mind. I am now able from time to time to notice myself thinking and bring my attention back to my breath, but when strong emotions come up in meditation, I do not seem to be able to let go of those so easily. They are captivating and disturbing, and are compelling me to look more deeply at their history and meaning. Should we really be using our meditation practice to shut down and stifle our emotions?”

This is a great question, and there are several issues involved that are well worth discussing.

First of all, it is not recommended to use meditation as a way of repressing our emotions (or thoughts for that matter) by forcibly silencing them in order to achieve a superficially imposed sense of peace and quiet. Many meditators have found that they are never really able to completely pacify their mind and that holding that as the goal only produces frustration and disappointment.

The approach of “just sit there and quiet your mind,” although commonly presented, is perhaps an over-simplification of the traditional method in which we:

1. Place our awareness on our breath.
2. Recognize what arises in our minds — without trying to manipulate, judge or suppress anything.
3. Simply see what arises in our mind as it comes up. Just notice it.
4. Then let go of the thoughts and return our awareness to the breath thereby coming back to the present moment.

This sequence is what we initiate repeatedly in our meditation session — as opposed to trying to stifle our thoughts and somehow magically hold on to that peaceful state. This more detailed method gives us some ground to work with — that being our mind as it is rather than as we wish it could be. We might find this practice more realistic, more workable, and more compassionate to ourselves. Of course it is up to each one of us to determine how we will proceed.

When it comes to experiencing strong emotions in our practice, it can be helpful to notice that what we call emotions really has two major components. One is the “story line”, which we do identify in our meditation practice as “thinking” and when we recognize it as such we are encouraged to let it go and return our awareness to our breathing and therefore to the present moment. The other component is actually energy that has a life beyond the “story line” — the energy and physical sensation of anger, passion, envy, pride, etc.

In meditation practice, we are encouraged to simply experience this energy and physical sensations as they are and not get involved with manipulating the “story line” or “content.” Just let the energy and sensations be there, be aware of them, without elaborating further. This way of experiencing our emotions is very powerful and may not map at all to our notion of peace and quiet.

These feelings, rather than being seen as problematic, can be seen to be completely natural and connected to what it means to be a human being. In more advanced meditation training the emotions can be “liberated” from ego-centric, repetitive “story lines” and experienced as a direct link to communication, appreciation of the inherent richness of our own being, and the penetrating quality of insight and wisdom.

So, we do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Our emotions, rather than feeding stale and repetitive mental habits, can manifest as the very expressions of being alive and living fully in an authentic way. From that point of view we do not utilize our meditation practice to suppress our feelings and emotions but to liberate them, by becoming more familiar with how they arise, what they actually feel like beyond acting out or repressing them, and therefore working with them in a more constructive way.

Your thoughts?

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If you study history, it seems that conflict and warfare are part of the very fabric of our human existence.

To understand the basis of conflict, all you really need to do is study two people living together. Sooner or later, even if they have the best of intentions, situations will arise that emphasize their different outlooks and needs. When these differences are not addressed, conflict will inevitably follow.

In the course of healthy interaction, we can work together to resolve our disagreements and create understanding and sympathy for each other — that is perhaps the definition of a good relationship, as contrasted with the more naïve notion that we can have endless romance or perfect harmony with no process or effort involved.

It may be impossible to create a world without conflict, but perhaps conflict is not the problem. It seems to be a natural outcome of the friction of people living together, sharing resources, aspirations and obstacles. Disagreement could be considered to be a creative process that leads to exploring other points of view, adjusting our expectations and becoming more sensitive and open to the needs of others.

The key to working with conflict creatively is the notion of resolution — working to arrive at a “higher” integration, a creative fusion of the dynamic elements expressed in a dispute.

We often experience discord with other people — at home, at work, in politics — everywhere. But when these disagreements remain unresolved, when we need to win at any cost or when the situation becomes more and more divisive, then we will see the dawn of warfare — at the personal level for sure, but also at the local, tribal, national and global level.

Once we abandon the idea of resolving conflicts, they will inevitably, sooner or later, flair up and expand into skirmish, into battle, into full-on combat. If you look closely at warfare, you will find its seeds in the abandoned process of conflict resolution.

War happens when we forgo the attempt to resolve our disagreements in a creative way and we feel there is no choice left but destruction. The “others” have now become our enemy and we try to eliminate them. Ironically, even in warfare, our enemies are still our partners. We are still choicelessly engaged with them. In a sense, even war is an attempt at conflict resolution, but it is a less desirable choice in that it leaves wounds and scars that will have to be dealt with again in the future.

Perhaps sometimes war is inevitable. The conflict is too strong, the rift is too wide, and the parties’ interests are not reconcilable. Great healers, diplomats and leaders have the ability, conviction and charisma to bring the diverging elements in a situation together and appeal to the “higher” instincts of all concerned. However, it may not always be possible to do so, and sometimes this kind of leadership is not present.

If we can’t resolve our differences, there is also the option of developing tolerance of others and acceptance of circumstances that are not going to turn out as we had hoped. It may be possible to let go somewhat of our expectations and the need to control every situation to map to our own fixed version of reality. Compromise is a cornerstone of healthy relationships and good diplomacy. Tolerance can be taught at the individual and societal level, and can serve as a buffer for those situations that are not so easy to resolve.

Once our attempts at resolving disputes have failed, we are heading down the road to either an imbalance in which dominance and submissiveness are the currency of exchange, or in the case where the power becomes more evenly distributed, open warfare.

If we can view conflict as a creative process and develop a strong capacity for exploration and resolution, we can quite possibly diminish the need for warfare in our world altogether. It is possible at the personal level and it is possible at the collective level.

Your thoughts?

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From the Buddhist point of view, there is always a relationship between cause and effect; this notion is expressed in various teachings about karma. As we interact with the world, we plant various seeds that will ripen and grow either right away, soon enough or some time in the future.

If we look at nature, small seeds can have big results; for example, the tiny acorn, given the right causes and conditions, can produce the mighty oak tree. In a similar way, in the world of human interaction, small seeds can sometimes come together to produce large-scale results.

This is why, if we want to create a good world for ourselves and others, attention to detail can sometimes trump having a huge vision. In that attention to detail, if we can lean toward courtesy and consideration for others, there is no doubt that we will begin to generate a more positive overall outcome.

If we manifest grasping, aggression and ignorance in the smallest details of our interaction with others, these energies gather power and strength like an avalanche. If we lace our smallest exchanges with awareness, courtesy, consideration and compassion, we can create a ripple effect with a different outcome.

Sometimes this kind of consideration and attention to detail while relating to others is called common courtesy. Respect and concern for the people around us, as well as using good common sense, are the hallmarks of common courtesy.

Each day in our lives is made up of tiny and discrete moments. Every relationship is made of specific and particular interactions. The whole point of developing mindfulness (as in Buddhist training) is to actually begin to pay attention to those discrete moments and interactions so that they don’t all just blur together. I believe that mindfulness laced with consideration for others executed at the smallest scale can actually change the world. Usually we tell people to think bigger, but in this case maybe thinking smaller could be very powerful.

Practicing mindfulness and consideration for others often translates to expressing common courtesy and good manners. We might be surprised to find that everything we want to build up from there — like compassion, decorum, elegance, well-being, peace, harmony — has these small gestures as its basis.

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Some say we human beings are the custodians of this planet Earth. Many ancient traditions, both Asian and European, have held the view that the role of the leader includes harmonizing human life with the rest of the natural world. In ancient China, for example, the emperor could be held accountable for famine, plague, blight and other natural disasters. The leader’s role was to harmonize or join together “heaven”, a vast or higher vision, with “earth”, a grounded, everyday reality.

Of course to some of us, the assertion that we can influence the course of nature through our actions might appear to be the ultimate hubris of the human race. But in the Buddhist view, and in synch with modern physics, science and, of course, environmental theory — the interdependence of all phenomena is considered to be a fact — not only in our environment but including our minds, emotions, society, politics, not to mention the full range of our actions with their inevitable consequences.

If we take a look, it becomes obvious that we live as part of a greater network, and that it is all interconnected and interactive — this is hard to deny no matter what personal philosophical or religious view we might hold. By studying even a small eco-system, it is possible to see the effect of every individual action on the whole.

You can see on YouTube— http://tinyurl.com/bjo64c — a story about a floating island of plastic refuse that is twice the size of Texas. If we wonder how it got there and feel no connection to that situation, we are unarguably asleep at the wheel as far as understanding its cause and effect. If we consider our environment and eco-sphere, at every level, from our individual bedroom, household, neighborhood, town, city, state, nation, continent, world, solar system, and universe, we can and will develop a different outlook for how to be mindful and care for the whole situation.

This mindfulness falls into the category of what we used to call, back in the day, consciousness raising. Consciousness raising has been, and still is, one of the primary roles of media. The other, of course, is entertainment — but maybe we have overlapped these two functions a bit too much in our modern world.

The term “disaster porn” seems to have emerged from the recent Japanese natural and man-made catastrophes. Watching the powerful effect, in awe and amazement, of the recent earthquakes and tsunamis looks shockingly similar to various Hollywood disaster movies we have all seen. Possibly the effect is numbing to the actual reality of these situations.

Even though it can be overwhelming, it is important to still pay attention and work to prepare for and avert these kinds of catastrophes.

Here is a brief framework to consider when contemplating these issues:

-What can we personally do in our daily existence to minimize the causes and conditions for such horrific circumstances to arise?

-How can we prepare and react effectively and compassionately when disasters do happen?

-How can we use the whole picture to actively stimulate contemplation of our relationship to our natural world, at the individual, group, regional, national and global level?

Your thoughts?

(Originally on the Huffington Post 3/17/11)

My wife, Cyndi Lee, landed at Narita Airport near Tokyo at almost the exact time the earthquake hit last Friday. She had come to Japan to lead a yoga teacher training program in Tokyo, and then a public program the following weekend in Osaka.

At the very moment she was handing the customs officer her passport, the entire airport began to shake. The shaking continued and intensified for several long minutes. At that point, all the passengers were quickly ushered out into the parking lot and were asked to stay there for several hours.

Cyndi ended up spending the night sleeping on the floor in the airport, and in the morning, with the help of some new “earthquake friends,” she was able to make her way to Tokyo and to her hotel there. In Tokyo there had only been minor damage from the quake, and in some sense life was mostly “normal” for a couple of days.

The first two days of the teacher training program at Tokyo Yoga went reasonably well (with most participants in attendance), but it became increasingly obvious that travel was getting more difficult for the students (due to closed roads, rolling power outages and gas shortages). Aftershocks were making everybody nervous, and the emerging crisis with Japan’s nuclear reactors was creating a very unstable environment.

I was scheduled to join Cyndi in Tokyo on Wednesday March 16 to lead the meditation aspect of the training over the following weekend, but after much consideration, Cyndi decided to postpone the program, get herself back to terra firma in New York City as quickly as possible and re-schedule our programs there to continue in September.

Like most of us, I have been glued to HuffPost and CNN to see the latest evolution in this powerful drama that has been unfolding in Japan. People’s lives have been transformed within minutes, sometimes even seconds. It seems impossible for us to understand all the forces at work here, and why one person is snatched away by a tsunami in the blink of an eye, never to be seen again, while in the same situation, rescuers can find a baby that has survived on her own for three days in the midst of all that turmoil and devastation.

As I watch these dramas unfold, I am struck once again by the strength and fragility of our human life. If we do not understand the one, we will not truly understand the other. There are such powerful forces that can take away our life at any time.

From the Earth’s and ocean’s point of view, these recent events are actually small in scale. It’s like the shrug of a giant when asleep, slightly shifting position — a very minor adjustment. Yet for us here in the human world, that shrug, that shift, can mean life or death in an instant, or at least a complete transformation of everything we held to be reliable and solid up until that very moment.

I can’t really offer a clever Buddhist analysis to make sense of all these events, but I would like to note that we, as human beings, seem to have so much strength and wisdom to draw on — even while our situation is so completely ephemeral and hazardous. How is it possible for us to reconcile this strength and fragility within our being and in the world we inhabit?

In the Buddhist view we talk about karma — the chain of causality. Causes and conditions from the past come together and create the current circumstances we face. We choose our response to these circumstances and create the basis for further causes and conditions moving into the future.

But who can say they comprehend, in this powerfully interdependent world we all share, the deeper meanings of these catastrophic events in the natural world and the profound currents and shifts in human society that are brought about by them?

There is, however, in this vast ocean of uncertainty, one thing I think we all can agree on: In times like these, we do have a powerful choice to make. We can choose fear and panic, or we can choose mindfulness, love and compassion. Such is the power of our human heart and mind.

Our hearts go out to our friends in Japan. They have survived powerful obstacles in the past, and no doubt they will rise to this new challenge. We are connected to them in seen and unseen ways. Their fragility is our fragility. Their strength is our strength. Their suffering is our suffering. Their survival is our survival.

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