Arts & Letters – Spirituality

Stricken with anxiety as a child, Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche learned how to heal his panic with awareness. He teaches us three techniques that helped him. I suffered terrible anxiety in my childhood. I desperately wanted to run away from it or fight it off. I don’t know exactly what the true cause of my panic was, but it manifested in many ways. I was terrified of snowstorms. In my...

Asian American Buddhist communities have for years been dismissed by “convert” Buddhists for carrying “cultural baggage.” Nalika Gajaweera says the response should not be to let it go but to claim it as a mark of cultural responsibility. You can often hear Western meditation-based convert circles use the term “cultural baggage” to refer to the ritualized acts, cosmological ideas, and devotional practices associated with “heritage” Buddhist communities. This is in...

We can’t just blindly meditate, says Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche. Our practice must be illuminated by deep, critical study of the Buddhist teachings. In the Tibetan tradition, the study of Buddhist philosophy is known as “learning and reflecting on the view.” Through a process of sustained inquiry, we can become free from all doubts about the true nature of reality as described by the Buddhist teachings. We understand the Buddhist view,...

We all have emotional experiences that feel terrifying, and in order to experience our natural state, we have to be willing to experience these emotions—to actually experience our ego and our ego clinging. This may feel disturbing and negative, or even insane. Most of us, consciously or unconsciously, would like meditation to be a chill-out session where we don’t have to relate to unpleasantness. Actually, a lot of people have the misunderstanding...