From over fifteen years of sharing her understanding of Buddhist concepts
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A meditation on the uselessness of ‘should’
I once said to my mother ‘I feel sad.’ She said, ‘Well, you shouldn’t.’‘Should.’ It’s a real buzz-kill. It lops off any bud of potential exploration with an instant censor. Where did that ‘should’ leave me? Feeling not only sad but chastised, guilty for feeling the way I did, angry that she shut me down,…
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‘You Don’t Have to Be Good’
“You don’t have to be good.’ This is the first line from Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese. It is such a touchstone for so many of us who find we are always working so hard to be good. We may be surprised to find these words are such a release for us, such permission —…
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Oh, to be a Bodhisattva
(NOTE: The term Bodhisattva is from Mahayana schools of Buddhism, and I am grounded more in Theravada, the school of the elders, the one that you might say keeps the Buddha’s flame burning without additional fireworks. However, Bodhisattva has resonance for me and perhaps for you. Just hold all I am about to say lightly…
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Insight Meditation, how ‘Dharma can heal our wounds’
The short lessons we read from The Pocket Pema Chodron before my dharma talk and discussion, is often in sync with what I had planned to talk about or whatever came up before in our meeting. This week we read #87 ‘Our Predicament is Workable,” that starts with the sentence “The dharma can heal our…
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Strip, No Tease
One of our sangha members arrived at class this week saying that she had just spent the morning stripping. I supplied a line of ‘ta da da da TUM, chicka boom, chicka boom’ strip tease music, and she laughed, then amended her sentence to include that she had been stripping the altar at her church…
STEPHANIE NOBLE 