Long before the final buzzer ought to have sounded, perhaps even before half time, Kobe Bryants transcendent life was snatched from NBA fans everywhere. The outpouring of grief from across the world shows how one man did not just shut up and dribble, but instead exemplified the highest ideals of sport.

If elite sport is a metaphor for lifes many battles the primeval competition for success, triumph over adversity, and endurance then Bryant was its warrior king. Even accounting for the fact that tragic deaths invite encomiastic obituaries, his demise reminds us of the many leadership lessons contained in his 41 years.

First, it is impossible to excel without melding talent with hard work. While the clich that hard work beats talent every time is not quite accurate, it is true that in competition between supremely talented people, those who combine talent with hard work prevail. This has been confirmed by research and there is perhaps no better example than Bryant.

After losing to the Miami Heat in a regular-season game in March 2011, for example, Bryant continued to practice late into the night, well after everyone had left the building. Despite being the best player, he outworked everyone and was known for berating teammates who did not have the same work ethic or commitment to excellence. Just ask Smush Parker.

Second, he had an all-consuming desire to win. You cant lead by losing. Bryant took no prisoners basketball was a zero-sum game for him. This was especially true in the second half of his career, when he rose above a pursuit of individual glory to emphasize team victory. And when his teammates play would not assure victory, he took it upon himself to will his team to victory recall the Game 6 Western Conference finals victory over the Phoenix Suns in 2010, when Bryant scored 37 points on 25 shots while playing on a team with elite scorers such as Pau Gasol, Lamar Odom and Andrew Bynum. Gasol, Odom and Bynum took a combined 26 shots, scoring just 25 points, meaningBryant had to carry the team to victory.

Third, lifes battles require an indomitable will. Bryants leadership style was not just to win but to dominate all competition through sheer willpower. Nothing seemed to faze him, not Raja Bell clotheslining him in a 2006 playoff game, or Matt Barnes threatening to throw the ball in his face. In both instances, Bryant exhibited disdain rather than anger and kept his concentration on the task at hand: winning. Contrast this with other players who react to provocations with bad behavior of their own, to the detriment of their team. Bryant even shot free throws against the Golden State Warriors after tearing his Achilles tendon in 2013.

Fourth is resilience to overcome adversity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the 2003 rape accusation and the years of abuse from opposing fans in arenas around the country. Bryant adopted the Black Mamba identity, and went about turning haters into his fans with sheer brilliance. Another man might have bemoaned the injustice of losing lucrative deals; Nike, McDonalds and other companies dropped him after the accusation. But Bryants resilience meant that Nike embraced him again, and fans eventually yielded him grudging respect.

Fifth, one needs self-awareness and accountability. When the criminal charges were dropped and the civil suit settled, Bryant apologized to his accuser and expressed contrition. On the basketball court, he recognized that his uncompromising approach to leadership was not working. The Lakers were losing and his teammates were disengaged. Bryant held himself accountable and transformed his leadership by sharing the load and including others in a way he had not done previously. The partnership with Pau Gasol stands as an example.

Sixth, Bryant showed an incessant commitment to self-improvement. Like most geniuses, he knew that the better is the enemy of the good. He was like a sponge, soaking up knowledge in business, entertainment and publishing in a way that was unprecedented for a man of his success. He also could have soaked up the applause like so many great athletes and coasted on what he did best, but his hunger elevated him to become a transcendent star who exceeded his sport. Perhaps no other elite athlete has won an Oscar or published childrens books, or accomplished as much in diverse areas of business with so little formal education.

Finally, a leaders true greatness lies in what he contributes to the growth of others. Bryant mentored people in sports and other domains, drawing from the well of highs and lows he had experienced. Aside from those he touched directly people such as tennis stars Novak Djokovic and Naomi Osaka he inspired millions who experienced tragedies in their own lives. He showed them that they could overcome, too, if they had his will and work ethic.

The Black Mamba will live on in the memories of millions of fans not just for the 33,000 points or MVP awards, but for the unique brand of leadership he exhibited. Kobe wrote in his poem, "Dear Basketball":

I fell in love with you. A love so deep I gave you my all From my mind & body To my spirit & soul.

He may well have been speaking about all his years on earth, when he gave us his all. RIP, Mamba.

Sandeep Gopalan (@DrSGopalan) is vice chancellor and executive vice president of academic affairs at Piedmont International University in North Carolina. He previously was a professor of law and pro vice chancellor for academic innovation at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. He has co-chaired American Bar Association committees on aerospace/defense and international transactions, was a member of the ABAs immigration commission, and was dean of law schools in Ireland and Australia. He has taught law in four countries.

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Kobe Bryant has left this earth but his life lessons linger | TheHill - The Hill

I think Tolstoy scholars would agree with me here: This material is pretty tight

Ashley Spurgeon is a lifelong TV fan nay, expert and with her recurring television and pop-culture column "And Another Thing," she'll tell you what to watch, what to skip, and what's worth thinking more about.

War and Peace maybe youve heard of it? According to the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on the book, War and Peace chronicles the French invasion of Russia and the impact of the Napoleonic era on tsarist society through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families. But more than that, it has a reputation, at least in the English-speaking world (and stop me if Im wrong), of being a hard thing to read, based primarily on criteria like its really thick and there too many characters, and they all have foreign names.

Currently, ya girl is on a self-improvement kick: For me, that involves a lot more reading and a lot less everything else. And if youre gonna go, why not go hard? So War and Peace it is I know next to nothing about Russia and even less about Napoleon, and in fact, I cant stand battle scenes or war in general. But I come bearing good news: War and Peace is nowhere near as difficult a read as Ive let myself believe the chapters are quite short (which makes sense, since it started as a serialized story), and the characters are distinct (Denisov is the one with the speech impediment, Dolohov is the psycho who ties a live bear to a policeman and dumps them both in the river).

Honestly, I would have started this a lot sooner if I had been informed of things like the bear and the policeman, or how one of the main characters is going through a really rough personal time so, like you do, he joins the Freemasons. War and Peace is working for me, because hey, it turns out the very famous thing that has been much beloved in dozens of languages for like 150 years is and I think Tolstoy scholars would agree with me here pretty fuckin tight.

But at the end of the day, Im still a dumb American, and I wanted my hand held. Before I started reading, I first watched the War and Peace miniseries from 2016 starring Paul Dano, James Norton and Lily James. (In the U.S., it aired on the Lifetime network, which makes War and Peace my second-favorite Paul Dano Lifetime made-for-TV movie, right behind Too Young to Be a Dad.) Dano is Pierre Bezukhov (the aforementioned Mason), Norton is Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (something of a mirror character to Pierre), and James ... well, shes Natasha, who somehow has to grow from Moscows most beloved 13-year-old to young woman who came of age during brutal wartime.

Im on the record as a fan of the miniseries as a form of television, and here it works exactly as I want it to: As a beginners guide to a larger, more resonant story. For instance, the Bear + Cop + River = Good Times scene was portrayed like a hungover flashback, and honestly, it was kind of hard to tell what was going down. But trust me its clear in the book. A dueling scene is played as a cliffhanger from one episode to the next; in the book, it quickly skips along over just a few paragraphs.

Probably the most helpful aspect of the watch-and-read is putting faces to names. Even if I dont literally imagine Paul Dano as Pierre (and I dont, I imagine someone much bigger and more physically awkward), Pierre is a Paul Danotype you know, a bit of a galoot compared to his friend. (Nortons Andrei looks like this.) Gillian Anderson is much younger than the Anna Pavlovna in my head, and really, the opening party scene at Annas St. Petersburg home is one of my only quibbles with the TV production. (My primary objection is with the womens gowns, which were way too modern.)

But for the most part, the adaptation appears faithful that said, Im still just roughly halfway through ... only about 30 more hours of reading to go! You feel the gravity of major deaths, believe so-and-so when they say theyre in love with so-and-so, the military and battle scenes build the sense of dread, and the internal character moments that come off in the book as transcendent, religious and meaningful are horseshoe-close enough to the spirit without reading as corny. Also, I love watching good actors act. Brian Cox as General Mikhail Kutuzov became one of my favorite parts of the adaptation, and Ive spent the past week or so falling in love with Jessie Buckley, who plays Andreis sister Marya as always being on the verge of tears.

Its also been fun to measure my reactions to the same scenes in adaptation and source. Natashas peasant dance is a sweet character moment on screen; when I read it, I was sobbing. The Battle of Austerlitz, the Battle of Borodino, difficult to watch. On page, looking inside the heads of the doomed men brought to those places by patriotism, money, self-regard, curiosity, duty, fear, chance, the vanity of Bonaparte, makes it even more difficult to read.

Nevertheless: Good thing good! proclaims local critic. It became pretty funny to me, pretty early on, that self-improvement was the reason for my reading War and Peace, and thats also the goal of Pierre and Andrei, and really, the book (but I thought it was about the effect of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society?!). So Im using my TV column to encourage book-reading, with the aid of television. Join me, so youll know exactly how funny it is when I start calling dudes Book I Andrei as an insult.

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And Another Thing: War and Peace - Nashville Scene

Reading time: 4 minutes

Increasingly, I work with leaders who use design thinking, agile development, and other innovation-growing methodologies. In my experience these tools are at their most potent when used by highly self-aware people.

No matter what methods or techniques your organisation uses to increase innovative capabilities, individuals, teams and leaders all benefit that much more when they are operating from a place of higher self-awareness.

Self-aware employees are sure of their strengths and gifts in any situation, can guard against unconscious biases, and know how to bring everyone else along with them in their quest for innovative success.

Self-aware people also understand why others are different to them, and find it easier to have empathy for those whose shoes theyve never walked in.

No matter what role people hold, or which problem theyve been asked to creatively solve, there are a range of ways in which they can access their spirit of innovation and bring a fresh perspective to even the oldest problems.

Open your mind with empathy

When we think through a problem, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of the person who will become the end user.

What will they need? What problems do they need help solving? What will the potential solution feel like or look like, how will it work or be accessed?

Self-awareness is our strongest tool. We must use it to empower ourselves to build a career and a life thats designed for who we are and how we want to live

These kinds of questions are a great jumping-off point when youre looking for an innovative solution to a business challenge.

Exercise idea: Find someone who is an opposite type of person to you and ask each other a series of questions around a topic or subject matter; dig a bit deeper on their answers and later you can consider what was similar and different about the answers you both gave. Great for limbering up your empathy!

Good communication makes great collaboration

Part of self-awareness is knowing both how you communicate, and how well you communicate. Having the best ideas in the world will get you nowhere if you dont land them well with the others in the room.

Knowing who youre talking to, and what theyll need from you in order to get behind your idea is key; how you pitch your idea to the team will be the thing that makes it stand or fall.

Exercise idea: To give everyone an opportunity to input into idea generation and conversation you need to be aware of the preferences of everyone involved.

Some people will happily speak up, others will appreciate solo reflection time, others will enjoy interactive exercises.

Make it your job to find out what motivates other people, and make space for their communication style too.

Look back and learn

Simply landing on a solution and implementing it well isnt the end of the process. We should all be lifelong learners.

Part of the innovation process is reflecting on how you showed up as the project unfolded the good, the bad, and the ugly.

There should never be an end-point in your journey of self-awareness, and looking at how you perform in an innovative environment can be one of the steeper parts of the learning curve.

Exercise idea: Ask for feedback from others on how they saw you perform. How do they think you could be even more effective? What could you stop, start, and continue doing?

If youre truly honest with yourself, do you have blind spots in your perception of your performance?

Use your failures to move you forward

Much like innovation, self-awareness isnt something you are going to get right every time. We should take every failure as an opportunity to learn and improve.

In both innovation and self-awareness, we can be clear on what success looks like for us. Whether its a project output or a successful meeting, having a good understanding of this can help you assess whether you achieved it or not.

Exercise idea: Create a journal of failures or feedback that indicates room for improvement. Reflect on these how can you improve next time? What will you learn from this?

Go back and note how you iterated your approach to overcome this failure the next time; was it more successful?

These self-awareness techniques can be used or repeated at any stage of the innovation process. Self-awareness is our strongest tool. We must use it to empower ourselves not only in an innovative environment, but to build a career and a life thats designed for who we are and how we want to live.

About the author

Kim Anderson is a designer for Insights

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Self-awareness: an indispensable tool when it comes to innovation - Training Journal

Kobe Bryants airballs in the final game of his rookie season drew derision and added kindling to the perception that he should have gone to college. Those misses were the first of many public failures throughout his 20-year NBA career, and his response to adversity was the same in those early years as it was when he got older.

[ The different eras of Kobe Bryant: Kobe the rookie ]

He endeavored toward self-improvement, undeterred by swirling narratives. He had gone from playing 35 games as a senior at Lower Merion High School where he was always the most physically imposing player on the court to 71 games as a rookie in a league of full-grown men. He devoted more time to his conditioning the following offseason to prepare for that grind.

Strengthened legs provided a foundation for the increased burden he would be asked to shoulder in the 1997-98 season. Lakers head coach Del Harris promoted him to the sixth man role, where he was asked to back...

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The different eras of Kobe Bryant: The youngest All-Star starter in NBA history - The Athletic

In my minds eye, I can see him squaring up on an isolated defender, out near the free-throw line. He leads with a jab step, feinting a drive that was, even in his final years, still quick enough to streak by people. Bryants man would bite and backpedal a step, enough to give him room for a shot. But Bryant always wanted more. More touches. More shots. More championships. Hed spin away from the basket for more space and gather the ball, all in one fluid sequence, his one-man ballet fooling the defender into thinking it would end with Bryant reclining into one of his patented fadeaways. But this, too, was a fake. By the time the defender recognized the ruse, he was already midair, having lunged forward to block a fadeaway that would never come. Meanwhile, Bryant was pivoting toward the basket for an easy 12-footer. That was the thing about Bryant: He always seemed to have one more pivot.

In recent years, an aura of legend has surrounded Bryant, one that will only grow now, given the tragic circumstances of his death. But he wasnt always as widely beloved as yesterdays outpouring would suggest. When Bryant entered the league, he was seen as self-consumed. In those naive years before social media, his obsession with his own narrative of destined greatness felt both novel and off-putting. But he was still growing up, still in his teens, still in possession of his own fandoms, expressed most poignantly by his mimicry of Michael Jordans physical tics, down to the loping movements of the elder mans gait (and least poignantly by his Jordan-esque cruelty to teammates).

When Bryants feud with Shaquille ONeal broke into public in 2000, during their first championship run, it was easy to side with the big man, who seemed more at ease with himself, especially for a fan base whod grown up on Magics smile. By comparison, Bryant came off as calculated. He seemed like basketballs answer to Mark Zuckerberg. Some suspected that his carefully controlled demeanor concealed something more sinister, a suspicion that seemed prophetic in 2003, when Bryant was charged with felony sexual assault in Colorado.

The facts on record from that night in Colorado arent great for Bryant, and they must be looked at, squarely: After a brief encounter in Bryants hotel room, a 19-year-old front-desk clerk left with a bruise on her jaw and bloodherson her clothing and Bryants. The next day, a rape exam would reveal vaginal injuries. In the run-up to trial, Bryants legal team would make much of her sexual history. The case was dropped just days before opening arguments when the woman, who later received a settlement in a separate civil case, refused to testify.

Its hard to know how the Colorado incident, as Bryant coolly described it in a 2014 New Yorker profile, would have played out in todays media environment. After the charges were filed, he lost many of his sponsors, but Nike stuck around, and in time others came back. By the decades end, journalists had mostly stopped asking him about the alleged assault, except as a means to frame his comeback. Even as late as 2018, when Bryant won an Oscar at an Academy Award ceremony that was haunted by that years #MeToo scandals, he managed to avoid a sustained public relitigation of the case.

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Kobe Bryants Unfinished Business - The Atlantic

YOU Season 3: Netflix Release Date, Cast, And What To Expect From New Season

There is something very captivating about Netflix U. Completely adapted from the series of books of the same name by the American author Caroline Kepnes, she invites us to the mind of the primordial psychopath Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley).

Although a program with such a theme should be more controversial, you are a great success among the public on Netflix. After being abandoned by the Lifetime cable network in the US In the US, Netflix bought the program at the end of 2018.

Season 3 was announced on January 14, with a production tax credit of more than $ 7 million to renew for another series. We will continue to explore the twisted lives of Joe and his new partner, Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti), after a wildly unexpected ending in season 2, then we will reveal when Season 3 is broadcast on Netflix, and summarize everything. What do we know about the next set of episodes so far?

Netflix has not confirmed an exact release date for Season 3 of YOU, but when news of the renewal appeared on TVLine, it was revealed that 10 new episodes would arrive in 2021. The official Twitter page for the program posted an ironic video to Early January, which read New Year, New Tum, a beautiful drama about the pseudo comment of self-improvement in the second season of Yu.

While condemning viewers for a full year before they can check back with Joe and Love, its good to know that a new season is happening at an age when Netflix is broadcasting its The original is not afraid of canceling the show

As it is not known till now when the production will begin in season 3, there is only confirmation of two returning cast members: Badgley will return as Joe and Victoria Pedretti as Love.

The continued presence of Loves Joe in life was something very definitive about how the second season ended, in a very unholy union with the couple (plus what that turn means for season 3 below). Hopefully, we will also see the return of an extended season of Quinns family and friends from season 2.

It is likely to be established in Los Angeles in the foreseeable future. With the tax incentives mentioned above for production in California and the closing season of the second season that saw how life adapted to live in an idyllic suburban home, it is safe to assume that the third season replaces the change of season. It wont be like the tickets for the second season of New York.

In season 2, they entered the melodrama of the books, revealing an extremely shocking character. When Love is forced to confront Joes true nature by her first victim, Candace, she takes the news in a way that some have seen coming: stabbing Candace in the throat.

It was the jaw of a moment, which shows that love is obsessed and inclined towards murder. Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, Badley provided an idea of gender policy, which shows the show challenging the darker trends of his partner.

It is not just loved that the third season is planned to be further questioned. Showrunner Sera Gamble is also planning a dark future for Joe. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Gamble talked about how the end of season 2 does not indicate good things for our protagonist.

Following the revelations of Loves murder, he surprised Joe with the news that he now takes his son, securing his future with her (for now). We see two steps in the suburbs (with Loves mother in tow) and it is here that Joe spies through the fence of his new neighbor, a possible new theme of his obsessive nature.

Although their stories are very different, we learn that both carry out acts of physical and emotional abuse, as well as acts of violence at a very young age.

The final was designed to establish a much more suburban and insular world where Joe would be a complete fish out of the water. How the next season in which Joe will become a father will be an interesting element: the last two seasons have shown that he is particularly protective of the children in his life.

Badgley told TVLine that Joe and Love are not soulmates. He is afraid of him in the end. Originally, this is somehow established for Season 3, where they would be the enemy of the other. You Season 3 has a lot of potential content to explore.

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YOU Season 3: Netflix Release Date, Cast, And What To Expect From New Season - The Digital Weekly

From getting fit to getting all As, students and visitors at Texas A&M University-San Antonio recently shared their New Years resolutions and goals for the semester. Mesquite reporters conducted interviews around campus Jan. 15.

Students strengthen faith, health

By Andrea Rangel and Matthew R. Serna

Communication junior Dee Garca said she wants to become a better steward in her faith in 2020.

Im a Christian, she said. I havent been going to church as much as I want to, so my New Years resolution is to start going to church and to start praying more.

Garca said she has started to pray more but has not begun her habit of going to church yet.

She attends Pearl Street Church at the Pearl near downtown San Antonio.

Cheyanna Ramsey said she plans to stay sober and stay away from alcohol.

Ramsey, who recently completed nursing school, was visiting campus this month while her mother attended class.

My family struggles with alcoholism on my dads side so its like, let me kind of break the chain for a little bit, she said in an interview on the second floor of the Central Academic Building.

Ramsey said she discovered she is allergic to beer.

Another reason why I kept my resolution is because I went into anaphylactic shock.

Anaphylactic shock is when a person has a severe allergic reaction to things such as foods, insect bites or certain medications, according to WebMD.

I ended up almost dying that night, and I was like, Oh yeah, I should try not to drink anymore, she said.

Ramsey plans to spend more time with her goddaughter and keep her friends aware that she can be their sober babysitter when they are out.

Im also just telling my friends, Hey, Im only drinking water and Red Bull, she said.

Students actively pursue fitness goals

By Onassis Figueroa and Amber Mayt Villarreal

Kinesiology junior James Otholt has a New Years resolution of getting in better shape and eating healthier.

He plans to go to the universitys gym in the morning before his classes begin and make adjustments to his diet. He enjoys vegetables and burritos.

Otholt also enjoys outdoor activities including biking, hiking, camping and intramural sports such as flag football and soccer.

I just like being outdoors, said Otholt, a front desk staff member at the universitys gym.Finance junior Daniella Aldaba said she hopes to be consistently active.

Aldaba joined Golds Gym in mid-December to prepare for the challenge.

I believe I can do anything I set my mind to, she said. It is going to take a lot of determination, and Im going to need motivation.

Aldaba wants to exercise at least three times per week and include meal prepping as a part of her daily ritual.

I want to feel like Im doing something good for myself. This is the perfect chance to start.

Success through studying

By Ava L. Palacios and Dana Michea Marquez

Computer science junior Leonard Gonzalez said he has never been a bad student but wants to keep improving.

That means keeping up with assignments, planning, balancing work and school better, he said in an interview in a STEM study room.

Gonzalez wants to improve his grades from B- and B+ to As to help him in his future career as a coder.

I think this will help me with job assignments and planning, Gonzalez said.

Biology sophomore Esmeralda Solis said she will be the first in her family to earn a bachelors degree and become an orthopedic doctor.

To help reach that goal, she plans to get As this semester.

Solis said a personal experience inspired her interest in studying medicine.

I had a small accident and I really like what they did, she said of an orthopedic surgeon who treated her at Brooke Army Medical Center. I was riding an ATV. Somehow, one of the parts on it got loose or wasnt put on right. The part cut my left inner bottom part of my calf.

The doctor at BAMC not only stitched her up; he also sparked her desire to pursue an M.D.

He explained why he wanted to be an orthopedic doctor, Solis said. He talked to me about his schooling and how he practiced. I took an interest in it. Also, I had many visits with the doctor for about two and a half to three months.

Student believes in year-round improvement

By Hannah Richards

Education senior Roxanne Saunders strives to be a year-round go-getter.

She said she doesnt believe in New Years resolutions but believes self-improvement is something people should focus on no matter the time of year.

I dont do New Years resolutions because theyre normally just a Band-Aid, Saunders said during an interview in the Central Academic Building. I always try to set goals that are attainable and will have an outcome when Im done.

Saunders has tried New Years resolutions, but noticed they never got her to where she wanted to be.

I used to do New Years resolutions with dieting, but it was more like yo-yo dieting. I didnt want that for myself anymore, she said.

Excerpt from:
Out with the old, in with the New Year's resolutions | Texas A&M University-San Antonio | TAMUSA - The Mesquite

I was introduced to the practice of mindfulness by S. N. Goenka in 1974, a few weeks after being ordained as a novice monk. Together with a group of young Tibetan monks and Western students of Buddhism, I attended a silent ten-day Vipassana retreat in Dharamsala, India.

During the first three days we cultivated mindfulness of breathing by focusing on the sensation of the breath as it passes over the upper lip. After a while the fugitive passage of inhalations and exhalations consolidated into a stable point of sensation at the center of the lip. This point then became the exclusive focus of the meditation.

In becoming more concentrated, I started seeing flashes of colored lights and patterns in my mind. They did not last long, and we were advised to pay them no attention. By the end of the three days, I had settled into an unprecedented state of focused attention, which I could sustain for several minutes at a time without distraction.

On day four, we moved our focus from the upper lip to a point at the top of the head. From there we carefully expanded our attention to the rest of the scalp, the face, the ears, the neck, until we reached the torso. Then we slowly continued through the rest of the body, along each arm and leg in turn, until we reached the tips of our toes. Once this downward scan was complete, we repeated the procedure in reverse until we returned to the top of the head. We spent each meditation session sweeping the body from head to foot and back again.

At first, my experience was patchy. Some parts of the body buzzed, tingled, vibrated, and pulsed, while other parts felt almost completely insensate. As I persisted with the exerciseit was all we did for several hours each daythe dead zones began to come alive until I felt my entire body as one single mass of quivering sensations.

In a deep, reassuring voice, Mr. Goenka instructed us to pay attention to the range of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings associated with these sensations. A pain in the knee breaks down into physical reactions triggered by the stress on the joint due to sitting cross-legged for long periods and a subjective feeling of that condition as unpleasant. In refining mindfulness, one learns to differentiate between physical sensations or sounds and how one feels about them, thereby enabling one to dwell in a keenly responsive but less reactive state of mind.

Mr. Goenka told us to notice how even the most stubborn sensations and feelings came and went. I found that if I probed deeply into a piercing pain in the knee, at a certain point it would switch from being something solid and unpleasant into a rapidly vibrating pattern of sensations that no longer hurt as much. I realized that what I experienced at any given moment was co-created by the physical processes of my body and the way I was conditioned to interpret and react to them. I remember a time when I was seated cross-legged outside on the grass between meditation sessions in an ecstatic, silent, openhearted awareness while the gusts of wind rising from the plains of the Punjab below Dharamsala seemed to blow through me. The sense of a separate world out there being observed by a detached subject in here began to break down.

All this took place more than forty years ago, but its impact remains with me today. It was my initiation into mindfulness, which has been the basis of my contemplative life ever since. Far more than just a technique, mindfulness offered me a new sensibility on life as a whole, an entirely other perspective on how to be a practicing human in the world.

My Tibetan Buddhist education and training during the two years before the retreat had been an ideal preparation for this practice. I was used to spending much of each day cross-legged on the floor, so long hours of sitting meditation did not trouble me. My daily reflections and studieson the preciousness of human life, the imminence of death, renunciation, existential commitment, an altruistic resolve, and emptinessprovided a fertile soil of value and meaning for mindful awareness to take root in. I had thought deeply about impermanence and selflessness. Now I was experiencing them viscerally. I found myself part of the living fabric of human experience into which I was inseparably woven yet was at the same time free to examine and explore. Mindfulness, I discovered, was not an aloof, detached regard. Its practice served to sculpt and shape the inner contours of my solitude.

Nor was the idea of mindfulness new to me. For many months I had been studying Shantidevas Guide to the Bodhisattvas Way of Life. The entire fifth chapter of this 8th-century Indian Buddhist text is devoted to the practice of mindful awareness.

Mr. Goenka provided the tools to turn Shantidevas teachings on mindfulness into a felt reality, while Shantidevas reflections provided an ethical dimension for Mr. Goenkas contemplative practice. If the elephant of my mind, wrote Shantideva, is firmly bound on all sides by the rope of mindfulness, all fears will cease to exist and all virtues will come into my hand. The purpose of mindfulness is not just to be more aware of the breath, bodily sensations, and feelings. For Shantideva it means to be constantly mindful of ones ethical aspirations. Mindfulness is compared to the gatekeeper at the doorway of the mind and senses, alert to any impulse that threatens to divert you from your goals and undermine you.

The thieves of unawareness, he remarks, follow upon the decline of mindfulness and rob you of your goodness. They circle around waiting for an opportunity to break in and take possession of you. Mindfulness is a heightened attention that notices the very first stirring of reactive impulses and neurotic habits before they have a chance to take hold. When, on the verge of acting, I see my mind is tainted, Shantideva tells himself, I should remain immobile, like a piece of wood.

The piece of wood is a metaphor for equanimity, not indifference. Mindfulness is a balanced, reflective stance in which one notices the meanness or sarcasm that rises up in the mind while neither identifying with it nor rejecting it. One observes with interest what is happening without succumbing to either the urge to act on it or the guilty desire to ignore or suppress it. This entails a radical acceptance of who and what you are, where nothing is unworthy of being the object of such attention. You say yes to your life as it manifests, warts and all, with an ironic, compassionate regard. Through sustaining this nonreactive stance over time, mindful awareness becomes the basis for ones ethical life.

This perspective is spelled out in the 14th-century Tibetan lama Thogme Zangpos commentary to Shantidevas text. For Thogme Zangpo, mindfulness is the recollection of all one aspires to let go of and realize, while awareness is knowing how to do that letting go and realizing. Mindful awareness thus encompasses the entire project of human flourishing. To be mindful means to remember to let go of compulsive reactivity and realize a nonreactive way of life, while to be aware means to know how to refine the psychological, contemplative, philosophical, and ethical skills needed to achieve these goals.

Ever since the Vipassana retreat with Mr. Goenka and the study of Shantidevas Guide to the Bodhisattvas Way of Life, the contemplative and ethical dimensions of mindfulness have been inseparable for me. Mindful awareness both embeds my attention in the raw immediacy of experience and serves as the moral compass that guides my response to that experience. What is the power of mindfulness? asked Gotama more than a thousand years before Shantideva. The noble practitioner is mindful: she is equipped with the keenest mindfulness and awareness; she remembers well and keeps in mind what has been said and done long ago.

_________________

Wrong-minded people voice opinions, as do truth-minded people too. When an opinion is offered, the sage is not drawn in theres nothing arid about the sage. Sutta Nipata 4.3

I feel death, says Michel de Montaigne, continuously nipping at my throat and kidneys. Montaigne knows that each stumble of a horse, each falling of a tile, each slight pinprick could be the harbinger of his end. To be able to die at peace, a philosopher needs to die to his attachments to the world. This, for Montaigne, is true solitude, where ones thoughts and emotions are reined in and brought under control. To prepare oneself for death is to prepare oneself for freedom. The one who has learned to die has unlearned to be a slave.

To die to the world is far from straightforward. People do not recognize the natural sickness of their mind, says Montaigne, which does nothing but ferret about in search of something, ceaselessly twisting, elaborating, and entangling itself in its own activity like a silkworm, until it suffocates there like a mouse in pitch. We rush around in a compulsive flight from death. Every moment, he remarks, it seems I am fleeing from myself. No matter how many laws or precepts we use to fence the mind in, we still find it garrulous and dissolute, escaping all constraints. This flight is chaotic and aimless. There is no madness or lunacy that cannot be produced in this turmoil. When the soul has no definite goal, it gets lost.

Chronic dissatisfaction further drives this restlessness. Nothing that we know and enjoy feels satisfying, remarks Montaigne.

Since what is present fails to gratify us, we hanker after future things of which we know nothing. It is not that what is present is unable to gratify us, but we grasp it in a sick and uncontrolled way.

This strategy increases the dissatisfaction it seeks to dispel. For what we cling to turns out to be hollow and empty. We clutch at everything, he says, but clasp nothing but wind.

Montaigne suggests that nature distracts us from ourselves so as not to discourage us. To divert our attention, it has very cleverly projected the activity of our gaze outward so that we are swept forward on its current. This is why to turn the course of our life back toward us is a painful move. It is hard work to swim against the stream. It creates turbulence, like when the sea, pushed back onto itself, churns in confusion.

Montaigne compares himself to a vessel that disintegrates, splits apart, leaks, and shirks its duty to itself. It needs to be knocked together and tightened up with some good strokes of a mallet. Such reform cannot be done piecemeal. It requires a continual training of the soul. Recover your mind and your will, which are busying themselves elsewhere, he urges. You are draining away and scattering yourself. Concentrate yourself; hold yourself back. You are being betrayed, dissipated, robbed.

It is a tricky business, he acknowledges, to follow so meandering a course as that of our mind, to penetrate its opaque depths and hidden recesses, to discern and stop so many subtle shifts in its movements. This is impossible without rigorous self-governance. To rein in its compulsive wandering, no beast more justly needs to be given blinkers to keep its gaze focused on what lies before its feet. It requires that you learn how to keep yourself settled, straight, inflexible, without movement or agitation. Others, he comments, study themselves in order to advance and elevate their mind: I seek to humble it and lay it down to rest.

The procedure that works well for me, says Montaigne, is this: With very little effort I stop the first movement of my emotions, and let go of whatever has started to weigh me down before it carries me off. By spying closely on the effects and circumstances of the passions that govern me, he has learned to detect the tiny breezes that brush against me and murmur inside me, as forerunners of the storm. Seeing them approach lets him slow down a little the frenzy of their charge. Experience has taught him that without knowing how to close the door against your emotions, you will never chase them out once they have gained entry.

To succeed in examining and managing ones life is, for Montaigne, to have accomplished the greatest task of all. It is not easy, but with practice you can tame the mind. Rarely does anyone attempt, let alone succeed in, this endeavor. Montaigne considers himself unusual in this regard: Never has someone prepared himself to leave the world more simply and totally, or detached himself from it more completely than I strive to do.

Montaigne follows Platos middle road between hatred of pain and love of pleasure, and instructs himself to contemplate both pain and pleasure with an equally calm gaze. To live this way, you need to jettison even the guidelines and pointers that have brought you to this point. Most people get it wrong, he explains:

Of course one can proceed more easily by sticking to the side of the road, whose curb serves as a limit and a guide, than by following the wide and open middle way. Yes, it is far easier to proceed by artificial than by natural means, but it is far less noble too and held in less esteem. The souls greatness lies not so much in reaching lofty heights and making progress as in knowing and respecting its range.

One needs to cultivate an intuitive sense of balance and orientation that is responsive to the demands of each moment. I want death to find me planting my cabbages, he says, worrying about neither it nor my imperfect garden.

_________________

TATE MODERN, LONDON, OCTOBER 2017

I am in a large public art gallery. People are milling around and talking in hushed voices. Behind me is a life-size standing figure that looks like a man encased in lead. On entering the room, I recognized it as a work of the British artist Antony Gormley. The figure leans slightly backward, its arms and legs splayed, its barely discernible features gazing skyward. Called Untitled (for Francis), it evokes the moment St. Francis of Assisi received the stigmata, as portrayed in a late-15th- century painting by Giovanni Bellini.

With my back to the ecstatic saint, I gaze at the only other work in the room. It is a five-foot-square abstract painting called Faraway Love by the American artist Agnes Martin. It consists of horizontal lines: five thin bands of white and four wider bands of pale blue. The bands are rectangles of different widths, their borders marked by hand-drawn pencil lines.

The paint is applied as a wash. The artists fingerprints are visible in places. The bottom blue band bears the seemingly accidental mark of a thin streak of blue pigment.

Agnes Martin maintained that her paintings were complete only when they evoked in the viewer the same quality that inspired her to paint them. As I peer at this work, I do not experience love, either close or far away. I am restless and uncertain as I try to make sense of what I am seeing. Nothing on the canvas holds my attention. I find myself distracted and bored. Perhaps my guilty obligation to appreciate Faraway Love undermines the innocent openness of heart required to experience love.

For twenty years Agnes Martin worked in New York and New Mexico as an obscure artist of figurative, landscape, and semiabstract painting. During this period, she routinely burned most of her work. One day in her early fifties she found herself thinking of the innocence of trees, and a grid of fine vertical lines and pale horizontal bands appeared in her mind. She painted what she saw and titled it The Tree.

For the remaining forty years of her life, nearly all her paintings would be squares divided by abstract bands of color wash and penciled lines. Her method was simple and inflexible. She would wait for moments of inspiration in which a tiny square image appeared in her mind. She would scale this up mathematically to the size of the canvas and then reproduce it exactly. She insisted that these paintings transcended the concrete world of sense experience. They were expressions of pure abstract emotion, such as innocence, perfection, benevolence, happiness, and love.

I paint with my back to the world, she told an interviewer in 1997. She had no interest in what others might think of what she was doing. She denied that these almost featureless works had anything to do with the prairies of Canada, where she was born, or the deserts of New Mexico, where she lived. Nor was she trying to represent the feelings that inspired her. By becoming a selfless channel for inspiration, she sought to reveal them. Since her paintings originated in inspiration, she refused to take any credit for the finished works. She accepted only the blame for their failure.

Agnes Martin pursued her art with the single-minded dedication of an ascetic. She believed that you have to get rid of everything in life that interferes with your primary inspiration and vision. If this alienates your family and friends, then so be it. For her, ideas, calculations, and ambitions obscure the sublime, absolute perfection of life that is present each moment. And the very worst thing you can think of when you are working is yourself. For as soon as the dragon of pride rears its fiery head, she observed, you start making mistakes.

The best things in life, said Agnes, happen to you when youre alone. She never married, lived with a partner, or had children. Solitude was the site of her inspiration. She spent months by herself driving around North America in a camper van. For nearly a decade, she settled on the Portales mesa above the New Mexico town of Cuba, without electricity or telephone. The nearest neighbor was six miles away. A mystic and a solitary person, she wrote, are the same. Her religion was just solitude and independence for a free mind.

For years Agnes practiced meditation twenty minutes twice a day in order to still her mind for inspiration. At the age of 85, she declared in a video interview that she no longer meditated, because she had learned to stop thinking. Now, she said,

I dont think of anything. Nothing goes through my mind. I dont have any ideas myself and I dont believe anybody elses, so that leaves me a clear mind. Gosh, yes, an empty mind, so that when something comes into it you can see it.

The video shows her at work: an old woman with close-cropped hair, a paint-brush in one hand, waddling patiently between the table with her dish of paint and the canvas mounted against a studio wall. She addresses the interviewer with emphatic, chuckling enthusiasm. Her eyes sparkle from a kind, wrinkled face. Now and again they seem to flash with a glint of almost feral wariness. Agnes Martin fought to realize her artistic vision in a male-dominated art world, in a society prejudiced against and frightened of her homosexuality and schizophrenia.

Martins work has been said to have the quality of a religious utterance, almost a form of prayer. Agnes inhabited that indefinable space between artistic practice and ascetic practice. Her paintings are infused with the quiet, spacious spirituality of Taoism, Zen, and the Native American culture of New Mexico. To fully appreciate Faraway Love, I suspect, you would need to contemplate it over time, ideally alone and in silence.

Antony Gormley, whose figure Untitled (for Francis) stood behind me as I reflected on Faraway Love, was raised a Catholic and grew up in England. In his early twenties he traveled to India, where he spent three years studying Buddhism. He regards the first ten-day Vipassana retreat he attended with S. N. Goenka in Dalhousie in 1972 as the single most important experience of my life. In conversation with the art historian Ernst Gombrich in 1995, he described how meditating on the sensation of being in a body became a tool he then transferred to making sculpture. He insists that his sculptures do not represent the body but reveal the space the body inhabits. Meditation would also have helped him remain still and calm enough while he had his own body cast for works such as Untitled (for Francis). Imagine the solitude of the naked artist wrapped in cling film and two layers of plaster and jute cloth, breathing through straws.

From The Art of Solitude, by Stephen Batchelor 2020. Reprinted with permission of Yale University Press.

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Solitude in Buddhism | The Art of Solitude - Tricycle

An African American professor of Buddhism looks at race, class, and American dharma.

I have often been asked over the yearsby friends as well as colleagueswhether or not I feel a gap, a kind of disjuncture, between what I do and who I am. By this, I take it that they mean a disjuncture between the facts of my being an African American and my being someone who has studied and taught Tibetan Buddhism for many years. I admit that I may be somewhat of an anomaly. But it hasnt seemed anomalous to me; it is, after all, my life. It is me and it is what I do.

Only recently have I begun contemplating what particular benefit might come from my making a point of this unusual or anomalous combination of circumstances. But a benefit for whom? One obvious answer, I have come to believe, is that my doing so might be of some benefit for other African Americans and other people of color generally. Moreover, in adding my voice to such discussions, it might well be the case that there is some benefit for American Buddhists and for Western Buddhists more broadly.

Over the years, it has certainly been the case that other persons of color have come up to me in various Buddhist gatherings and told me, I was so glad to look around and see you here! It is a way of validating their own choice to be there, a way of not being pulled under or dismissed by being the other, a way of finding sanity in the scene. White Americans dont yet seem to get the point that, given the history of societally marginalized people in this country, whenever we find ourselves in spaces where we are clearly in the minority, we have a natural tendency to be fearful, guarded, and mistrusting.

That Buddhist centers in this country have not exactly had an open-door policy toward people of color is a fact so well known that it is almost taken for granted. Some people have been noting the absence of people of color for some years now. In 1988, Sandy Boucher put the matter quite bluntly when, in Turning the Wheel, she characterized the number of North American-born people committed to Buddhism as being overwhelmingly white and middle or upper middle class. Yet there seems to be little open discussion of why this is so or of how the situation might be changed.

Again, after noting that the only school of Buddhism in America able to boast comparatively large numbers of people of color is Nichiren Shoshu of America (NSA), Boucher stated:

Many people in the world of American Buddhists are leery of Nichiren Shoshu, seeing it as a pseudoreligion in which people chant to get a Cadillac, and they are repelled by Nichirens aggressive recruiting tactics. It is also said that Nichiren is political in some ill-defined but presumably sinister way People in Nichiren do chant to get a car, a house, a job, a better life. It is also true that the majority of people in this country practicing the other forms of Buddhism already have access to those things and so can comfortably choose to renounce them.

I am neither a member of nor an advocate for NSA Buddhism. I do, however, think that their success in attracting people of color into their groups makes them worthy of study, and in some respects, perhaps even worthy models. NSA organizations have done two things in particular that impact on their having a more diverse community of members: (1) NSA centers are located in large urban areas, and they draw a more diverse following; and (2) the ritual practices that are enjoined on members are simple. Apart from the mandatory recitation of the Nam-myoho-renge-kyo mantra, the scriptures and prayers are recited in English.

More recently, the Korean Zen master Samu Sunim remarked in an interview:

We Buddhist teachersthose of us who came from Asiaare like transplanted lotuses. Many of us are refugees. Here we find ourselves in the marketplaceas dharma peddlers, you might say. I am concerned with the Zen movement becoming more accessible to ordinary common people.

It is worth noting that, as far as I know, it has always been either women or ethnic, that is, Asian, Buddhists who have noted the non-inclusiveness of the various Buddhisms in Western societies. Western men havent seemed to notice. That, in itself, may say something. Whenever Ive brought up the subject, Ive been told: But Buddhists dont proselytize! They never have. Historically, though, this isnt exactly true. Except for during the three-month rainy season, the earliest Buddhist mendicants were told to travel continuously and spread the faith.

When certain people ask me whether I feel a gap between who I am and what I do, it seems to me that they are really asking, What does Buddhism offer to any African American? That is a legitimate question, and one that I feel is worthy of real consideration. To answer most simply, I believe that Buddhism offers us a methodology for enhancing our confidence. This is especially true of the various forms of tantric Buddhism, since tantric Buddhism aims at nothing less than the complete transformation of our ordinary and limited perception of who we are as human beings.

I was very fortunate to have been a close student of Lama Thubten Yeshe. We met in Nepal in fall 1969. Lama Yeshe kindly accepted me as his student, and I was honored that he chose to call me his daughter. When I look back on the fifteen years that Lama Yeshe was my teacher, I see confidence as his main teachingnot only to me but to countless others who over the years came to him for guidance. Indeed, when Lama Yeshe discussed the essential teachings of tantric Buddhismas he did so simply, so eloquently, and so profoundly in his Introduction to Tantrahe stated this idea quite explicitly. Here I provide only a few examples:

According to Buddhist tantra, we remain trapped within a circle of dissatisfaction because our view of reality is narrow and suffocating. We hold onto a very limited and limiting view of who we are and what we can become, with the result that our self-image remains oppressively low and negative, and we feel quite inadequate and hopeless. As long as our opinion of ourselves is so miserable, our life will remain meaningless.

One of the essential practices at all levels of tantra is to dissolve our ordinary conceptions of ourselves and then, from the empty space into which these concepts have disappeared, arise in the glorious light body of a deity: a manifestation of the essential clarity of our deepest being. The more we train to see ourselves as such a meditational deity, the less bound we feel by lifes ordinary disappointments and frustrations. This divine self-visualization empowers us to take control of our life and create for ourselves a pure environment in which our deepest nature can be expressed. . . . It is a simple truth that if we identify ourselves as being fundamentally pure, strong, and capable we will actually develop these qualities, but if we continue to think of ourselves as dull and foolish, that is what we will become.

The health of body and mind is primarily a question of our self-image. Those people who think badly of themselves, for whatever reasons, become and then remain miserable, while those who can recognize and draw on their inner resources can overcome even the most difficult situations. Deity-yoga is one of the most profound ways of lifting our self-image, and that is why tantra is such a quick and powerful method for achieving the fulfillment of our tremendous potential.

This is not just my interpretation of Lama Yeshes view. Once, when Lama Yeshe was visiting California, I took him to hear a lecture given by Angela Davis. She spoke one afternoon in the quarry on the University of California, Santa Cruz, campus. Lama Yeshe was visibly excited to see and to listen to Davis speak. Several times during her talk, with clenched fist, he said aloud, This is how one ought to be: strong and confident like this lady!

Still, none of the great benefits that tantric meditative practice offers can be experienced and realized by ordinary, common people if those people dont hear about it and dont have a chance to try it for themselvesin short, if the teachings are not accessible. And as long as Buddhist practice is viewed and packaged as a commoditylike so many other commodities in the Westit will remain inaccessible to a great many people. And here, it seems clear that the question of accessibility is one of class, notat least not necessarilyone of race. In order to study and to practice Buddhism in America, two requisites are absolutely essential: money and leisure time.

I met Tibetan lamas because I was able to travel to India (on a fully paid scholarship) for my junior year of college. I was part of that late 1960s phenomenon of Western students traveling to the mysterious East; part of the infamous 60s counterculture. I would not have met the Tibetans had I not been able to travel East. Neither would I now be able to attend or to afford Buddhist meditation retreats were it not that I have the kind of job I do, in terms of both the financial security and the ample vacation time and break periods it affords.

The Tibetans took me in instantly, and I saw in them a welcoming family of compassionate and skilled people who, as I viewed myself, were refugees. I soon learned that the Tibetans possessed the type of knowledge and wisdom I longed forknowledge of methods for dealing with frustrations, disappointments, and anger, and of developing genuine compassion. Indeed, their very beings reflected this. They had suffered untold hardships, had even been forced to flee their country. We shared, it seemed to me, the experience of a profound historical trauma. Yet they coped quite well, seeming to possess a sort of spiritual armor that I felt lacking in myself. Lama Yeshes personal example inspired me, and his compassion led him to entrust some of the tantric teachings to me. Having come personally to see the benefits of such teachings, I would like to see them disseminated much more widely than they are at present.

Once Lama Yeshe looked at me piercingly and then remarked, Living with pride and humility in equal proportion is very difficult! In that moment, it seemed to me, he had put his finger on one of the deepest issues confronting all African Americans: the great difficulty of having gone through the experience of 250 years of slavery, during which ones very humanness was challenged and degraded at every turn, and yet through it all, to have maintained a strong sense of humanness and the desire to stand tall, with dignity and love of self, to count oneself a human being equal with all others.

It is the trauma of slavery that haunts African Americans in the deepest recesses of their souls. This is the chief issue for us. It needs to be dealt with, head-onnot denied, not forgotten, not suppressed. Indeed, its suppression and denial only hurts us more deeply, causing us to accept a limited, disparaging, and even repugnant view of ourselves. We cannot move forward until we have grappled in a serious way with all the negative effects of this trauma. Tantric Buddhism offers us some tools to help accomplish this task, since it shows us both how to get at those deep inner wounds and how to heal them.

But again, none of Buddhist tantras benefits can be recognized if more African Americans and more people of color generally dont have access to it. So the question remains: How do we remedy this situation? As international Buddhist leaders and their American counterparts continue to mount extensive dialogues and conferences that focus on Buddhism and Science, Buddhism and Psychology, Buddhism and Christianity, and so on, they would do well, it seems to me, to devote efforts toward trying to make Buddhism in all its forms more readily available and accessible to a wider cross section of the American population. Indeed, such efforts would go a long way toward helping a truly American Buddhism to emerge.

In the end, the question of what Buddhism has to offer African Americans and other people of color may not be as important as what such people have to offer Buddhism in America. For even when African Americans deny, out of shame and embarrassment, the horrors of slavery, they carry the deep knowledge of that experience in their very bones. Amiri Baraka, in his classic text on African American blues and jazz, Blues People, expressed this well, I think, when he wrote:

The poor Negro always remembered himself as an ex-slave and used this as the basis of any dealings with the mainstream of American society. The middle-class black man bases his whole existence on the hopeless hypothesis that no one is supposed to remember that for almost three hundred years there was slavery in America, that the white man was a master, the black man a slave. This knowledge, however, is at the root of the legitimate black culture of this country. It is this knowledge, with its attendant muses of self-division, self-hatred, stoicism, and finally quixotic optimism, that informs the most meaningful of Afro-American music.

This deep knowledge of trying to hold on to humanness in a world firmly committed to destroying it adds a kind of spiritual reservoir of strength at the same time that it is so burdensome. The spiritual resilience of black folk has something to offer us all.

The first noble truth of Buddhism asks us to understand the noble truth of suffering. Apart from the newness, exoticism, and aesthetic attractiveness of the various traditions of Buddhism now existent on American soil, in the end, it is the sobering and realistic recognition of our individual and collective suffering that marks the true beginning of the Buddhist path. The physical presence of more dark faces in Buddhist centers will serve to both focus the issue of what makes us all Americans and, hopefully, allow a freer American expression of Buddhism to emerge.

The atmosphere of a lot of Buddhist centers may be peaceful to most of their regular followers, but it is off-putting to some outsiders who find the sweetness and tender voices of the pujas and other ceremonies disingenuous. Its as though certain center members have just exchanged one pretense for another. I remember well the admonition from the great Kalu Rinpoche never to engage in such pretense. And I will never forget hearing Alice Turiya Coltrane at a birthday celebration for her teacher, the venerable Hindu guru Satchidananda. She began a hymn to Krishna by striking up her harmonium and singing, I said, ah, Om Bhagawata . . . with all the strength and power of an African American Baptist choir! My own heart rejoiced as I thought, Now, this is truly the dharma coming West! There is clearly a sense in which more diverse membership in centers will stir changes in ritual and, perhaps, more straightforward and honest behavior.

I do not intend any of what Ive discussed here either to glorify victimization or to vilify current Buddhist practitioners in America. My intention was to make needed suggestions about how changes might be begun. There is the perception that there is a disjuncture between what Buddhists in America preach and what they practice. One of these perceived disjunctures revolves around the issue of the non-inclusion of persons of color in the events and memberships of Buddhist organizations in this country. Clearly, if centers act as though people of color are anomalies within their precincts, then people of color will certainly become so. It would seem to me that changing such perceptions (and the actions that foster them) ought to lie at the heart of what genuine Buddhists are all about: in a word, openness. In other words, equanimity and compassion toward all.

Just as Buddhism in America has begun to undergo transformations to find its American identitywhich is really a way of saying find itself in this social and geographic spaceto the extent that it has seen the disproportionately greater number of women teachers of the dharma emerge here, so it will change for the better and become more itself when its overall audience is more representative of all Americans. That is, when the various forms of Buddhism are offered freely to Americans of all racial and economic backgrounds.

From Dharma Matters: Women, Race, and Tantra, collected essays by Jan Willis 2020. Reprinted with permission of Wisdom Publications.

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Race and Class in Buddhism: A Vision of What Could Be - Tricycle

To celebrate Valentines Day, three Buddhist couples share their love stories and talk about how the teachings apply to romance.

JoAnna is cofounder of Meditation Coalition and sits on the teachers council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Andre is the sports editor for TribeLA Magazine and a novelist. Years together: 4 | Tradition: Theravada

Where did you meet?

Andre Hardy (AH): On Tinder.

JoAnna Hardy (JH): We got some crap for it, but Im a dharma teacher, and its really hard to reach out of the community to find people to date. So I threw the net out wide.

Why did you swipe right?

AH: It had to do with her approach to life and the connection to meditation and Buddhism.

When we met, I said to JoAnna, Have you heard of this guy named Jack Kornfield? Because Ive been listening to his book. She said, Thats my mentor. I was like, yeah, this is the woman I need to be with right here.

Do you think the Buddhist teachings have a role to play in romantic love?

JH: I definitely do. The first thing that comes to me is the beauty of renunciation in relationshipthe renunciation of self-involvement, the renunciation of doing whatever I want whenever I want. And also the commitment of practice, whether it be seated meditation or our relationship, both take the same kind of intention, energy, and effort.

Which teachings do you draw on when approaching your partner?

JH: The precepts, especially wise speech.

AH: Its a rule of mine that when I am triggered, I wait. It might take a day or a week to dig through and get to what exactly is bothering me, and often it turns out to be old stuff that has nothing to do with our relationship.

How about Buddhist teachings that are not helpful when it comes to love?

JH: Who knows who actually wrote them and in what era, but I dont appreciate certain suttas that speak about women

AH: Like about the man being in charge? See, those are the ones that I like. Those are the ones that work really well for me. [Laughs.]

JH: They dont work for me! [Laughs.] Also, many times theres a misunderstanding or some kind of spiritual bypass of thinking were not meant to get angry or be sensual or sexual or have too much pleasure. Ive watched so many people get thrown out of whack around that.

Whats your relationship advice for others in one sentence or less?

JH: This is really clich, but to just be kind. Theres no reason to fight. This is your home; take care of it. Theres plenty of shit on the streets.

AH: Specifically for men, if you can find a way to be vulnerable, you have an opportunity to have a very loving relationship, with kindness you can usually only dream of.

Koshin and Chodo are cofounders of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. Years together: 18 | Tradition: Zen

How did you meet?

Koshin Paley Ellison (KPE): We saw each other 24 years ago doing kinhin [walking meditation]. I remember when he walked into the meditation center, I knew that my whole life was going to change. But we didnt speak that night.

Robert Chodo Campbell (RCC): Fast forward six years later: I had married another man, and six months after we had had a big wedding in Australia, I saw Koshin again. The arrow of Eros was shot through my heart. All my friends were saying, youre crazy, this is an infatuation. So I said to Koshin, Can we just have an affair?

Koshin said, Absolutely not. If you want a relationship with me, then you have to make your decision.

Aside from your professional life running a center together, in what ways do you see your romantic relationship intersecting with the dharma?

KPE: The practice allows us to honor space for the other person. Even with disagreementswhether it has to do with laundry or the kitty litter

RCC: The kitty litter. Thats a big area. [Laughs.]

KPE: Its a big, big area. [Laughs.] Even with those disagreements, its our willingness to stay in relationship and not hold on to our rightness. Or even if we do, we can hang out together and know that that will eventually soften.

Or another dharma thing at home is that I wake up very early, and Chodo is usually still sleeping. I have this awareness of never wanting to leave without it being total and complete. So I whisper in his ear as hes sleeping. Sometimes he wakes up, sometimes he doesnt. Part of my practice is to make sure each day that I appreciate him and my love for him.

RCC: And what do you say? Tell her what you say. Oh, now hes crying. Every morning he says, I love you. Youre my treasure.

Ruben and Maria are Zen teachers at the Maria Kannon Zen Center in Dallas, Texas.Years together: 29 | Tradition: Zen and Catholicism

When did you get married?

Maria Reis Habito (MRH): That is a complicated story, because Ruben was a Jesuit priest when we met at a conference in 1987. He decided to leave the priesthood in 1989, and then he got an offer to teach theology here in Dallas at Southern Methodist University. We decided to stay one year apart to find out if this was really a good idea to spend the rest of our life together. It needed some deeper reflection.

Ruben Habito (RH): Maria decided to take the big leap and came to Dallas in March of 1990. We got married in April.

Since youre grounded in two traditions, what are the teachings from either Buddhism or Christianity that you find most relevant to sustaining a romantic partnership?

MRH: I think the ritual foundation is very important. The Catholic teaching is that you want to stay together, you want to make this work, you want to take care of your family.

RH: I would say that its not so much the teaching but the practice, and the practice that we share is sitting in meditation. In those moments when one is truly absorbed and taken up in the stillness, you can see clearly what is important in life.

Do you find points of tension between the Buddhist teachings and romantic love?

MRH: Im the translator for the main teacher at a monastery in Taiwan. The monks there were utterly shocked when they heard that I was going to get married, because they had thought I would take the path of enlightenment and become a nun. Meeting Ruben assured them, but they really thought I had been lost.

RH: From a theoretical perspective, there are all of these injunctions in Buddhism about romantic love as an attachment, as something that will take you off the path. That is something that needs to be clarified.

The foundation stone of the Christian faith, of saying that God is love, is also the source for saying that romantic love is also from God, and its not to be disdained but to be seen in the larger context of your entire life and all the other kinds of love in it. As long as it does not contradict any of the other types of love, then it is something that is to be cultivated in a wholesome way, and celebrated.

Any last thoughts?

MRH: Just that I travel often, and every time I come back, the house is full of fresh flowers and a bottle of champagne and chocolates. So after 29 years, there is still this romantic aspect, which I am grateful for.

Continued here:
Buddhism and Relationships: Love at First Sit - Tricycle