Everyday Buddhism: Making Everyday Better

Join me for the first of a series of interviews with podcast listeners on how they are coping with the pandemic. In this episode, David Farley, a travel and food writer who lives in New York City, joins me for a conversation. David wrote a blog post where he mused about our seeming missing future. He wrote: We can't envision what life is going to be like in, say, a year or what we'll be doing.... It's seriously anxiety-producing for many of us.... The only way we can maneuver, even survive without eventually imploding, is to change our outlook on life and the world. And reality. Listen for more of this thoughtful conversation with David where he shares his understanding of Buddhist teachings and his refuge in them. And listen for how you can share what you've learned as an upcoming podcast guest!

Announcing a new Everyday Buddhism feature for the Membership Community: A lecture series/workshop on mindful writing! In this series I hope to introduce you to a new way of practicing mindfulness through writing. As Gary Snyder wrote, meditation can put you totally into the world even as it takes you out of it. Mindfulness and meditation are practices of deliberate attention that can create a spacious awareness of what is and help us escape the narrow box in our heads where the thinker lives. Focusing in on what is at any one moment doesn’t narrow our awareness but, instead, opens us up to what is outside our concepts of self and what we ‘think’ we are seeing. This will not be ‘writing course’ but a practice of engaged seeing, hearing, and feeling with the objective of capturing moments and expressing them through writing. This does not mean you need to be a poet, nor a writer. If you would like to join the Everyday Buddhism Membership Community and continue your participation in this virtual workshop on mindful writing, you can do so at this link: https://www.everyday-buddhism.com/join-community-or-sangha.html

Join me as I share some insights from an article by Tara Haelle, Your Surge Capacity is Depleted—It's Why You Feel Awful, and some insights of my own, that may help you find new attitudes and practices to help you keep going. Help you go the distance of this pandemic, even though we don't know how long that distance is—or what's at the end. This time of ambiguous loss can cause feelings of helplessness and hopelessness because our solution-oriented culture is actually destructive when faced with a problem that has no solution. Instead we need to look at things differently and do things differently. The end isn't in sight but that doesn't mean we give up. We just need to find new ways to keep going. This podcast should help...PLUS keep listening to find ways YOU, as a podcast listener, can share some of the ways you are coping through these troubled times.

We're currently faced with a global pandemic, which reminds us how uncertain life really is. So what do we do? How do we cope? Join me in conversation with Gregg Krech, who uses the concepts of acceptance—active acceptance—to understand how we can't take effective action until we've accepted the reality of the situation we're in. Gregg talks about how a large portion of the population has not accepted the situation and others whose impatience pushes them to make bad decisions. Is there another way? We talk about 6 action steps we can take to reach deep within ourselves to find capabilities that may have been sleeping for a long time. They are: - Waking up to our faith or true entrusting - Working with our attention - Sharpening our skills of reflecting on ourselves - Recognizing the blessings that we encounter throughout the day - Act constructively and compassionately in the face of fear - Find something purposeful and meaningful to live for each day

Join me for a short episode check-in and sharing of how I am taking personal action despite living in our current reality of uncertainty. Awakening to the fact that I was spending too much time anxiously looking "out there" at what was or could be coming ... or focusing on the horrible feelings inside me, I decided to turn my personal boat around. As Gregg Krech of the ToDo Institute reminds us "Everyone is dealing with losses but ultimately it's an individual thing.... It's not a mass issue. It's your personal situation and attachment." How are you doing as the navigator and pilot of your own boat? Listen for some questions for reflection. And if you have questions about how to cope with these uncertain times email them to wendyshinyo@everyday-buddhism.com with the subject line "Question for Gregg" and Gregg Krech, one of the leading authorities of Japanese Psychology will do his best to answer them in an upcoming podcast episode.

Join me for an episode that is part autobiographical, part solidarity with Pride and Black Lives matter, part poetry, part science, and part Buddhism. Sounds a bit chaotic, doesn't it? Yet I hope you find some relevant order. Sharing a recent experience with my own revisiting of internal trauma sparked by the external trauma of pandemic politics and social unrest, I tried to find order in the chaos through poetry and, of course, Buddhism. Every life has some chaos because as the poet Gregory Orr writes, "there is a great deal of disorder in experience." Or stated through a Buddhist lens, "the unenlightened life is suffering." Yet, in the suffering and chaos there may be a new heartbeat; the birth of a new order, if we lean in and keep going with strong back and soft front.

Join me for a special guest episode with Dr. Christiane Michelberger, a retired physician, psychoanalyst, and past spiritual seeker who currently mentors seekers in their quest to awaken. Christiane talks about how more than 10,000 hours of meditation and 40 years of studying Buddhist scriptures didn’t help her deal with debilitating fear when she was faced with the reality of breast cancer. It was then that she took steps to escape from a habit of "spiritual sleepwalking" and find a way to see through the 'me' that it is at the heart of our dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and suffering. Christiane and I share a wide-ranging conversation about the importance of seeing through the 'me' … embracing the ordinary … why meditation may not be enough … shifting from spiritual illusions to simple reality ... spiritual bypassing … brainwashing and guru worship … and dealing with the stages of grief we might be going through during the new pandemic reality we find ourselves in.

In this episode, I reflect on our responses when we find ourselves in life situations that don't make sense and that are out of our control. As we make our way through the global Covid-19 pandemic we see humbling examples of courage and compassion. And we also see examples of people responding in fear and anger. The symptoms of fight, flight, or freeze—our natural responses to perceived threats—are everywhere you look. We have been smacked in our collective and previously comfortable faces with the need to find ways of accepting what is happening to us. And many of us aren't doing so well. Yet, the pandemic is teaching us about interdependence, change, and impermanence in a profound way. Our choice is to respond like victims or like the brave front-line workers, with a noble response to suffering.

Join me for a special guest episode with Duncan Ryuken Williams, the author of American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. 125,000+ Japanese-Americans we rounded up and placed in internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Many of these were Buddhists who persevered despite their imprisonment. Circumstances that were no fault of their own but because of their "Japanese faces" and their faith in a non-Christian religion seen as anti-American. And they kept going because of that faith. The lessons shared in this episode can help us, too, find faith and freedom during this time of separation and community during the global Covid-19 pandemic.

The whole world is afraid. A tiny piece of biological stuff—this virus—brought the world to its knees. A contagion or plague of this level is not new to the world but new to most of us living today. We have very little experience dealing with this level of uncertainty. This makes protecting the health of our minds and hearts as important as protecting the health of our bodies. There has never been a better time to develop a practice of finding a healthy balance between being informed and tormenting yourself. Listen as I share mantra, breathing, awareness, and mindful writing practices that might help.