Posts Tagged ‘america’

Touched down in LA, made my way back to the monastery only to have to turn around and head back to save a visiting nun from deportation. All is well, time to rest. Tomorrow is the first day of my planned stayputting in Los Angeles. Wish me luck.

At the Suvannabhumi airport in Bangkok, waiting to board the first of my flights back to the West. This flight may mark the end of my residence in Suvannabhumi in general, as I begin to settle in my new North Hollywood environment. Thailand has been a great place, in retrospect, but I’m looking [...]

Cynicism sucks, really… I mean, if you’re always expecting the worst, you can’t ever really be happy, even when things turn out for the best. On the other hand, optimism doesn’t really accomplish anything useful either, since the optimist has little or no reason to effect real change in their life and tends to [...]

A perennial favourite, this question.
Last year, I said I wasn’t going to stay at Wat Thai, any Wat Thai, and now here I am in Thailand about to go to a Wat Thai board meeting to talk about starting a meditation department at Wat Thai. See, they bought a piece of property near Wat [...]

‘Brethren, if outsiders should speak against me, or against my teaching, or against my disciples, you should not on that account either bear malice, or suffer heart-burning, or feel ill-will. If you, on that account, should be angry and hurt, that would stand in the way of your own self-conquest. If, when others speak against [...]

Just back from the Mohave Desert, having learned a few new things about deserts in general, or at least this desert in specific. First, it rained for the first five days we were there, shattering any myths I might have held about deserts being dry places… the nearby lake did nothing to reaffirm this [...]

Talk last night went quite well, I think… listen here:

Four Noble Truths at Grenada Hills Center For Spiritual Living
The center is in Grenada Hills (as if I know where that is…) and here’s their website:
http://www.cslgh.com/
Sounds like they might invite me back; I’d be happy to return, it’s a place with very good energy and nice, [...]

Here it is; the next generation in meditation huts:

And then we turned on the Thai version of Angulimala for my pre-teen protoges, and I realized that it is a perfect example of how forgiveness and redemption takes place for evil doers in Buddhism. Hope you appreciate this little cut-and-paste preview of the 90-min movie (I’ve fixed the horrid subtitles):

It’s funny how things work… I just got around to sending Tiger Woods a “How To Meditate DVD” (along with a bonus “Why Everyone Should Meditate” DVD) this afternoon, when what should I see on Facebook but the following video clip:

First of all, Buddhism is not a faith, it is a practice. If you [...]