There is a disposition in the West to direct our spiritual efforts towards solitary practice—eg. a daily meditation on the cushion—placing less emphasis on the role that interactive, human connections play in spiritual growth. While mindfulness developed in isolation can result in great breakthroughs, it certainly makes for a withdrawn and difficult journey. For we [...]
We’re into an historic week: Today, the controversial Prop 8 was argued before the US Supreme Court, and tomorrow will give way to discussion of the federal recognition of all legal marriages. To that end, we want to point you to “Happily Ever After,” a beautiful piece that our friend, the great writer Steve Silberman, [...]
January 5, 2013 – 12:53 pm
Andrea Miller — deputy editor of the Shambhala Sun, and editor of the book Right Here With You: Bringing Mindful Awareness into Our Relationships — on Daniel Ladinsky’s Love Poems from God. Love Poems From God Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West Translated by Daniel Ladinsky Penguin Books 2002; 384 pp., $18 (paper) [...]
December 29, 2012 – 10:18 am
Shambhala Sun deputy editor — and editor of the book Right Here With You: Bringing Mindful Awareness into Our Relationships — sometimes points us to noteworthy books on mindful loving. Here, she focuses on Sitting Practice by Caroline Adderson. Sitting Practice By Caroline Adderson Trumpeter 2009; 336 pp., $21.95 (cloth) Ross and Iliana have been [...]
Meet my wife’s boyfriend. Well, not really, but: for two years now, she’s been talking about Andy Whitfield — the star of the TV show Spartacus — and she remains a cheerleader for him now, though Whitfield is no longer with us, having died after being diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Well, the late actor’s story [...]
This is the second of a series of Shambhala SunSpace posts in which Andrea Miller — deputy editor of the Shambhala Sun, and editor of the book Right Here With You: Bringing Mindful Awareness into Our Relationships — takes a look at noteworthy books on mindful loving. In this post, she focuses on Committed by [...]
“In all that goes down, writes Lin Jensen in this guest post for Shambhala SunSpace, “there lives a going up. This is reassuring when you’re witnessing the end of something.” The first I saw of the oak were its raw roots crusted with mud and tilted up into the air so that the whole root [...]
February 16, 2012 – 10:15 am
Author and teacher Lodro Rinzler has contributed a few great posts here on Shambhala SunSpace (you’ll find links to those below), and in our current issue, Andrea Miller reviews Lodro’s new book, The Buddha Walks Into A Bar: A Guide to Life for a New Generation. Here, from that book, is a typically frank and [...]
December 21, 2011 – 3:55 pm
“Every billboard, every message from television, radio,” says Diana Winston, “is telling us to consume.” But does that mean that Winston — the Director of Mindfulness Education at the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA — thinks we should give up on holiday gift-giving entirely? “I’m not saying that,” she says. “But probably the thing [...]
December 6, 2011 – 1:10 pm
The Sola Yoga Project seeks to bring yoga and meditation to the people of Afghanistan and its surrounding region, and help them “develop the tools they need to reduce the level of hatred, hostility, and other states of being responsible for perpetuating armed conflict.” Is it working? Let’s go to the video: The Sola Yoga [...]
October 20, 2011 – 11:04 am
For so many of us, our relationship with technology is a trying, push-pull affair — not least of all when we’re also trying to make some kind of meditative or contemplative approach part of our lives as well. It’s that kind of conflict that informed filmmaker Tiffany Shlain — the subject of our November issue‘s [...]
September 29, 2011 – 1:04 pm
“It was the toothbrush that told me,” begins “Waking Up Alone,” Karen Maezen Miller‘s feature story from the current issue of the Shambhala Sun. “Alone and overlooked, in the emptied medicine chest, it was one of the few things my departed lover had left behind. When I found it, I knew with certainty something I’d [...]
August 9, 2011 – 11:49 am
If you’ve read her editorial from the new Shambhala Sun magazine, you know that today, August 9th, is a doubly special day for Shambhala Sun Deputy Editor Andrea Miller. And it’s all about love. First, it marks exactly five years of being with her husband. She knows because, as she writes, “Under the cocktail of [...]
Theodore Roszak, the author of many books including the essential 60′s tome, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society (pictured, left), has died at age 77 after ongoing illness. (Read The New York Times’ obituary here.) Roszak didn’t see aging as an enemy, and tracked the trajectory of baby boomer lives [...]
“Examples of animals demonstrating compassion for members of other species and their own species are all around us,” writes behavioral ecologist Joanna Burger in “Creature Comfort,” from our July 2011 magazine. “We just need to recognize them.” And when we better understand of how animals show compassion, she says, we better understand ourselves. “Creature Comfort” [...]
