April 22, 2013 – 10:00 am
Because, as they say, every day should be Earth Day, we wanted to remind you that if you’re looking for some refreshing and hopeful wisdom about how to live in harmony with nature, you’ll find plenty on our special “Buddhism and Green Living” spotlight page, which includes Thich Nhat Hanh, Stephanie Kaza, Rick Bass, and [...]
November 2, 2012 – 2:00 pm
“Climate change isn’t on any serious political candidate’s agenda these days,” says Norman Fischer in “Topsy-Turvy World,” from our November magazine. “It’s entirely off the table. Which is crazy.” There are some signs that the tide has turned, though, in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. This week’s Bloomberg Business Report put it bluntly with its [...]
This spring, activist and Buddhist/yoga teacher Michael Stone, along with filmmaker Ian MacKenzie, sought donations for a crowdfunded short film called Reactor, about Japan’s response to last year’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Stone and MacKenzie have exceeded their fundraising goal and traveled to Japan, where they’re posting updates about their travels and filmmaking process. Click [...]
April 11, 2012 – 11:08 am
Last night at MIT, poet Gary Snyder was awarded PEN (Poets/Playwrights, Essayists/Editors, Novelists) New England’s “Henry David Thoreau Prize” for Literary Excellence in Nature Writing. Our congratulations to him for the well-earned honor. Here at the Shambhala Sun we’ve had the honor of publishing his writing; click through here for links to see for yourself [...]
Activist and yoga/Buddhist teacher Michael Stone — author of “What’s the Music All About?”, found in our current, May 2012 magazine — is currently crowdfunding for a new short film project called Reactor. The film visits post-tsunami Japan to ask the questions “How are the old Zen traditions and cities of beautiful temples responding? How [...]
January 9, 2012 – 11:04 am
A new “Earth Dharma” post by Jill S. Schneiderman. The first time I chanted the Metta Sutta — the Buddha’s teaching on lovingkindness — I was a retreatant at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts and I got caught up in the inflection marks that appeared above the words; I couldn’t quite figure out [...]
November 21, 2011 – 2:24 pm
In the November 2011 “Joy of Living Green” issue of the Shambhala Sun, you’ll meet four young activists who are making the world a better place. One of them is Rebecca Fletcher, who works at the Massachusetts nonprofit, Equity Trust Inc, where she combines compassion and optimism to help groups that protect farms and affordable [...]
November 9, 2011 – 12:38 pm
A new “Earth Dharma” post by Jill S. Schneiderman. As thousands of people circled the White House to make known their objections to the multibillion dollar Keystone XL Project, I was again reminded of a comment by Jack Kornfield: “Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any direct difficulty [...]
October 7, 2011 – 2:57 pm
The November 2011 “Joy of Living Green” issue of the Shambhala Sun magazine is on newsstands now, featuring “The Joy of Living Green” — and the activists, like Dekila Chungyalpa, pictured here, who help make it a reality — plus, a profile of actor and Buddhist Michael Imperioli, Ellen Graf on failure, James Kullander on [...]
September 15, 2011 – 4:08 pm
In his book For the Benefit of All Beings: A Commentary on the Way of the Bodhisattva, His Holiness the Dalai Lama writes, “The actions of each of us, human or nonhuman, have contributed to the world in which we live. We all have a common responsibility for our world and are connected with everything [...]
By Jill S. Schneiderman Because of the extended time frame over which they occur, human-induced environmental changes—increased temperature, rising sea level, high-energy storm patterns, desertification and drought—are out of sync with human lives lived in an age of short attention span. The violence exacted on all living beings by these changes poses real representational challenges [...]
Applying mindfulness to how and what we buy just makes sense, says Daniel Goleman — by getting in touch with our true needs we will be driven less by our desires, and, in turn, have less impact on the environment. “But,” he says, “I think there is a level of mindfulness, or ecological intelligence, that [...]
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology By David Abram Pantheon 2010; 336 pp., $26.95 (cloth) David Abram, cultural ecologist, anthropologist, philosopher, and accomplished sleight-of-hand magician, has a rich and varied background that seems to nurture the many complementary perspectives evident in his writing. While Abram is well aware of the pervasive and ever-accelerating unraveling of our [...]
January 10, 2011 – 10:22 pm
Tibetan hip-hop? Well, why not? …I mean, sure, it might at first seem that these Tibetans are trying to be “too” Western in their approach — the regrettable inclusion of Auto-Tune doesn’t help things — but these ain’t like most Western rap lyrics; the emphasis on togetherness and responsibility here is largely missing from not [...]
December 2, 2010 – 6:03 pm
Shambhala Sun contributor Velcrow Ripper has been working on a timely new film called Evolve Love. Watch the teaser-trailer below, and then read a new original piece about the film’s subject — the climate crisis — by Ripper himself. Love in a Time of Climate Crisis by Velcrow Ripper It’s the year 2010. Icebergs are [...]
