We associate effort with strain. The strain is extra, almost always unnecessary, and generally a source of suffering. Lose the strain. Ease up on the gas. Driving home from Queens – the traffic is always terrible – sitting in bumper-to-bumper, I realize how less stressful it is to drive 10 miles per hour than 60. We are so often in a hurry. We humans are the only animals that worry about arriving late. Instead of being present, we’re chafing to get to the next step, the nex

I’ve added a Bodhisattva Vow to the traditional four chanted by Mahayana Buddhists everywhere. You may think that’s brassy. Four vows have been enough since the 6th or 7th century. Why another? Maybe my vow is already encompassed by the other four. Why do we even need four? Embody any one of them fully and the other three are included. There’s nothing magical or sacred about the number of vows. So, these days, I’m chanting five vows each morning, and I’m finding hungry ghosts

And yet we keep setting up boundaries. I never liked them. In the world of my childhood and young adulthood, “sectarian” was a bad word. The sectarians were the activists who spent more energy opposing other anti-war groups than opposing the war, more energy opposing other civil rights organizations than fighting racism. My first teacher, Kyudo Nakagawa Roshi, was part of the Japanese Rinzai sect. When I got to Roshi Bernie two years later, I was moving from Rinzai to Soto. W