Everyday Buddhism: Making Everyday Better

In this episode I talk with Oren Jay Sofer about his new book, Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity & Love.

Oren teaches meditation and communication internationally. He holds a degree in comparative religion from Columbia University and is a Certified Trainer of Nonviolent Communication and a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner for the healing of trauma.

Oren has practiced meditation in the early Buddhist tradition since 1997, beginning his studies in Bodh Gaya, India, and later spending 2-1/2 years living as an renunciate at branch monasteries in the Ajahn Chah Thai Forest lineage. He is a long-time student of Joseph Goldstein, Michele McDonald, and Ajahn Sucitto, and is a member of the Spirit Rock Teacher’s Council.

Oren is also the author of the best-seller Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication and two books on teaching mindfulness to adolescents: The Mindful Schools Curriculum for Adolescents and Teaching Mindfulness to Empower Teens.

His teaching has reached people around the world through online communication courses and guided meditations, combining classical Buddhist training with the accessible language of secular mindfulness

In our conversation we talked about, among other things:

• How our hearts REALLY are made for these times … Our hearts were made to awaken and if we can practice—in small steps—turning toward suffering, we enter a portal to transformation.
• How the world shapes our hearts in ways not best for us and how we can practice shaping our own hearts.
• How getting in touch with our true values will guide us through these challenging times.
• How we need to consciously "change the channel" of our thoughts to be more aligned with our true values.

Join me for a delightful conversation with Steve Kanji Ruhl about his book, Appalachian Zen: Journeys in Search of True Home, from the American Heartland to the Buddha Dharma, the 2023 Gold Prize winner for Memoir in the Nautilus Book Awards.

Steve Kanji is a Zen Buddhist minister ordained in the Zen Peacemaker Order, now teaching independently and instructing Zen students through his Touch the Earth cyber-sangha. Reverend Kanji received his Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University and is a Buddhist chaplain at Deerfield Academy, a Buddhist Adviser at Yale University, and faculty member of the Shogaku Zen Institute.

Kanji has been a guest speaker or workshop facilitator at Harvard’s Center for World Religions, Yale Divinity School, the International Conference on Socially Engaged Buddhism, the Omega Institute, and elsewhere.

In addition to Appalachian Zen, he is the author of Enlightened Contemporaries: Francis, Dogen & Rumi—Three Great Mystics of the Thirteenth Century and Why They Matter Today and has recently finished writing a new book about his personal experience of spirituality and wellness called The Whole Earth is Medicine: Science, Zen, and Healing Body and Mind in a Journey through Cancer. He has also published two volumes of poems, The Constant Yes of Things and Paintings of Rice Cakes Satisfy Hunger.

In his book, Appalachian Zen, Kanji takes us on a 30-year journey through his search to find his "true home" in lilting and lyrical prose and poems that move the story from Appalachia through academia—constantly asking: What is home? What is this? What is life? Death? What is real? … The questions Buddhism never answer but continue to ask.

In our conversation we talked about, among other things:

-Childhood memories

-The search for self and the search for losing the self

-Being a foolish being and Shin Buddhism

-The contrast between Western and Eastern philosophical and spiritual worldviews

-Mystical Christianity and the similarity to the direct experience of the sacred in Buddhism

-Buddhist lay ministers as compared to Buddhist monastics, priest, and the "guru model"

-Kanji's teaching of "Be Clear, Be Kind, Be Present"

In this episode, I welcome back Rebecca Li to talk about her new book, Illumination: A Guide to the Buddhist Method of No Method. Rebecca and I had a conversation in May of 2021, about her previous book, Allow Joy into Our Hearts: Chan Practice in Uncertain Times.

Rebecca is a meditation and Dharma teacher in the lineage of Chan Master Sheng Yen and founder and guiding teacher of Chan Dharma Community, a Chan Buddhist practice and study community made up of individuals committed to cultivating wisdom and compassion for the benefit of all beings.

Rebecca has two decades of Dharma and meditation teaching experience, leading retreats or teaching at Buddhist centers in North America, Europe, and Asia. She has been featured in several Buddhist publications, including Tricycle, Lion's Roar, and Buddhadharma. 

She is also one of the founding board members of The GenX Buddhist Teachers Sangha where she continues to serve as a board member. Rebecca is a sociology professor and lives with her husband in New Jersey.

In Allow Joy into Our Hearts, Rebecca wrote about Chan Practice and she continues to teach the path of Chan Buddhism in the book we will discuss today, Illumination. In Illumination, she dives deeper into the Chan meditation of Silent Illumination and deeper still into what causes our suffering and how Silent Illumination can help us identify and help decrease the causes of our suffering.

In her book, Rebecca takes us on a fascinating, deep-dive into the method of no method in silent illumination and guides us in the mechanics of this type of practice. In our conversation we talked about, among other things:

• How, in our meditation, we turn thoughts into enemies, rather than allowing thoughts and feelings to be fully experienced and felt …
  
  
• About how tend to try to "achieve" as meditators, as if a sport …
  
  
• And about the modes of operation: craving, aversion, trance, problem-solving, intellectualizing, quietism, and forgetting-emptiness …

This week, over at my new premium Substack podcast, Words From My Teachers, I released Episode 6, continuing readings from the book, The Center Within by Rev. Gyomay Kubose. In the episode I read the following essays: Middle Way, Water, Purposeless Purpose, No Mind, and How the Buddha Taught.

As a special bonus episode for the Everyday Buddhism podcast, I am sharing the reading of the essay Purposeless Purpose. It's a wonderful essay to reflect on, as they all are in The Center Within, but I'm releasing it here on the Everyday Buddhism podcast as a companion piece to Episode 103.

As a special bonus episode for the Everyday Buddhism podcast, I am sharing the reading of the essay Purposeless Purpose. It's a wonderful essay to reflect on, as they all are in The Center Within, but I'm releasing it here on the Everyday Buddhism podcast as a companion piece, which you will find in the next episode, 104.

But as a special introduction to the bonus episode, I am adding new content in this re-release of an episode I did in June of 2022, called Why Nonsense Makes the Most Sense, which was built on the essay, Purposeless Purpose.

The new addition is some insight about meditation that is related to the purposeless-purpose message.