Contemplative psychotherapy for individuals, couples, and groups in New York City.
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Buddhist Death Rites
Hey, noble one! Now you have arrived at what is called “death.” You are going from this world to the beyond. You are not alone; it happens to everyone. You must not indulge in attachment and insistence on this life. Though you are attached and you insist, you have no power to stay, you will not avoid wandering in the life cycle. Do not lust! Do not cling! Be mindful of the Three Jewels! More » -
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What to Think About at Death
I want to remind all of you who are presently sick or dying to think about what I have to say and try to change or go on diligently with your practice. The Buddha spoke of “death-proximate karma” (asanna karma). This kind of karma is really powerful. It can lead us to a better or worse realm after we die. If death-proximate karma is good, it will lead a dying person to a good realm, and vice versa. More » -
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Molly's Death
Six of us carried Molly’s body up the narrow, twisting staircase, an embrace so intimate and sweet that the experience remains vivid for me months after her death. Her passing was expected and uneventful, like many I’ve witnessed—a slow withdrawal, a growing acceptance of the inevitable, and a quiet release. Molly had struggled for four and a half years with advancing brain cancer and with the effects of the drugs that slowed its progress. Her body now rested in a hand-built coffin, cut from cedar at a nearby sawmill and reassembled for her only hours ago at the top of the house, in the bedroom that she’d abandoned several months before, no longer able to negotiate the climb. She and her husband, Craig, had built that large room and the attached deck six years earlier—she had loved it there. More » -
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Remembering Ed Softky
I remember picking up the phone on Thursday and hearing my wife Eva’s voice. I could tell she was crying. “Sweetie,” she said, “Ed was in an accident and was killed.” I felt my knees buckle, and I dropped into the chair behind me. My mind couldn’t accept it. This simply wasn’t possible. Ed Softky was the Tibetan translator for Geshe Ngawang Singey, our teacher in Williamsville, Vermont. Ed had orchestrated the camping trip for our sangha to see His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Ed was the one who secretly shoveled our driveway all winter until we finally caught him in the act, shovel in hand, laughing. Ed was the one we all thought of whenever we heard the word bodhisattva. Ed was our dearest friend. More » -
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Faith in Freedom
That meditation is a moral practice, not just a psychic one, was not immediately clear to me when I began to sit. I understood intellectually, but not intuitively, that Buddhist psychology defines an intimate relationship between our treatment of others and the unfolding of mindfulness. Only recently on a retreat did I begin actually to experience the relationship between metta (lovingkindness) and the varied states of meditative concentration, to experience the impact of one’s wishes for others on the actual meditative states of mind. Then I began to grasp that the act of meditation, far from being a purely psychic exercise, actually draws moral practice and unfolding insight into a continuum. More » -
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If I Were the Buddha
After not voting in several national elections I was forced to admit that my claim to “a position of no position” was pretty much nothing but pretense. I didn’t come to dharma until the middle eighties, but, with no very deliberate intent, I inherited the baby boomer Buddhism of my elders that pervaded the Zen center where I started my practice. The inarticulated presumption was that to vote at all was a vote for samsara, that voting endorsed pathetic delusions of liberty, and furthermore, that those who voted flaunted their hopeless attachment to worldly concerns - not what Zen students most want to advertise about themselves. More »
