Harold Mandel, Examiner.com: There is a lot of excitement among many Americans about the visit of the Dalai Lama to the United States. Phayul.com has reported on May 6, 2013, The Dalai Lama leaves for US visit. On Sunday His Holiness the Dalai Lama left his exile hometown of Dharamshala, north India, for a visit of the United States of America. He has been invited by various universities, colleges, and organizations to interact with students and give a series of lectures, public talks, discussions, and teachings on topics which range from compassion to global environment.

The Dalai Lama is scheduled to begin …

meditation on peace by Alamsyah Rauf
 

There’s been so much bad news from Burma recently, with Buddhist monks advocating violence against the Muslim minority and being attacked by security forces as they tried to prevent the expansion of a Chinese copper mine, that I thought I’d post this lovely image of a Burmese boy monk meditating.

The photographer, Alamsyah Rauf, says that he used a 1/5th second exposure on a tripod to blur the water a little yet keep the monk sharp. Do …

Via IndyBay: On Friday evening, September 21, the International Day of Peace, while Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney hosted a private fundraiser in Hillsborough, barring media access, over a hundred Bay Area residents gathered during rush hour for a lively flashmob meditation and yoga action in San Francisco’s Union Square. The action, organized by BeThePeace and Dancing Without Borders, created a heart-shaped aerial image which was photographed from a building 36 stories high.

This action was part of over 200+ organized “MedMob” events that happened on the International Day of Peace across all continents, coordinated by BeThePeace. This initiative was an opportunity for world cultures to connect to invoke peace on …

Ivet González: In response to the pressures of everyday life, some people in Cuba are promoting meditation as a way to protect the mind and body and foster a culture of peace.

“People are looking for paths to inner peace and ways to live without stress. Having mechanisms for relaxation is a crying need everywhere in these times,” cultural promoter Juan Dávila told IPS. He identified about 10 groups on this Caribbean island that regularly use these techniques.

Since 2009, Dávila has coordinated a sociocultural community project, OM Meditación, Salud y Creación (OM Meditation, Health and Creation) in the historic district of the Cuban …

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On the occasion of Martin Luther King Day, it’s worth reading the letter he wrote to the Nobel Peace Prize committee, nominating the Buddhist monk-activist, Thich Hnat Hanh:

1967 25, January
The Nobel Institute
Drammesnsveien 19
Oslo, NORWAY

Gentlemen:

As the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate of 1964, I now have the pleasure of proposing to you the name of Thich Nhat Hanh for that award in 1967. I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam.

This would be a notably auspicious year for you to bestow your Prize on the Venerable Nhat Hanh. Here is an apostle of peace and non-violence, cruelly separated from his

…

In the metta sutta, the discourse on loving kindness, the Buddha teaches us how to be “skilled in goodness and know the path of peace”.

These attributes can be practiced in a number of ways including kind speech, humility and also through being frugal.

We are living at a time when prices keep going up and our income, if we are fortunate enough to have one, is not keeping up.

So, how can we live abundantly while living frugally?

Here is a list of suggestions.

1. Attitude is Everything

The way we think about things creates our reality. When we think we don’t have enough, we come from a place of scarcity. When we think …

Violence is declining, argues psychologist Steven Pinker. What are we doing right?

Over the past century, violent images from World War II concentration camps, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, and many other times and places have been seared into our collective consciousness. These images have led to a common belief that technology, centralized nation-states, and modern values have brought about unprecedented violence.
Our seemingly troubled times are routinely contrasted with idyllic images of hunter-gatherer societies, which allegedly lived in a state of harmony with nature and each other. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of…

Read the …

Happiness – we all seek it and want to know the secret of it. Self-help books on happiness line the shelves of book shops and libraries and there are all kinds of theories about happiness.

Over the years what I thought about and desired as a means to gaining happiness have changed as I have… matured (I like the word matured better than aged). Here is my list, organized by decades.

From ages:

0-10 I wanted to be cared for, safe, nourished and nurtured to be happy (although I could not articulate all this at the time).

11-20 I wanted friendships, fun, freedom, popularity, a car and someone interesting and sexy to date.

21-30 …

The mind is like a wild elephant that needs taming. If you have ever meditated and tried to quiet your mind, you will have experienced your thoughts as continuous and difficult to manage.

We worry, we obsess about the same things over and over again, we are anxious about things that never happen, we want more than we have, or something different from what we have, and we have expectations of ourselves and others that may never be met.

What we think creates the world we live in. When we think negatively about ourselves and others, we do not experience the beauty and joy that can be found within ourselves and others.

One of …

The Statesman reports on a Meditation Flash Mob, that converged on the State Capital grounds in Austin to promote a message of peace and harmony.

People convened at the Capitol on Sunday afternoon for the first Austin flash mob meditation. They meditated all over the capitol grounds from noon to 1 p.m. using their meditation power to bring positive intentions to the state. Then they moved inside the Capitol and formed a circle in the rotunda and chanted OM for about 20 minutes.

This was the second such event in Austin, and the organizers said in a press release that they would be joined simultaneously by eight other …