The UK’s Daily Mail has a collection of photographs of this meditating lemur, taken by Belgian-born amateur photographer Sebastian Degardin, who lives in Finchley, north London.

The photographs were taken on a forest path in a nature park in Mons, Belgium.

Check out the rest of the pics here.

[Click on the image for a larger version.]

This Buddha statue reclines gracefully on the ledge of one of the windows in the “yoga room” (it’s called that, although there’s hardly ever any yoga done there) below the shrineroom at Aryaloka Buddhist Center in Newmarket, NH.

A large stone Buddha head I photographed while I was leading a workshop at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY.

This photograph was taken on a recent retreat.

I love the tenderness of the little bird sitting in the Buddha’s left hand as he meditates. It says something about the gentle kind of effort that’s required in meditation. An image I used to use in my teaching — but which I had forgotten about until this moment — was that the quality of effort we use in meditation aims toward the kind of effort we’d make in holding a baby bird. We don’t want to hold our attention so firmly that we crush our sensitivity, but we also don’t want to hold our attention so gently that the object …

Foreign Policy magazine’s exclusive look inside what it calls a “booming multibillion-dollar, evangelical, global Thai cult.”

Picture this: millions of followers gathering around a central shrine that looks like a giant UFO in elaborately choreographed Nuremberg-style rallies; missionary outposts in 31 countries from Germany to the Democratic Republic of the Congo; an evangelist vision that seeks to promote a “world morality restoration project”; and a V-Star program that encourages hundreds of thousands of children to improve “positive moral behavior.” Although the Bangkok-based Dhammakaya movement dons saffron robes, not brown shirts, its flamboyant ceremonies have become increasingly bold displays of power for this cult-like Buddhist group that was founded in the 1970s,

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