Cathy Jones gets personal in new one-woman show My brother Andy told me, he said, ‘Stop feeling like your career is like this thing that you’re climbing. Think about it as a garden and look at the things you have in your garden.’ New one-woman show is part of the Stages Film Festival by Eastern Front… Read More Cathy Jones: The Human Realm is the Middle Ground

Here’s a recording of my last session (6-17-15) with the Khyber Sound Klub, an improvisation group in Halifax. We’re a sound improv group that works with the improvisation teachings of Jerry Granelli, jazz drummer and teacher of direct experience art practice. I’m on the Fender Jagmaster, fucking with my TC Electronics flanger, which produced the most hellacious sounds. I love… Read More The Punk Dharma at Khyber Sound Klub

The moral tide of our age pushes us in two directions. One is to uplift the living standards of the billions mired in poverty, struggling each day to survive. The other is to preserve the integrity and sustaining capacity of the planet. A rapid transition to an economy powered by clean and renewable sources of… Read More Bikhu Bodhi: Climate Change is a Moral Issue

On using Buddhism like a drug: Meditation actually makes you feel and experience everything more intensely. So when you feel this intensity, you can do either one of two things: you can either withdraw from the world and go into a cocoon of endless retreats, numbing yourself out with still more meditation, running marathons, or escaping… Read More The Punk Dharma

Pope Francis: The Earth, our home, is beginning to look like an immense pile of filth An extract from Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, the environment and inequality  ‘The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of… Read More Guardian UK: Summary of the Papal Encyclical on the Environment “Laudato Si”

by Scott W. Menasco We have a new contributor to Engage!. Scott W. Menasco is a PhD Student studying Buddhism in the United States, a counselor, and a practitioner of a tradition influenced by the Perfect Wisdom Tradition of Mahayana Buddhism. In the United States, the overwhelming amount of non-heritage Buddhist practitioners are white and… Read More Privilege, Knowledge, Power in White Convert Buddhism

Today I begin a new series on the use of the Buddhist concept of emptiness to challenge and dismantle social systems of power and oppression. I translate the term shunyata or emptiness into a description of the process of seeing through social institutions that create powerful controls on our minds, behaviours and relationships. As engaged Buddhists,… Read More Seeing Through: Emptiness and Networks of Power