Unlocking True Happiness

Back by popular demand, Deborah Eden Tull joins Tenzin for a timely conversation about how to hold space and stay present in deeply challenging times. Recorded at the beginning of the renewed conflict between Israel and Hamas, this episode shares deep insight on how we can navigate polarization and difficulty with compassion and engagement with our shared humanity.

We're often led to believe that our highly-structured, thinking-oriented sides are what make us human, that "hard work" is of value above all else, and that play is simply something that young children do. However, research shows that play has incredible power is developing social bonds, fostering creativity, sparking joy and even helping to make positive changes to our epigenetics. In this episode, Tenzin explores the many types of play, the positives benefits, and how we can bring a sense of play to our own spiritual practice to make it more joyful.

No matter how mindful we are of our thoughts, speech and actions, being human means that we can sometimes act unwisely or hurt someone's feelings. Whether these mistakes are unintentional or not, they can lead to rifts in our relationships; and ultimately damage both our own contentment, as well as the cohesion of our community. In this episode, Tenzin shares the power of apologizing as a roadmap for forgiveness, healing and reconciliation; and then leads a reflection on the impact of both giving and receiving a wholehearted apology.

Nina Simons is the co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers, and leads its Everywoman’s Leadership program. Bioneers is a nonprofit that uses media, convening, and connecting to lift up visionary and practical solutions for many of our most pressing social and ecological challenges, revealing aregenerative and equitable future that’s within our reach today. Nina is a social entrepreneur who is passionate about reinventing leadership, restoring the feminine, andco-creating a healthy, peaceful,and equitable world for all. She speaks and teaches internationally at schools, conferences, and festivals, and co-facilitates transformative workshops and retreats for women that share practices for regenerative leadership through reclaiming wholeness and relational mindfulness Her book Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership offers inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into or inhabit their own unique form of leadership with resilience and joy. The book draws on Simons’ own personal learning and extensive experience with women’s leadership development... to reconnect and defend people, nature and the land, both practically and spiritually.

Nina Simons is the co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers, and leads its Everywoman’s Leadership program. Bioneers is a nonprofit that uses media, convening, and connecting to lift up visionary and practical solutions for many of our most pressing social and ecological challenges, revealing aregenerative and equitable future that’s within our reach today. Nina is a social entrepreneur who is passionate about reinventing leadership, restoring the feminine, andco-creating a healthy, peaceful,and equitable world for all. She speaks and teaches internationally at schools, conferences, and festivals, and co-facilitates transformative workshops and retreats for women that share practices for regenerative leadership through reclaiming wholeness and relational mindfulness Her book Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership offers inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into or inhabit their own unique form of leadership with resilience and joy. The book draws on Simons’ own personal learning and extensive experience with women’s leadership development... to reconnect and defend people, nature and the land, both practically and spiritually.

In this episode, Tenzin explores the many gifts that gratitude can bring to our lives, helping to offset our natural negativity bias and bring more richness to our experiences and our relationships. She then shares some simple ideas on how we can cultivate our own practice of gratitude with an experiential meditation.

Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown by Deborah Eden Tull is a resonant call to explore the darkness in life, in nature, and in consciousness—including difficult emotions like uncertainty, grief, fear, and xenophobia—through teachings, embodied meditations, and mindful inquiry that provide us with a powerful path to healing. Darkness is deeply misunderstood in today’s world; yet it offers powerful medicine, serenity, strength, healing, and regeneration. All insight, vision, creativity, and revelation arise from darkness. It is through learning to stay present and meet the dark with curiosity rather than judgment that we connect to an unwavering light within. Welcoming darkness with curiosity, rather than fear or judgment, enables us to access our innate capacity for compassion and collective healing. Dharma teacher, shamanic practitioner, and deep ecologist Deborah Eden Tull addresses the spiritual, ecological, psychological, and interpersonal ramifications of our bias towards light. Tull explores the medicine of darkness for personal and collective healing, through topics such as: • Befriending the Night: The Radiant Teachings of Darkness • Honoring Our Pain for Our World • Seeing in the Dark: The Quiet Power of Receptivity • Dreams, Possibility, and Moral Imagination • Releasing Fear—Embracing Emergence Tull shows us how the labeling of darkness as “negative” becomes a collective excuse to justify avoiding everything that makes us uncomfortable: racism, spiritual bypass, environmental destruction. We can only find the radical path to wholeness by learning to embrace the interplayof both darkness and light. About the Author Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, author, activist, and sustainability educator. Eden teaches the integration of compassionate awareness into every aspect of our lives. She spent seven years training as a Buddhist monk at a silent Zen monastery and has been teaching dharma for 19 years. Eden has also been living in, and teaching about, sustainable communities for over 25 years. Her teaching style is grounded in compassionate awareness, experiential learning, inquiry, and an unwavering commitment to personal transformation. She teaches engaged awareness practice, which emphasizes the connection between personal awakening and global engagement. Eden draws upon teachings from the natural world and an embodied understanding of animism. She is author of “Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Our Self, Each Other, and Our Planet” (Wisdom 2018) and “The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide for the Sustainable Food Revolution.” Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Tricycle, Yogi Times, GOOP, Shambhala Times, and The Ecologist. She also teaches The Work That Reconnects, a program created by Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy, and teaches for UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. Eden offers retreats, online courses, and consultations internationally. Readers can connect with Deborah Eden Tull on Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads. To learn more, go to DeborahEdenTull.com.

Sara is a contributing author to the book The Neuroscience of Learning and Development: Enhancing Creativity, Compassion, Critical Thinking and Peace in Education, and writes for Deepak Chopra’s Center for Wellbeing website. Sara’s new book, A Case for Compassion: What Happens When We Prioritize People and the Planet, is available now.

Dr. Joey Weber, who was raised in a Buddhist community in northern England, noticed that the focus in popular mindfulness programs was on the attentional training, and not as much emphasis was given to the “non-judgmental” aspect of mindfulness. He was so intrigued by this that he completed a PhD program devoted to the study of equanimity, the non-judgmental stance of mindfulness. His book, Mindfulness is Not Enough: Unlocking Compassion with Equanimity, is based on his research, and he also developed a six-week training program called Equanimity-based Compassionate Action. Join us for our conversation with Dr. Weber, as we delve into the meaning of equanimity, what this quality can bring to our lives, and how it can inspire our own compassionate action.

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron says, in relation to contemplative practice, “We are being encouraged to remain open to the present groundless moment, to a direct, unarmored participation with our experience… How many of us feel ready to interrupt our habitual patterns, our almost instinctual ways of getting comfortable?” Many of us find the experience of groundlessness to be profoundly uncomfortable, and in the last few years we’ve experienced this feeling to an accelerated degree, with the changes brought about by the pandemic, the global financial crisis, political unrest, and so on. How do we remain open and view groundlessness as a gift, see the potential inherent in it, and embrace it? Join Tenzin Chogkyi and Mathew Divaris to explore the theme of groundlessness and how to bring it into the spiritual path.

This is the episode that was aired on KSQD.org. Checkout the full, 90 minute conversation in the next post. Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown by Deborah Eden Tull is a resonant call to explore the darkness in life, in nature, and in consciousness—including difficult emotions like uncertainty, grief, fear, and xenophobia—through teachings, embodied meditations, and mindful inquiry that provide us with a powerful path to healing. Darkness is deeply misunderstood in today’s world; yet it offers powerful medicine, serenity, strength, healing, and regeneration. All insight, vision, creativity, and revelation arise from darkness. It is through learning to stay present and meet the dark with curiosity rather than judgment that we connect to an unwavering light within. Welcoming darkness with curiosity, rather than fear or judgment, enables us to access our innate capacity for compassion and collective healing. Dharma teacher, shamanic practitioner, and deep ecologist Deborah Eden Tull addresses the spiritual, ecological, psychological, and interpersonal ramifications of our bias towards light. Tull explores the medicine of darkness for personal and collective healing, through topics such as: • Befriending the Night: The Radiant Teachings of Darkness • Honoring Our Pain for Our World • Seeing in the Dark: The Quiet Power of Receptivity • Dreams, Possibility, and Moral Imagination • Releasing Fear—Embracing Emergence Tull shows us how the labeling of darkness as “negative” becomes a collective excuse to justify avoiding everything that makes us uncomfortable: racism, spiritual bypass, environmental destruction. We can only find the radical path to wholeness by learning to embrace the interplayof both darkness and light. About the Author Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, author, activist, and sustainability educator. Eden teaches the integration of compassionate awareness into every aspect of our lives. She spent seven years training as a Buddhist monk at a silent Zen monastery and has been teaching dharma for 19 years. Eden has also been living in, and teaching about, sustainable communities for over 25 years. Her teaching style is grounded in compassionate awareness, experiential learning, inquiry, and an unwavering commitment to personal transformation. She teaches engaged awareness practice, which emphasizes the connection between personal awakening and global engagement. Eden draws upon teachings from the natural world and an embodied understanding of animism. She is author of “Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Our Self, Each Other, and Our Planet” (Wisdom 2018) and “The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide for the Sustainable Food Revolution.” Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Tricycle, Yogi Times, GOOP, Shambhala Times, and The Ecologist. She also teaches The Work That Reconnects, a program created by Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy, and teaches for UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. Eden offers retreats, online courses, and consultations internationally. Readers can connect with Deborah Eden Tull on Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads. To learn more, go to DeborahEdenTull.com.

Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown by Deborah Eden Tull is a resonant call to explore the darkness in life, in nature, and in consciousness—including difficult emotions like uncertainty, grief, fear, and xenophobia—through teachings, embodied meditations, and mindful inquiry that provide us with a powerful path to healing. Darkness is deeply misunderstood in today’s world; yet it offers powerful medicine, serenity, strength, healing, and regeneration. All insight, vision, creativity, and revelation arise from darkness. It is through learning to stay present and meet the dark with curiosity rather than judgment that we connect to an unwavering light within. Welcoming darkness with curiosity, rather than fear or judgment, enables us to access our innate capacity for compassion and collective healing. Dharma teacher, shamanic practitioner, and deep ecologist Deborah Eden Tull addresses the spiritual, ecological, psychological, and interpersonal ramifications of our bias towards light. Tull explores the medicine of darkness for personal and collective healing, through topics such as: • Befriending the Night: The Radiant Teachings of Darkness • Honoring Our Pain for Our World • Seeing in the Dark: The Quiet Power of Receptivity • Dreams, Possibility, and Moral Imagination • Releasing Fear—Embracing Emergence Tull shows us how the labeling of darkness as “negative” becomes a collective excuse to justify avoiding everything that makes us uncomfortable: racism, spiritual bypass, environmental destruction. We can only find the radical path to wholeness by learning to embrace the interplayof both darkness and light. About the Author Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, author, activist, and sustainability educator. Eden teaches the integration of compassionate awareness into every aspect of our lives. She spent seven years training as a Buddhist monk at a silent Zen monastery and has been teaching dharma for 19 years. Eden has also been living in, and teaching about, sustainable communities for over 25 years. Her teaching style is grounded in compassionate awareness, experiential learning, inquiry, and an unwavering commitment to personal transformation. She teaches engaged awareness practice, which emphasizes the connection between personal awakening and global engagement. Eden draws upon teachings from the natural world and an embodied understanding of animism. She is author of “Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Our Self, Each Other, and Our Planet” (Wisdom 2018) and “The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide for the Sustainable Food Revolution.” Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Tricycle, Yogi Times, GOOP, Shambhala Times, and The Ecologist. She also teaches The Work That Reconnects, a program created by Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy, and teaches for UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. Eden offers retreats, online courses, and consultations internationally. Readers can connect with Deborah Eden Tull on Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads. To learn more, go to DeborahEdenTull.com.

What is the role of joy on the spiritual path? The bodhisattva path and the path of compassion require us to have an awareness of the suffering of beings – are joy and compassion contradictory? Or can joy be used to sustain our spiritual path and practice? Join us for an exploration of the theme of joy on the spiritual path with Tenzin Chogkyi, who will draw from sources as diverse as 8th Century Indian master Shantideva, research psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and poet Ross Gay.

Our emotions bring us our greatest joys and our deepest sorrows. We wouldn't survive without them, and yet they can also cause us to harm others and ourselves. What is the purpose of emotions, and how can we cultivate more emotional balance? Join us for this conversation with well-known emotions researcher and educator, Dr. Eve Ekman, as we explore these questions. We will also discuss the role of contemplative practice, how our emotions are influenced by our position in the social hierarchy, and Dr. Ekman's "go-to" emotional regulation strategies.

She also talks about an upcoming event "Let's Talk About It: Finding common threads through conversation" to be held at the MAH on Saturday, July 23, 2022 from 2:00 to 6:00 pm, which will be based on these principles and provide the opportunity for members of the public to have conversations with people representing misunderstood identities. Find out more here.

In these uncertain times, our roles as individuals in the sweeping events washing over the world stage can feel deeply unclear, sometimes frightening and frequently overwhelming. It is tempting to respond to these often painful situations by vacillating between anger and complacency. Buddhist teachings can offer insight into accepting “what is” while developing the capacity for equanimity and the courage for wise action. Join Ven Tenzin Chogkyi and Mathew Divaris in a lively conversation originally aired on KSQD Santa Cruz where we navigate the nuances of accepting where we are, while cultivating a wish for positive transformation and avoiding the traps of striving and complacency.

The concept of Right Speech (or "Skillful Speech") is core to many Buddhist teachings about how to live an ethical life and avoid causing harm. In our hyperconnected world, our ability to communicate beyond face-to-face has increased exponentially, and navigating our own speech (and written words) is important because of the wide-ranging ramifications that our words can have on others, as well as on our own minds. In this talk and meditation, Ven Tenzin takes us through the practical advice given in the traditional teachings so that we can exercise our communication with skill and compassion.

This is borrowed from the Reflections on Buddhism show with Ven Tenzin Chogkyi that airs monthly at KSQD.org. Find past episodes at UnlockingTrueHappiness.org.

We’re raised to believe that our perceptions of the world around us has an objective quality, but both Buddhism and modern neuroscience agree that our perceptions can frequently be distorted, and these distortions can cause great suffering. This "naive realism” — the belief that the world exists in the way it appears to us — is so innate to many of us, yet our beliefs, past experiences and emotional states can dramatically alter how we perceive experiences. In this informative session, Ven Tenzin discusses the many ways that our minds can play tricks on us, particularly when it comes to the impact of experiences that we perceive as negative, and shares a simple practice that can help balance and enrich our minds by reinforcing the impact of positive experiences.

In this episode, Ven Tenzin explores the Eight Worldly Concerns, a set of four dyads that correspond to many of the deeply held hopes and fears that drive the actions of all beings. As we engage with the spiritual path, or even the mundane decisions of the day-to-day, a clear understanding of these forms of attachment and aversion can serve as a way to become mindful of our motivations and bring clarity and skillfulness to our actions. In this way, we can ultimately become free from the suffering that these unconscious, habitual ways of engaging with the world can bring.