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This interview is reprinted with permission from the Spirit Rock Meditation Center website. Spirit Rock: Why is the cultivation of compassion (karuna) essential to awakening? DaRa Williams: There is a non-acknowledgment around the fact that the two go hand-in-hand. Awakening is not a separate state of being that comes into existence without the cultivation of the heart […]

An article by Janice Cittasubha Sheppard on the theme for the October 2017 retreat.

Like many who grew up in the 1950s, I have happy memories of playing ping-pong in our basement ‘rec room’ and of hearing my father’s stories about his skill as a ping-pong master when he was young. Playing ping-pong is fun, but having a mind and heart that swings back and forth like a ping-pong ball is decidedly not fun.

It can take some time, even decades, to notice that swinging between peaks and valleys of emotion, attention, energy, effort, etc. is exhausting. Our attachment to the peaks sometimes has obscured the truth of the equal and opposite valleys. Or sometimes we have decided that there must be a way to get the peaks without the valleys and we just have to figure out what it is. But slowly, with time, we come to realize …
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This interview with Ayya Medhanandi was conducted in 2013. It offers a superb introduction to the history and the revival of the bhikkhuni order.

We are truly on the cusp of a wonderful new era. I see the changes as historical for both Theravada Buddhist monasticism and the outreach of the Buddha’s teachings in western society. The Buddha said that when a person native to the country in which the Dhamma teachings are introduced becomes a monastic, then the Dhamma will truly begin to take root there. That is now happening around the world, including here in Canada. So compared to how things were 25 years ago when I first ordained, the Theravada monastic landscape for women is remarkably transformed…
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