Ezra Bayda, Judith Simmer-Brown, and Kamala Masters discuss how to identify obstacles in your practice, apply antidotes that work, and deepen your meditation in the process.

After caring for his ailing mother for nine years, Ajahn Viradhammo reflects on self-sacrifice and the importance of cultivating a strong and expansive heart.

One thing that comes up a lot for me is the limitation of personal­ity. There’s something about it that doesn’t change very much.

In classical Buddhist teaching, meditation (samadhi) has always been sandwiched between integrity (sila) on the one hand and wisdom (pañña) on the other. Indeed, this is what makes it Buddhist. As a technol­ogy for the attenuation of consciousness, meditation had been practiced by yogis for centuries before the Buddha, but in his hands it became a tool for the deep transformation of character that results in liberation of the mind from the toxins that cause suffering.

Zenkei Blanche Hartman:Certainly I think practicing the Buddha Way without a teacher is better than not practicing at all. However, you have not said anything about why you want to practice without a teacher. Do you live in a location where there are no teachers available? Does it feel somehow disloyal to your original teacher for you to work with a new teacher? Have you asked this question of your deceased teacher in your heart during meditation?

Ed Gensho Welsh, a longtime member of the Zen Community of Oregon, posted the fol­lowing on BuddhistGeeks.com:

In the USA, many couples start attending church after having a baby. And most churches have the resources to support them. In American Buddhism, the pattern appears to be the opposite: have a baby  and disappear. But then, do most sanghas offer the support that churches do? The answer to Ed’s question is no—most Buddhist communities whose membership consists primarily of American Buddhist converts have not created ongoing ways for the whole family to participate.

Reviewed by Annabella Pitkin

Imagine opening a book about what we would today call Buddhism and read­ing that it is an Egyptian religion and that the Buddha was a former Egyptian priest exiled from his country during a Persian invasion twenty-three hundred years ago. Or think of reading, in a different treatise on the Buddha, that “We are compelled therefore to believe... that Buddha and [the Norse god] Woden are the same deity, and consequently that the theology of the Gothic and Saxon tribes was a modification of Buddhism...”