When the doctor sent my mother home to die, I went with her even though I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. In those days, hospice offered little support beyond a weekly nurse visit. I moved in, kept my mother clean, took care of her cat, made smoothies for her...

My mountain of a dog, Monty, is bouncing around the foyer, pawing at the door, whinnying and whining like a racehorse straining at the bit. We’ve just adopted this big guy—ninety-five pounds of pure strength and sweetness—and he’s eager to muscle his way past my legs...

When Larry Ward died suddenly on August 19, Buddhism in America lost a unique and powerful voice.  “His dharma name was True Great Sound, and he was indeed a master of sound,” said dharma teacher Kaira Jewel Lingo after his death. “He soothed, uplifted, and gave...

One of the tales from the Japanese Zen tradition recounts the story of Ohashi, the daughter of a samurai family that had fallen on hard times. To save them, Ohashi sold herself to a brothel and gave the money to her parents. In The Hidden Lamp: Stories from...

We all need healing. Sometimes we need healing for physical illness. At other times, we need to heal the traumas that we’ve suffered and the past difficulties we still carry in our bodies. We need release from the struggles and emotions brought about by our conflicts...

Andrea Miller: How can Western psychology and Buddhism work together to help people heal from trauma? Jack Kornfield: There’s a very simple word underlying this question, which is suffering. The deep medicine of the dharma acknowledges that there’s suffering, that it...