Lodro Rinzler

Lodro Rinzler

Lodro Rinzler is a teacher in the Shambhala tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism. He has taught numerous workshops and retreats. His column "What Would Sid Do?" (Sid = Siddhartha, the Buddha) appears regularly in the Huffington Post.

Lodro Rinzler

Lodro Rinzler is a teacher in the Shambhala tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism. He has taught numerous workshops and retreats. His column "What Would Sid Do?" (Sid = Siddhartha, the Buddha) appears regularly in the Huffington Post.

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GUIDES

Book Club Discussion | The Buddha Walks into the Office

The Buddha Walks into the Office seemed a particularly apt choice for our Shambhala office book club. After all, if anyone should aspire to an awake, uplifted workplace, it should be us. We dove in to see if Lodro Rinzler, teacher in the Shambhala tradition and founder of MNDFL meditation studios in New York, had any tips for us.

If you’re reading along, please comment at the bottom of this guide and let us know if The Buddha Walks into the Office was helpful to you, whether or not you work in an office.

Questions for Discussion

  • How do you envision applying these teachings in your workplace every day? What are the ways we can collectively support each other to continue practicing these lessons after we’ve finished reading? How do we take the teachings off the page and cultivate a work environment rooted in mindfulness and compassion?
  • The Buddha said, “Come and see for yourself,” meaning that we don’t have to take Buddhist teachings on faith but should actively investigate whether they hold true in our lives. Which teachings from this book resonate with your own experience? Which contradict it? Which do you feel require further investigation?
  • Since Lodro is part of the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, this book touches on a lot of the same principles that we read about in Trungpa’s Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior. How do their presentations of similar topics compare? Which do you find more accessible and why?
  • This book is full of all sorts of sensational anecdotes, metaphors, and pop culture references. Do you have any favorites that stand out to you or that illustrate a difficult concept in a particularly helpful way?

Notable Quotes

  • “When it comes to figuring out a career path, knowing your intention may be the most basic and most helpful step on the journey that links your work with your spiritual path.” (6)
  • “It occurred to me that given the current educational and economic situation in the United States, maybe the question of what you want to be when you grow up is outdated. This conversation steered me toward what is perhaps a better question for the thoughtful young person today: ‘Who do you want to be when you grow up?’” (26)
  • “Your job is not your life. If you think your life is your job, you should be concerned. Your life is what you make of it and what qualities you want to cultivate during your time here on earth.” (30)
  • “Sometimes we need to create space around difficulty in order for solutions to arise. When we take a step back from a problem, that simple mind that arises can unravel the complicated situation. The more space we create for ourselves and others, the more clearly we are able to see a situation.” (46)
  • “We all suffer. The fact that you see more clearly how you get hooked by suffering only highlights how your friends and coworkers are going through the exact same thing.” (62)

Social change through inner change:

  • “By continuously coming back to the present, we are learning to free ourselves from fixed points of view. That is an important first step in creating change, at work and in society.” (106)
  • “The more we can empathize with coworkers, clients, and even superiors, the better we will be able to understand them. Having understood them and seen them for who they are, we will be able to figure out how best to engage in compassionate activity and create change based on what needs to happen, as opposed to our ideas about what needs to happen.” (108)
  • “Instead of trying to yell our ideas for societal change into existence, we have the opportunity to infiltrate the same organizations we seek to transform and create the change from within. . . . We can maintain an open heart, even in tough corporate settings, and let our compassion touch others.” (108-109)
  • “We can use our work situation as a jumping-off point for sharing our heart more widely with everyone we encounter. We can reflect each day on whether what we have done has helped others or created positive change in the world. Through this gradual process, we can build a society that is based in empathy and compassion.” (110)

Compassionate Leadership:

  • “A fundamental principle of leadership is that we need to engage others, work with their skill sets, and encourage the people with whom we collaborate.” (122)
  • “Take a moment to recognize that all parties concerned have at least one thing in common: basic goodness. . . . Instead of meeting someone on the battlefield of aggression, you can meet them in the spacious playground of shared innate wisdom.” (130)
  • “Power is best used when everyone profits from it—when we share it and empower others.” (136)
  • “Fearlessness is about looking at our fear, learning it well, and seeing our way through it.” (148)
  • “An artful leader is one who gives others the space to discover their own wisdom.” (158)
  • “With the view that everyone and everything we encounter is rooted in basic goodness, we can find magic in any situation.” (163)
  • “If we recognize obstacles as merely part of the display of our world, then we realize we don’t have to take them—or ourselves—so seriously. You are not this heavy, solid thing but a vast conglomeration of knowledge and experience that is ever-changing. Similarly, when you face an obstacle, you should think of it in the same impermanent, fluid way.” (176)

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First US Air Force Buddhist Chaplain Answers, “Why?”

by Brett Campbell

Nobody asks for the chaplain in the good moments. This is an unspoken rule I realized early in my career. Nobody thinks of the chaplain after they’ve delivered a healthy child or they take their first steps following an accident that left them bedbound for weeks. These are the times when life makes sense. We don’t question these experiences. We simply bask in the joy they bring to our hearts. It is in the moments of pain and uncertainty when the chaplain is called. The chaplain is called when the child is stillborn, when the young couple wants a divorce, or when the grandmother, the rock of the family, succumbs to old age. People call the chaplain when life veers from the path of normalcy. These are the times when suffering becomes real and our minds begin searching for answers. These are the times when, as a chaplain, I am faced with the question, “Why?”

 

I struggled with this question as a young chaplain. I wanted to relieve the pain a family felt when they lost their daughter to drug addiction. I wanted to fix the situation and make their hurt disappear. They asked “Why?” because they wanted relief, but I was unable to answer their question. I was only able to feel their despair and my own inadequacy. We were all stuck together in a space of intense emotion and no answers. In fact, there were no words that could heal their suffering. Sadness and confusion were the only truth in that room.

 

When we are faced with loss or change, we are often shaken to a place of emptiness. Reality no longer makes sense, emotions flood our system, and words lose all meaning. We normally feel like we have some control over our lives. Life seems to move along on a regular schedule. There are some bumps along the way, but it’s relatively comfortable. The problem is, that understanding of life was always an illusion. Life has always been messy and ever-changing, but that doesn’t change the fact that we want it all to make sense. When difficult things happen, we want those experiences to seamlessly weave into the stories we have about our lives. That is why I am asked, “Why?” We want answers to fill our emptiness.

 

Answers can relieve some suffering, but they are not the way to heal from loss and change. The truth is, the only answer to “Why?” is openness. We have to relax into the pain of loss, the pain of not knowing, the pain of change. True healing can only come through openness and letting go of our clinging to that which we have lost. That doesn’t mean we let go of the love we felt or the memories we have, but we must accept that that which we loved won’t be a part of our story going forward. As a caregiver, all I can do is create a space where fully experiencing loss is possible. I don’t have any answers to “Why?” There aren’t any answers. There is only the present moment. There is only pain and sadness and laughter and memories. These are the things we want the least when facing loss, but they are all that is left and the only thing that is real.

 

My time working as a chaplain has shown me that we must face our suffering in order to heal from it. If we spend our time running away from our pain by binging on television, excessive drinking, or any of the other ways we keep ourselves from feeling, we will never heal. We can try to run away from our suffering, but it will always be there, haunting us. It lives on in our bodies and our minds and wreaks havoc on our lives. It causes more suffering, and it continues to build on itself. We must accept our grief and let it flow through us. It is uncomfortable, but our pain is just as impermanent as the reality we are grieving. Only after we have allowed ourselves to fully feel our emotions and make peace with them and our loss can we truly begin to heal. Only then can we fully move on into our new reality, allowing for life to continue without answers and accepting it exactly as it is.

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Brett Campbell

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A Year of Mindfulness: A Reading List

What would you like to accomplish this year?

Have you made New Year's resolutions to start meditating or pick up your practice again? To be more mindful with your children or adolescents? To mend a broken heart or learn to cook? To finally figure out your dosha, prioritize, or simply to relax?

We at Shambhala have books covering all these topics and more to help you have your most satisfying, healthy, and mindful year yet. From favorite authors like Pema Chödrön, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jan Chozen Bays,  Susan Piver, and others, read up on some of our top picks for turning a new leaf in 2016:

 

9781611802672

If you want to meditate but have no idea where to begin, this book by best-selling author Susan Piver will help you: it contains everything you need to know to start a meditation practice and, even more important, to continue one.

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Mindfulness on the Go

If you've heard about the many benefits of mindfulness but think you don't have time for it, prepare to be proven delightfully wrong. Mindfulness is available every moment, as Zen teacher Jan Chozen Bays shows with these twenty-five exercises that can be done anywhere.

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9781611801651.png

Believe what you've heard about meditation: it'll focus your mind, open your heart, and sometimes surprise you with insight. And it's not complicated. In fact, everything you need to get started is contained in the pages of this little book by Lodro Rinzler, founder of the Institute for Compassionate Leadership.

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9781611800586

This introduction to mindfulness for children and their parents includes practices that can help us all calm down, focus, fall asleep, alleviate worry, manage anger, and generally become more patient and aware.

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9781611802467_1

Parenting a teenager is a challenge, to be sure, but Eline Snel has some very good news for those facing that challenge: there's a way to stay mindful, present, and, yes, positive throughout it all by developing a base of mindful awareness as your resource.

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9781611800579

This practical guide introduces you to the practice of meditation, explains how it is approached in the main schools of Buddhism, and offers advice and inspiration from Buddhism's most renowned teachers, including Pema Chödrön, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Sharon Salzberg, Chögyam Trungpa, Shunryu Suzuki, Sylvia Boorstein and many others.

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9781570623448

A collection of talks she gave between 1987 and 1994, the book is a treasury of Pema Chödrön's wisdom for going on living when we are overcome by pain and difficulties.

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9781590308387

In this book, Thich Nhat Hanh distills the essence of Buddhist thought and practice, emphasizing the power of mindfulness to transform our lives. "Mindfulness is not an evasion or an escape, " he explains. "It means being here, present, and totally alive. It is true freedom-and without this freedom, there is no happiness. "

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9781559391535_1

This user's guide to Buddhist basics takes the most commonly asked questions and provides simple answers in plain English.  Buddhism for Beginners is an ideal first book on the subject for anyone, but it's also a wonderful resource for seasoned students, since the question-and-answer format makes it easy to find just the topic you're looking for.

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9781590308431_1

Best-seller Pema Chödrön draws on the Buddhist concept of shenpa to help us see how certain habits of mind tend to "hook " us and get us stuck in states of anger, blame, self-hatred, and addiction. The good news is that once we start to recognize these patterns, they instantly begin to lose their hold on us and we can begin to change our lives for the better.

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Start Where You Are

An indispensable handbook for cultivating fearlessness and awakening a compassionate heart, Pema Chödrön presents down-to-earth guidance on how we can "start where we are"-embracing rather than denying the painful aspects of our lives through contemplation of the 59 lojong slogans.

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9781611800852

With her love of whole food, chef Amy Chaplin has written a book that will inspire you to eat well at every meal, every day, year round. Part One involves stocking your kitchen, planning weekly menus, composting, doing a whole-food cleanse, and much more. Part Two is a collection of recipes, most of which are gluten-free, celebrating vegetarian cuisine in its brightest, whole, sophisticated form.

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9781611802290

Eating natural, homemade foods in accordance with personal constitution and changes in environment is often all that we need to find balance in our lives. In The Everyday Ayurveda Cookbook, Kate O'Donnell inspires you to get into the kitchen and explore this time-honored system for health and vibrancy.

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9781611802825

The Relaxed Mind  contains instructions for the seven-phase meditation practice Dza Kilung Rinpoche  developed for Westerners, whom he finds have difficulty relaxing due to  the pace of Western life. It's very traditional but adapted to help those of us who live in a culture of distraction.

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 9781611801002

When taken on mindfully, vows can be a source of surprising wisdom and powerful energy, enabling you to accomplish things you never dreamed possible.  In this guide to the vow-directed life, Jan Chozen Bays provides a wealth of practical exercises for formulating and implementing vows of your own with honesty and compassion.

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We hope  these books provide you much support and enjoyment, and we at Shambhala Publications wish you a very happy new year!

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