Category: compassion

Contemplating Disease – Part 5c – Comforting the Ill – September 3, 2018

Walking the fine line between remembering the emptiness of the body and dwelling upon final extinction is often the fine line many who deliver medical care and care-givers travel.  How do you be honest without being forlorn or slipping into causing hopelessness.  Vimalakirti saw this difficulty and cautioned the person seeking to provide comfort.  Not being dishonest about the disease or illness causes harm, being too brutally honest also causes harm.  There is no one…

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Contemplating Disease – Part 5b – Comforting the Ill – September 2, 2018

It’s not just family and friends who don’t know how to interact with the patient.  I’ve witnessed many doctors who, while good at the practice and delivery of medicine are woefully inadequate in finding the balance between honesty and compassion.  I’ll say this from my witnessing many doctor patient interactions, most doctors don’t know how to deliver bad news.  Part of this comes from the sense of failure on the part of a doctor if…

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Thursday’s Five Book Recommendations – August 23, 2018

What I hope will be a regular weekly feature, here are a few books I recommend.  The books will not always be directly about Buddhism however they will relate to the greater truths found in Buddhism and also to things I’m interested in.  Sometimes ideas from my outside reading I use as I process the complex theories we study in Buddhism.  Please note that the temple will receive a small percentage of any purchase made…

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The Clergy Letter Project

(I am one of the signators of this letter) Article by Michael Zimmerman “From Baptists to Buddhists, Roman Catholics to Rabbis, and from mainline Protestants to Unitarian Universalists the number of clergy stepping up to make it clear that religion and all facets of science need not be in conflict is exploding. Indeed, more than 16,000 clergy members have now joined The Clergy Letter Project, a grass roots organization designed to demonstrate this point. These 16,000…

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