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From journalist and internationally recognized author Lee Carlson comes a life-changing memoir about our journey to seek meaning and the personal relationships we build along the way.

A Single Excellent Night weaves together awakening experiences and pivotal realizations from the first four years of a 15-year apprenticeship Lee Carlson spent with Peter Matthiessen. The relationship between these two men, Zen teacher/student, writer mentor/mentee, trusted confidants and friends, unfolds in beautiful stories as Carlson goes on a quest to the furthest limits of human understanding and mindfulness, culminating with a single magical event on a winter beach.

Layered with profound insights on identity, belonging, and suffering, A Single Excellent Night is more than a book about Zen, spiritual awakening, and the enlightenment found in presence. It is a book about meaningful relationships, healing, love, and community. Unpacking the wisdom and teachings of towering literary figures like Peter Matthiessen and spiritual teachers like Joanna Macy, Carlson invites readers to experience the rare fusion of lived memory and meditative inquiry—a search for insight shaped by Zen practice, poetic prose, and the lasting imprint of a literary legacy. (see more here)

Gary Sanders and Dana Gornall talk with Lee Carlson, traumatic brain injury survivor, journalist, former magazine editor and Zen practitioner. Lee's previous memoir, Passage to Nirvana goes into his journey of near death to recovering from an accident that caused a Traumatic Brain Injury. We discuss some of his background and story along with his latest work, A Single Excellent Night.

Lee's website here: https://leecarlson.life/

Purchase A Single Excellent Night here: https://leecarlson.life/a-single-excellent-night

Amazon

Passage to Nirvana here: https://leecarlson.life/passage-to-nirvana

Podcast edited by Brad Parsons at Train Sound Studio, www.trainsoundstudio.com

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*trigger warning: Suicide

Jaqui was a young, 22 year old free-spirited young woman who loved to plant trees and was a part of a tree-planting community. 

She was an artist, a tattoo artist and an adventurer. Her dad had no longer needed a contractor van so she renovated it into a traveling van and went exploring. 

Jaqui loved meditating and had been trying to get into a 10 day Goenka meditation retreat for awhile and when her name came up on the list to be able to go, she was very excited. 

A few days into the retreat, Jaqui's mom received a phone call from a volunteer saying that Jaqui had left in the night and they just wanted to make sure she had gotten home safely. In fact, Jaqui had not gotten home, and this led to a call to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in order to file a missing person's report. While the police were able to locate her van about 30 miles from the retreat center, they did not find Jaqui. 

Jaqui was found to have taken her own life. 

This is not the first time someone has commit suicide after a Goenka retreat. We sit down and talk to Nathalie St-Maurice, Jaqui's mom, about this story, about Jaqui, and what she and other families would like to see change with these type of Vipassana retreats.

******

These retreats were a part of an investigative podcast on The Financial Times. You can listen to those here. 

Here is the article from John Pendall on the dark side of meditation.

Check out Cheetah House here, a website and community organization that helps support those who have experienced distress during/after meditation. Cheetah House will also have an online event on June 3 called Behind the Scenes at Retreat.

Here is the foundation Jaqui's family started to celebrates and supports education in arts called Nice Day Shining. Their purpose is to advance education by providing scholarships to study arts at post-secondary educational institutions, and o raise awareness and provide support for mental health through disbursement to charitable organizations.

If you need help, or need someone to talk with please reach out by calling 9-8-8.

*Podcast edited by Brad Parsons at Train Sound Studio, www.trainsoundstudio.com

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Kellie Schorr has not only written for The Tattooed Buddha since 2018, she has been publishing as a ghost writer for the romantic suspense genre for several years penning commissioned novels. 

She is a Buddhist yogi in the Tibetan tradition and worked as a prevention specialist in the field of HIV and AIDS. She said she has always been a writer. She talks about her journey as a professional writer and how it can take many, many submissions to get published. We also talk about how she found The Tattooed Buddha and began writing for us here.

Kellie recently wrote her own book, A Space Between Breaths, published by Brother Mockingbird, which is a Buddhist mystery story. See the review for her book here, and purchase the book here or here. See her first post from The Tattooed Buddha here.

Check out her website here.

Substack

Book club resources

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Today we had a long term friend and former TTB board member, Daniel Scharpenburg on our podcast!

Daniel has written a lot for The Tattooed Buddha as well as many other Buddhist magazines. He has worked for the IRS for 16 years now and he became a Union Steward in 2018 and during the COVID pandemic in 2020 he was elected as the first Vice President of his union.

He has really enjoyed being a leader and activist during this time and is taking those leadership skills as first Vice President to also be an activist for social liberation. Daniel has been a Buddhist and meditation teacher for years and is active member and Dharma Facilitator of the Rime Buddhist Center & Institute of Tibetan Studies.

We discuss the Buddhist role in politics, what role Buddhists can, and has historically played, and how to peacefully and effectively take part in protests.

"Right now it's like this, what can I do?" is one of Daniel's favorite  Buddhist slogans.

See Daniel's Substack here. See Daniel's books here. See Daniel's writing on TTB here, and on Patheos here.

Check out 50501 here.

*Podcast edited by Brad Parsons at Train Sound Studio, www.trainsoundstudio.com
 

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Do Not Try to Become a Buddha is a collection of short essays, Irish Soto Zen priest Myozan Ian Kilroy describes how he came to practice Zen, introduces some basics of Zen philosophy, and recalls the challenges of establishing a Zen Buddhist community in Catholic-dominated Ireland. 

A former journalist, Rev. Myozan’s clear yet entertaining storytelling style paints a clear picture of how Zen has adapted to the culture and traditions of Ireland. Rev. Myozan describes how he came to practice Zen, introduces the basics of Zen philosophy, and recalls the challenges of establishing a Zen Buddhist community in Catholic-dominated Ireland. He also explores the rituals and practices that Zen brings to everyday life, from holidays to weddings to birth ceremonies to funerals.

Dana and Claire Parsons, Tattooed Buddha columnist and blogger at Brilliant Legal Mind, sit down and chat with Rev. Myozan about rituals and teachings, his history of working as a journalist, his current job for the last 16 years at the school of media at the Technological University Dublin. He has represented Buddhism on national radio and television, in advisory panels for the Taoiseach (Ireland’s prime minister), and in the National Day of Commemoration in Ireland, which remembers all Irish people who have died in past wars. 

We talk about the current state in global politics and how Zen fits into that, and into every day life. 

Podcast editor: Hallie Gornall

Do Not Try to Become a Buddha

Rev. Myozan's YouTube Channel

zenbuddhism.ie

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Ethan Nichtern is the author of Confidence: Holding Your Seat through Life’s Eight Worldly Winds and several other titles, including the widely acclaimed The Road Home. A renowned contemporary Buddhist teacher and the host of The Road Home Podcast, Ethan teaches meditation and Buddhist psychology classes and retreats online via Dharma Moon and around the US.

Kellie Schorr and Claire Parsons talk with Ethan about his new book and the concept of confidence and the idea of it being a practice. We also discuss how fear can play a role in our culture and how it can effect our ability to build confidence.

Check out the promo video where he talks about this book here. You can find his book on Amazon here. 

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If you meditate, chances are you may have heard of or have used Insight Timer.

This app was brought to my attention because it wasn’t just a timer—it has classes, courses, talks and most especially it has a community. Our culture and society has become more and more digitalized. Socializing is done via messaging, texting and by using likes, dislikes and emojis. We meme, we snap, we gif, along with many other nouns that we now verb—all from our phones. It’s amazing and has connected us from one side of the globe to another.

Unfortunately it has also divided us from one side of the globe to another.

What I like about Insight Timer is that it uses this technology to connect—to find likeness and community—and brings it to the practice of meditation. In our busy-ness of life, sometimes getting to a meditation group is not ideal. Sometimes it is actually not even possible depending on where we live. Old school practices may push back, and while it is true that there is nothing better than actually meditating in a group, Insight Timer elects to fill this gap of those that need a social network of meditators.

So when one of our writers brought to our attention the open call by Insight Timer for interviews and podcasts, we jumped. Was I nervous about meeting Christopher Plowman, the CEO of Insight Timer? Yes. But that quickly faded after a he popped up on our screens and began chatting about his new puppy.

You know how people will say that someone is unexpectedly down to earth despite the fact that person is a little famous? Christopher Plowman was exactly that. In just a minute we felt like we were a group of friends chatting about meditation, and the power of one idea that snowballs into a dream.

As just a small start up company, the people at Insight Timer have worked tirelessly to keep up with technology and to stay one step ahead of what we as meditators are looking for in an app that is not only functional but a bridge to those who are all looking to find a little peace, a little connection, a little understanding, and best of all, it is at no cost.

Grab some coffee or tea and listen as we talk about how Insight Timer was born and what they hope to accomplish in the future.  

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Claire Parsons started writing for us here at The Tattooed Buddha with a column titled: The Bodhisattva of Power Suits, but she is not new to writing. She started her own blog called Brilliant Legal Mind and has also written two books: How to Be a Badass Lawyer, and Mommy Needs a Minute.

Claire E. Parsons is a practicing lawyer in the Cincinnati, Ohio area, and the mom of two girls. She started meditating to manage stress and curb overthinking, but the practice changed her life. Over time, she got training and began teaching other lawyers and professionals about mindfulness. Claire is also a frequent writer and speaker for these and other organizations. She has published and spoken about numerous topics, ranging from complex legal issues, to law practice, networking and marketing, as well as mindfulness and wellness for lawyers and other professionals. She writes regularly on LinkedIn and even co-authored a book this year with 19 other women lawyers about how they used the platform to network and pursue career goals during the pandemic.

We talk about meditation, her job as a special education lawyer, her thoughts on Buddhism and how she got here to this point, and how to find time to write when she has a full schedule with career and parenting.

Check out Claire's personal blog here.
Check out Claire's books: How to be a Badass Lawyer and Mommy Needs a Minute.
Check out Claire's blog on the Tattooed Buddha: The Bodhisattva of Power Suits.
Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley and David Kelley
Link to Ben Gioia

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In this podcast, we talk about how Rod found the Dharma, his journey to writing and eventually editing for both Wisdom Publications and then later, Lion's Roar.

The post Talking with Guest Rod Meade Sperry, Editor of Buddhadharma at Lion’s Roar appeared first on The Tattooed Buddha.

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Rod and I have been friends on social media for awhile now but we have never interacted (as what happens often with social media and networking).

In this podcast, we talk about how Rod found the Dharma, his journey to writing and eventually editing for both Wisdom Publications and then later, Lion’s Roar. Rod started his own independent magazine (zine) originally to highlight how Buddhism shows up in different areas of our culture.

We talk about Canadian winters, mindfulness and anxiety, how digital publishing is changing the way we get our information and more!

See Rod Meade Sperry's articles here at Lion's Roar.
Check out Rod's books here on Amazon.
Here is the book Rod brought up in our discussion: Relax & Be Aware: Mindfulness Meditations for Clarity, Confidence and Wisdom by Sayadaw U Tejaniya

Podcast edited by Brad Parsons at Train Sound Studio, www.trainsoundstudio.com

Love The Tattooed Buddha content? Check out our website!

Follow us on Facebook and Instagram! Interested in being a guest on our podcast? Contact us at [email protected].