Hi all,

This week's new article is on the Eight Worldly Concerns:
The Eight Worldly Concerns in Buddhism are four pairs of attachments and aversions that we experience continually in our daily lives. Through Buddhist practice we strive to unhook our happiness from this cycle, abiding in the deeper happiness that arises.
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art183597.asp

This month I have also updated the article on Buddhist precepts:
The Buddhist Precepts are the core ethical guidelines for practicing Buddhists. There are core 5 Precepts adopted by both lay and monastic practitioners, and then additional Precepts added for monastics. These Precepts are guidelines for practice, not commandments.
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art173627.asp

For those of you interested in meditation, I also wanted to let you know that I am doing a free teleseminar on Trauma-Sensitive Meditation tomorrow through an organization called The Breathe Network. You can find the information for that here:

http://thebreathenetwork.org/ai1ec_event/creating-trauma-sensitive-meditation-classes?instance_id=24

As always, I would love your participation in the forum - I currently have ongoing threads there related to several books, as well as active threads on meditation, spiritual practice and our brain, and other topics:

http://forums.bellaonline.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=postlist&Board=351

In honor of Maya Angelou's passing this month, I wanted my closing quote to be one from her. Although not Buddhist per se, she did explore Buddhism, along with other religions, and so many of her teachings and writings are simply universal, including this one on self-acceptance:

"I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach."
― Maya Angelou

In Peace,
Lisa Erickson, Buddhism Editor
http://buddhism.bellaonline.com

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