IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching The seasons are changing in earnest here in Pennsylvania. We are in the bardo (or “interval”) between summer and winter, complete with golden, red, and brown leaves, carved pumpkins, and Halloween decorations. This shift is a reminder that everything is in motion, constantly changing.  Our regular online meditation group has been reading and contemplating Pema

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching Our founders Matt DiRodio and Michael Carroll recently sat down together and edited The Wisdom Seat’s chant boo k which we use in our monthly nyinthuns and other events. Much appreciation for their work and dedication! So for those who participate in our nyinthuns, take note of the new version updated in September 2025. On September 11th our communities exper

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching At the end of the month The Wisdom Seat will be offering Refuge and Bodhisattva Vows. As many of you know these vows are a proclamation to formally claim one's identity as a Buddhist. Why would one want to take this leap?  You might ask yourself  "Who needs to join a religion?" Maybe in your study of buddhism you came across the teaching of "egolessness", so yo

Like all things, The Wisdom Seat is ever-changing, and we are writing today to start a dialogue with you, our community, about how we can best shape our organization to serve our precious sangha in the years ahead. Whether you consider Wisdom Seat your sangha, donate time or funds, come to events, or simply read our newsletter, we consider you to be part of The Wisdom Seat community, and we want to hear your voice. We will be soliciting your opinions and ideas in the weeks to

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA This is Sanskrit. I didn't know I've been chanting Sanskrit for years, and how important the language was to Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Did you know Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche often preferred his students go back to the original Sanskrit instead of using Tibetan terms? "He(CTR) even decided, whenever possible, to choos

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching I've just returned from being in a country where I couldn't speak the language. My wife, our 14-year-old, and I went to South Korea to visit our extended family. We spent two weeks traveling around and met about 15 relatives for the first time: aunts, uncles, grandparents, young cousins...and I couldn't converse with any of them. In Korean, I could only say yes

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching I’ve been thinking a lot about equanimity lately. I can be overwhelmed by the news of the day across the globe, and how people are going through unimaginable suffering, loss and fear. There’s a common misunderstanding that being equanimous means experiencing an absence of big emotions, that to feel peace, we need to detach. Buddhism teaches something different

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching Steve McCurry, Tofuku-ji Monastery, Kyoto, Japan, 2005. The Great Gift Richard Driscoll Sometimes as practitioners the Dharma turns up in unexpected places or we may see something in a newer, more Dharmic light. Something like this happened to me with an excerpt from the poem, “All Night, All Night” by Delmore Schwartz which I read long ago in my pre-Buddhist d

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching The irony of the Buddhist path  Michael Carroll The Buddhist path is fraught with countless ironies: to journey, one must sit still; to understand reality, one must stop trying to understand; to “ get a grip ”, one must “ let go ”. And of course, the best of all: to attain enlightenment, one must recognize that doing so is impossible.  Such ironies seem tense w

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching Pawo Khandro Ling, 2025 Greetings friends and fellow aspiring practitioners! I hope that you are finding workability in the world as it is presenting itself to you. It’s cliché at this point to say that we are in a time of unprecedented change on many fronts – ecologically, governmentally, and personally. And it seems like the pace of change is occurring at a h

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching Steve McCurry, Nova Scotia, Canada, 2005 As I was thinking about what to write for this introduction I thought a lot about numbers, namely how we use numbers to track the passage of time. Time is named by numbers. Sometimes we even name a group of numbers with an actual name - in the case of this writing and according to the Gregorian calendar, the 24-hours are

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching Steve McCurry, Red Feather Lakes, USA, 2004 Here we are in 2025 - a new calendar year and the traditional time to make resolutions. Resolutions are defined in the dictionary as “a firm decision to do or not do something.” As you reflect on resolutions you have made over the years, how many times have you held to the resolution? Can you even recall the resolutio

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching S teve McCurry, Kyoto, Japan, 2004 The first time I met with Michael Carroll, with what I thought was a secret yearning to have a dharma teacher in my life, was shortly after my mother had died. I couldn’t get her final, difficult, days out of my head. I told him my heart felt like it had broken, and I couldn’t pull myself together. And he said “that’s ok. We

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching Steve McCurr y, New York City, NY, USA, 2005 Welcome to November! This is a tense time in the USA, and I had the good fortune to go to the first Wisdom Seat Retreat in October for 8 days of sitting meditation at Karma Triyana Dharmachakra (KTD) monastery in Woodstock, NY. There were about 20 of us practicing together, learning about each other, and enjoying mak

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching S teve McCurry, Burma / Myanmar, 2013 Practicing Dharma in Tibetan When I tell my friends and fellow Dharma practitioners that I do most of my Dharma practice in Tibetan they either look at me with puzzlement or concern - why torture yourself? I will try to answer that question by describing my own experience of learning Tibetan and how it became a source of in

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching Passed Hands As Buddhist practitioners we are fortunate to live in an age when the authentic Buddhist teachings have “passed hands” from distant cultures through generous teachers directly into our lives. Buddhism has a storied history of such wisdom transmission from culture to culture, and we are indeed carrying on such a tradition in how we translate, pract

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching As many of you know, I am entering the 3 Year Retreat @ Sopa Choling in Nova Scotia, Canada. In fact, as you're reading this, I'm probably on the road.   Firstly, I wanted to thank all who have donated so graciously to my endeavor. I have directly contacted many of you expressing my gratitude. Yet, I do not have direct contact information for some of you, so I'

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching The summer is here and many of us are busy tending the garden, putting in extra hours at work, or preparing for an adventure. It is also a time when we can wander through nature, find that welcoming rock beside a stream and take a well deserved seat.  As we experience the activities of summer we can also be caught off guard by an unexpected circumstance. Perhap

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching “If you come to me and say ‘Rinpoche, I can’t meditate at all; my mind is going everywhere: here, there, past, present, future,’ I should give you a medal. Finally you are meditating. The whole purpose of this instruction is to make you realize you cannot concentrate.” – Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche (from The Transforming Power of Meditation ) Often when someone

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: •   From The Wisdom Seat •   The Wisdom Seat Events •   Programs To Consider •   A Teaching “Sitting lets us just, first of all, recognize that we are this massive collection of thoughts and experiences and sensations that are moving at the speed of light and that we never get a chance to just be still and pause and look at them, just for what they are, and then slowly to sort out our own voice from the rest of the thoughts, emotions, the interpretati