Allan Lokos is the founder and guiding teacher of the Community Meditation Center located on New York City's upper west side. He is the author of Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living , Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living, and Through the Flames: Overcoming Disaster Through Compassion, Patience, and Determination. His writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, Tricycle magazine, Beliefnet, and several anthologies.
Among the places he has taught are Columbia University Teachers College, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, The Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Marymount Manhattan College, The Rubin Museum of Art Brainwave Series, BuddhaFest, NY Insight Meditation Center, The NY Open Center, Tibet House US, and Insight Meditation Community of Washington. Lokos has practiced meditation since the mid-nineties and studied with such renowned teachers as Sharon Salzberg, Thích Nhất Hạnh, Joseph Goldstein, Andrew Olendzki, and Stephen Batchelor.[ citation needed ]
Earlier in this life Lokos enjoyed a successful career as a professional singer. He was in the original Broadway companies of Oliver!, Pickwick (musical), and the Stratford Festival/Broadway production of The Pirates of Penzance.[ citation needed ]
On Christmas Day, 2012, Lokos and his wife Susanna Weiss boarded Air Bagan Flight 11 which crashed while landing in Myanmar. Doctors in Thailand said that he could not possibly survive his injuries. [1] Yet he did and has gone on to thrive in his teaching and writing. His book, Through the Flames, tells the story of the accident and offers a wide array of teachings from the Buddhist perspective. His against all odds recovery and joyful outlook have become an inspiration for many.
Karuṇā is generally translated as compassion or mercy and sometimes as self-compassion or spiritual longing. It is a significant spiritual concept in the Indic religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism.
Engaged Buddhism, also known as socially engaged Buddhism, refers to a Buddhist social movement that emerged in Asia in the 20th century, composed of Buddhists who are seeking ways to apply the Buddhist ethics, insights acquired from meditation practice, and the teachings of the Buddhist dharma to contemporary situations of social, political, environmental and economic suffering, and injustice. Finding its roots in Vietnam through the Thiền Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh, Engaged Buddhism was popularised by the Indian jurist, politician, and social reformer B. R. Ambedkar who inspired the Dalit Buddhist movement in the 1950s, and has since grown by spreading to the Indian subcontinent and the West.
Mark Epstein is an American author and psychotherapist who integrates Shakyamuni Buddha's teachings with Sigmund Freud's approaches to trauma. He often writes about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy.
Tricycle: The Buddhist Review is an independent, nonsectarian Buddhist quarterly that publishes Buddhist teachings, practices, and critique. "A beacon for Western Buddhists," the magazine has been recognized for its willingness to challenge established ideas within Buddhist communities and beyond. It is based in New York City.
The term American Buddhism can be used to describe all Buddhist groups within the United States, including Asian-American Buddhists born into the faith, who comprise the largest percentage of Buddhists in the country.
Buddhist meditation is the practice of meditation in Buddhism. The closest words for meditation in the classical languages of Buddhism are bhāvanā and jhāna/dhyāna.
A Jewish Buddhist is a person with a Jewish background who practices forms of Dhyanam Buddhist meditation, chanting or spirituality. When the individual practices a particular religion, it may be both Judaism and Buddhism. However, their ethnic designation is often Jewish while the individual's main religious practice is Buddhism.
Upekṣā is the Buddhist concept of equanimity. As one of the Brahma-viharas, virtues of the "Brahma realm", it is one of the wholesome mental factors cultivated on the Buddhist path to nirvāna through the practice of jhāna.
The Vipassanā movement, also called the Insight Meditation Movement and American vipassana movement, refers to a branch of modern Burmese Theravāda Buddhism which promotes "bare insight" (sukha-vipassana) to attain stream entry and preserve the Buddhist teachings, which gained widespread popularity since the 1950s, and to its western derivatives which have been popularised since the 1970s, giving rise to the more dhyana-oriented mindfulness movement.
Air Bagan Limited was an airline headquartered in Bahan Township, Yangon, Myanmar. It operated domestic scheduled services within Myanmar, as well as to Thailand. Its main bases were Yangon International Airport and Mandalay International Airport.
Jack Kornfield is an American author and teacher in the Vipassana movement in American Theravada Buddhism. He trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma and India, first as a student of the Thai forest master Ajahn Chah and Mahasi Sayadaw of Burma. He has taught meditation worldwide since 1974 and is one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practices to the West. In 1975, he co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, and subsequently in 1987, Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. Kornfield has worked as a peacemaker and activist, organized teacher trainings, and led international gatherings of Buddhist teachers including the Dalai Lama.
Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu is an American Buddhist monk and author. Belonging to the Thai Forest Tradition, for 10 years he studied under the forest master Ajahn Fuang Jotiko. Since 1993 he has served as abbot of the Metta Forest Monastery in San Diego County, California—the first monastery in the Thai Forest Tradition in the US—which he cofounded with Ajahn Suwat Suvaco.
Sharon Salzberg is a New York Times bestselling author and teacher of Buddhist meditation practices in the West. In 1974, she co-founded the Insight Meditation Society at Barre, Massachusetts, with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. Her emphasis is on vipassanā (insight) and mettā (loving-kindness) methods, and has been leading meditation retreats around the world for over three decades. All of these methods have their origins in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. Her books include Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (1995), A Heart as Wide as the World (1999), Real Happiness - The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program (2010), which was on The New York Times Best Seller list in 2011, and the follow-up Real Happiness at Work (2013). She runs a Metta Hour podcast, and contributes monthly to a column On Being.
Tonglen is Tibetan for 'giving and taking', and refers to a meditation practice found in Tibetan Buddhism.
Joseph Goldstein is one of the first American vipassana teachers, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) with Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, a contemporary author of numerous popular books on Buddhism, a resident guiding teacher at IMS, and a leader of retreats worldwide on insight (vipassana) and lovingkindness (metta) meditation.
Larry Rosenberg is an American Buddhist teacher who founded the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1985. He is also a resident teacher there. Rosenberg was a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and Harvard Medical School. In addition to teaching at the Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge, he is also a senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts.
Ken McLeod is a senior Western translator, author, and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. He received traditional training mainly in the Shangpa Kagyu lineage through a long association with his principal teacher, Kalu Rinpoche, whom he met in 1970. McLeod resides in Los Angeles, where he founded Unfettered Mind. He has currently withdrawn from teaching, and no longer conducts classes, workshops, meditation retreats, individual practice consultations, or teacher training.
Secular Buddhism—sometimes also referred to as agnostic Buddhism, Buddhist agnosticism, ignostic Buddhism, atheistic Buddhism, pragmatic Buddhism, Buddhist atheism, or Buddhist secularism—is a broad term for a form of Buddhism based on humanist, skeptical, and agnostic values, valuing pragmatism and (often) naturalism, eschewing beliefs in the supernatural or paranormal. It can be described as the embrace of Buddhist rituals and philosophy for their secular benefits by people who are atheist or agnostic.
Sylvia Boorstein is an American author, psychotherapist, and Buddhist teacher.
Anne Cushman is a teacher of yoga as exercise and meditation, an author on the intersection of those topics long thought to be distinct but now widely called Mindful Yoga, and a novelist. Her novel Enlightenment for Idiots was named by Booklist as one of the top ten novels of 2008.