Hi Mind Bod Squad!!
This week we’re hanging with the legendary Sam Bercholz: refugee kid turned founder of Shambhala Publications, the prolific dharma press behind many of the books on your shelf. In 1968, a London publisher handed him a manuscript by a Tibetan lama in Scotland whom Sam had never heard of. He read it sitting on the bed of a five-pound-a-night room, and it felt like it was speaking straight to him. It was Chögyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action, and it became Shambhala’s first book. Thousands followed.
Sam’s path started with a burlesque-house-singing Chan teacher who’d break into song mid-teaching. It deepened over decades as a close student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Kyabje Thinley Norbu Rinpoche, who empowered him to teach. Sam calls himself irreverent but totally orthodox, and you can see where he got both. His new book Rude Awakenings: An Unconventional Guide to the Buddhist Path opens in the spirit of an AA meeting: he’s addicted… to believing his own thoughts! “I am like this total mess that’s cheerful,” he tells us.
Under the jokes is real conviction. Sam is orthodox about the integrity of practice because the dharma took shape through centuries of trial and error by people who were practicing deeply. He takes the practice seriously. Himself, not so much, as you’ll see from all the fun we have together 🙂
We talk about:
How a manuscript from Chögyam Trungpa in 1968 became the first Shambhala Publications book
Why Sam had a “panic breakdown” working in Washington politics, and how that sent him looking for something genuine
Emptiness vs. fullness: how the word shunyata might be better translated as “full” than “empty”
Why becoming “helpful, cheerful humans” is the real measure of the path
What gets lost when practice skips the foundational groundwork
Why meditation isn’t for lowering your blood pressure (as Sam puts it, you can just go to the drugstore for that!)
The Adventure
Sam distills a vajrayana visualization meditation down to the elemental heart: we eat the sun!
Eyes open, gaze tilted slightly up, he guides us through a clouded sky that slowly clears until the sun comes through. We rest there, feeling the whole body in that light as thoughts come and go.
Then the turn: the sun comes down behind the senses and settles in the heart, so the light that was in the sky is now inside. From there, we look back out at the world, radiant and alive.
Let us know in the comments what came up for you during the sun practice :)
Till next time,
