Sean Feit Oakes

Author: Sean Oakes

  • Chants: lokāḥ samastāḥ sukhino bhavantu

    We do this chant at the end of the Satsang meditation period. It’s an ancient mantra beloved in both the Buddhist and Hindu Yoga traditions, and translates roughly as: May all beings be at ease. OM, Peace, peace, peace. If you want to use it as a mantra to repeat, you could omit the “oṃ…

  • Mindfulness means intimacy

    Talk: Mindfulness as intimacy with ourselves, with the world through our senses, in relationship with each moment. Given at Vajrapani yoga and meditation retreat with Pete Guinosso. (10.2.15)

  • From this craving for power, this global disaster

    The core Buddhist doctrine of the Four Noble Truths is a lens through which to see the world, which is why it’s the heart of the path, described in the first limb, Right View. It explains the painful reality of the world in compellingly simple terms, offering a beautiful, if stark, framework for understanding who…

  • Yama and Mara: Hindu and Buddhist personifications of Death, a hypothesis

    Both Buddhism and Hinduism personify Death in the form of a deity. The two traditions’ imagination around this figure naturally has many overlaps, but I’m suddenly thinking about some that I can’t find any reference to in the scholarly literature. The correspondence is about the role of Death as Teacher, as appearing in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad,…

  • I have seen the yogi and he is us: Patañjali and the consolations of ambiguity

    One of the marks of a great text seems to be that it can be deeply important to wildly different people from cultures separated from each other by vast distances of time and space. A theater company in Kolkata establishes a reputation for cutting social realism by putting on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, while a British director in France hubristically (and with some success) attempts to stage the entire Mahabharata. A Japanese…

  • Devotion and doubt: race, religion, and postmodern kirtan

    After a long day of sessions, feeling with clients/students through the morass of feelings and confusions that seem to be the near-universal experience of being human around here, I light a dry leaf of white sage, shake off the fire, and walk slowly around the practice room both clearing the air and honoring the images…

  • Saffron-washing part 2: Response to Thich Nhat Hanh

    Several folks have posted this Thich Nhat Hanh (TNH) interview to me, after my recent dip into the Google-Mindfulness-Buddhism-Capitalism debate following the Wisdom 2.0 protest. There’s a good debate about it on Be Scofield’s Facebook wall, and a smaller one on mine after this post, and I don’t need to repeat many of the elements…

  • Mindfulness the Google Way: well-intentioned saffron-washing?

    For the last few years there’s been a growing uproar in San Francisco rooted in dismay and anger over ballooning rents, historically high eviction rates, and other markers of the intense gentrification that has been happening for 15 years or so — if I choose the tech boom of the 90s as a convenient recent…

  • “I am not my body”: a response to Matthew Remski

    This writing originated in a comment at the bottom of this great blog post of Matthew Remski’s, in which he continues to unpack the implications in this phrase, “I am not my body”, which first surfaced when used by Cameron Shayne as somehow yogic justification for his rant about how “No Problem!” it should be…

  • Inner and outer gaze in dharma and art practice

      I tell you that there is no making an end of suffering & stress without reaching the end of the cosmos. Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the…

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