Beyond the Cushion is a multi-year documentary and storytelling project exploring how everyday people in the West are living the Dharma. Through in-depth interviews, portrait photography, and honest reflections, the project captures the heart of modern Buddhist practice—rooted in tradition, shaped by culture, and deeply personal.

Themes We Explore:

• The transformation of lay practice in a fast-paced, digital world
• Lineage and innovation: how people honor tradition while adapting to modern life
• Sangha as refuge: why community still matters
• The tension between secular mindfulness and spiritual depth
• Buddhism across cultures and identities—especially voices less often heard
• What it means to live the path authentically, off the cushion and in daily life

If you’re new to Buddhism…

This project is a window into what the path can look like in real life—beyond the Instagram quotes and meditation apps. Through these stories, you’ll see how real people navigate the highs and lows of life with wisdom, compassion, and presence.

In a spiritual landscape shaped by choice, fluid identity, and endless options, the idea of lineage might seem like a relic—something rigid, outdated, or hierarchical. And yet, again and again in these interviews, lineage emerges as one of the most quietly transformative aspects of practice.

For many Western practitioners, the path begins with curiosity. A book. A meditation app. A yoga class. And often, those initial steps offer comfort, insight, and calm. But at some point, a deeper hunger appears—not just for tools, but for guidance. Not just for relief, but for transformation. And that’s where lineage enters the picture.

Lineage, in these stories, is not about blind devotion or clinging to tradition for its own sake. It’s about depth. Structure. Accountability. It’s about entering a stream that’s been flowing for generations, and allowing yourself to be shaped by something older, wiser, and larger than yourself.

Ben, a longtime practitioner who lived in a residential Buddhist center for over two decades, put it this way:

“Lineage is the antidote to spiritual consumerism. It keeps you honest. It keeps you grounded.”

For practitioners like Mark, it’s the clarity of the structure that brought his spirituality from a kind of floating inspiration into a real, embodied path. For Lennell, it was the ability to trace a thread—through teachers, through rituals, through lived culture—that gave her practice roots. For others, like Alex, lineage didn’t come until later in the journey—after years of exploration, when the need for depth finally outweighed the desire for novelty.

At the same time, lineage can raise complicated questions. What does it mean to enter a tradition not of your birth? What happens when cultural, racial, or gender identities are at odds with inherited forms? How do we honor lineage while making the Dharma accessible to new generations?

This theme explores both the beauty and the friction of lineage—how it challenges our ego, deepens our trust, and connects us to something real and tested. And perhaps more importantly, how lineage serves as a mirror: not just reflecting the past, but showing us what kind of practitioners we are willing to become.

Each face in this collection holds a story. A beginning. A turning point. A quiet perseverance.

These portraits are more than images—they are invitations. They represent real people who have committed, in their own ways, to walking the Dharma path amidst the complexities of modern life. Some were born into Buddhist families. Others arrived through loss, illness, activism, or sheer longing. What connects them is not uniformity, but sincerity.

As you move through these portraits, you’ll meet teachers and students, parents and monastics, immigrants and first-generation Americans, long-time practitioners and those just beginning. Every one of them sat for these photographs with vulnerability and courage—knowing their image would carry something beyond a smile or gaze. It would carry their practice.

Behind each portrait is a longer conversation—an in-depth interview about lineage, transformation, sangha, and the evolving face of Buddhism in the West. You can read excerpts from these stories, or simply let the images speak for themselves. Either way, what you’re seeing is the Dharma—alive, diverse, and unfolding in real time.

Start anywhere. Pause. Reflect.
These are portraits of the path as it is truly lived: imperfect, beautiful, human.