Transcript/History My name is Joe Evans and I've been studying Buddhism with my teacher switching camp, which are very important for 17 or 18 years now, close to 18 years now. And, uh, yeah, I've, I've had a wonderful journey and I really, really am grateful for the practice that I have now. Um, so I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, and I'm a musician. I play violin in the Utah Symphony. And, uh, yeah, the, the way I got into Buddhism. [...]

Transcript/History Hi. My name is Christopher and I am a father. I have two boys. I have Ronan and Teague. I'm married, I have a regular job. I am a currently I am a corporate instructional designer and I do that 40 to 50 hours a week. And then on my free time, I'm a lay minister with the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship. I'm the founding sensei there, and I am from a kind of a newer tradition called the Bright Dawn Way [...]

Transcript/History Hi. My name is Cynthia McCormick. I'm 69. I'm divorced. I was married for 27 years and I have three children and three grandchildren. What was coming to my mind as we sat down right here, as I was thinking of the day when I was sitting in my house, I was married and I was sitting in in the little corner where that I had set up for me, where I had my spiritual books piled up, you know, and my [...]

Biography My experience with Tibetan Buddhism as both a student and teacher has been truly life changing. I have been drawn to the Himalayan region of the world since I was a small child, and realizing that the path I was on wasn't working , more than 20 odd years ago,  I started to study the Buddhadharma in earnest. Having been both a student and teacher of the Dharma has led to many experiences on both a spiritual and personal level that I [...]

And so it’s fit well with my traditional, the way I had been before I found Buddhism, which was as an agnostic or atheist. So this there wasn’t any conflict between those different philosophies of life. The other part of Buddhism that I was extremely attracted to is that it was besides the fact that it gave you a pathway, a curriculum, it was very laid out to achieve this wisdom and this peace that comes from that.

I resonated with Buddhism because of its emphasis on silent meditation. I was always attracted to silent meditation, remembering the quiet time after Communion and silent prayer in Christian traditions. The old saying, “Be quiet and you will know God."

So my parents immigrated in the 1970s. And so I grew up there and I was born into a Won Buddhist household. My dad was a very devout Won Buddhist. My mom was a Presbyterian.

And then at a certain point in around 30 years old, you know, I just was extremely unhappy and it seemed like I shouldn't be because I had, you know, done all the schooling and then gotten these good jobs and then was, you know, making money, which was supposed to be a really important thing, you know, in acquiring the assets. And and I was looking at my life and it just dawned on me that, Wow, you know what? I have all these things and I am actually very empty inside. I don't feel fulfilled.

You could say I found what I was looking for in the first text I read – the logic was clear and simple and fit my experience. I met my teacher a couple years after that and never looked back.

I didn't have the pressure of parents. I didn't have the pressure of religion. I didn't have a pressure of society. I was on a quest to finding who I was, and it was a very interesting.

I'm a combat veteran, I work with veterans. I teach martial arts. I teach haiku. I'm the resident haiku poet at the Japanese Culture Center and the Labor Lay Buddhist chaplain at the Jesse Brown VA Hospital.

My first exposure to Buddhism wasn’t significant. In fact, it was a turn off. A man who claimed to be Buddhist visited our high school and basically told our class his goal was to become a heartless robot. Well, not entirely, but pretty much… There wasn’t any joy.