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Monday, August 3, 2026
Via Daily Dharma: Cultivating Metta
Sunday, August 2, 2026
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation /// Words of Wisdom - August 2, 2026 🌞
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Via GBF /// "The Bard and the Buddha: Finding Your Refuge in the World of Shakespeare" with Matthew Perifano
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A new dharma talk, from our very own Matthew Perifano, has been added to the GBF website and podcast.
The Bard and the Buddha: Finding Refuge in the World of Shakespeare - Matthew Perifano
In this moving and lyrical talk, Matthew Perifano shares how he found a sense of true refuge when facing deep grief and the uncertainty of life.
Matthew shares how he began weaving together the wisdom of the Dharma with the timeless plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare. He describes how his relationship with these texts evolved from a daunting college requirement into a vital mind-body practice that eventually helped him navigate the devastating losses of the AIDS epidemic. He suggests that when we lend our own voices and bodies to these words, we can discover that we are never alone in our suffering, finding a profound sense of compassion—or karuna—that transcends time and space.
Matthew illustrates how the insights of the Buddha are often hiding in plain sight within the Bard's greatest works, offering we several "Shakespeare Dharma" keys to unlock our own understanding of reality:
- Finding Refuge in Grief: He explains how Sonnet 30 helped him move through personal loss by revealing that our "precious friends hid in death’s dateless night" connect us to a universal experience of suffering, turning art into a path through pain rather than just an escape from it.
- Presence in the Ordinary: Drawing from his own "transcendent experience" while washing dishes and the poetry of Layman Pang, he reminds we that spiritual activity is found in the most basic daily affairs, like drawing water or carrying wood.
- The Trap of Papancha: He uses the jealous rants of King Leantes from The Winter's Tale to demonstrate papancha, or mental proliferation—the tendency of our minds to spin "nothing" into a suffocating storm of obsessive, illusory thoughts.
- Life as a Dream: He concludes with Prospero’s famous speech from The Tempest, which he calls "Shakespeare’s Diamond Sutra," to help we contemplate how all conditioned things are essentially "such stuff as dreams are made on".
Enjoy 900+ free recorded dharma talks at https://gaybuddhist.org/
Via Daily Dharma: Always Hope
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Saturday, August 1, 2026
Via Daily Dharma: The Gift of Death
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Friday, July 31, 2026
Via FB \\ Thomas Gibble - My Thought for Today
My Thought for Today (LGBT Warning!)
I sometimes wonder if we have forgotten how hard-won acceptance really is.
I grew up in a time when being gay wasn’t a matter of announcing your pronouns or expecting the world to affirm your identity. For many of us, it was simply about survival.
I was once beaten up in an alley because someone perceived me as gay. I lived through a time when “coming out” could mean losing your family, your friends, your job, your church, or your place in the community.
We didn’t expect society to change overnight. We worked really hard for it. We came out. We told our stories. We educated people who had never knowingly met a gay person. We marched. We organized. We endured ridicule, rejection, violence, and, during the AIDS crisis, the loss of far too many of our friends.
And then we did it all over again. Often with grace.
Slowly—painfully—people began to understand.
And eventually, the public came around. Well, at least many of them.
That’s why I sometimes struggle with the expectation that everyone must immediately understand and embrace every new identity, every new term, and every new set of pronouns—or risk being labeled hateful or bigoted.
Let me be clear: I believe every person deserves dignity, safety, and basic human respect. No one should be bullied or mistreated because of who they are.
But I also believe that acceptance is something you build. It takes time. It takes patience. It’s not something you can simply demand.
The gay and lesbian movement spent decades building bridges to a society that didn’t want us or understand us. We didn’t win people over by insisting that they instantly understand everything about us. We invited them into the conversation. We showed them who we were. We gave them time to catch up.
Perhaps that’s the part I wish we remembered.
The generations coming after us are standing on ground that was fought for by me, my generation, and the people who came before us. That’s a wonderful thing. It’s what progress is supposed to accomplish.
But inherited progress can sometimes make the struggle that created it invisible.
Do I need to say that again?
So here’s my thought: Maybe we need a little less outrage and a little more patience. A little less “You must accept me right now” and a little more “Let me help you understand.”
Because I know what it’s like to be told that I didn’t belong.
And I also know that the most powerful way to change someone’s mind isn’t to demand that they change it.
It’s to give them a reason to.
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