What is the subject of your dharma talk with Tricycle? It’s titled “The Gift of Attention,” and it explores how generosity is a building block of happiness. There is a particular focus on how giving our attention can shape experience toward well-being.
Can you explain the work of your organization, SanghaSeva? SanghaSeva offers retreats that explore the relationship between dharma teachings and our capacity to meet suffering in the world skillfully. We believe meditation and activism go hand in hand and are mutually supportive. We offer retreats that combine meditation with action in humanitarian and ecological projects—for example, supporting olive farmers during the olive harvest or when they are planting trees. Our experience, in over twenty years of doing this, is that our understanding of dharma grows through acts of service, and our capacity to engage in wholesome ways is nourished by our dharma understanding.
When I reflect on my own journey, I see how much the SanghaSeva retreats have contributed to the cultivation of beautiful qualities such as equanimity, compassion, appreciation, generosity, patience, and wisdom.
These qualities are priceless, and they are a source of well-being that is not conditioned by things going a certain way.
What drew you to Buddhist practice? As a child, I spent a few years in Bangkok with my family. I loved visiting the temples and, in particular, watching the monastics on their alms rounds in the mornings. The joy on the faces of householders as they offered food to the monastics is incredibly vivid in my memory. This sparked an interest in Buddhism that led me to learn more about it as a teenager, and to attend my first meditation retreat in my 20s.
How do you deal with feelings of doubt or uncertainty in your practice? I remember that doubt is a hindrance, and that it is extremely convincing! I encourage myself to open the space in awareness and in the body, so that I can unhook from the belief in, and the identification with, the doubt. I then work with it through the body—opening space and relaxing.
Depending on how the experience unfolds, I often bring in a way of looking at the feeling that helps to dispel the doubt, such as metta for myself, or seeing the doubt as an appearance that is not me or mine.
What do you say to students who come to you in despair about the state of the world? I listen, I resonate, and I encourage us to bring compassion to ourselves in these moments of despair. To hold the pain arising in the face of greed, hatred, delusion, and their consequences, and through meeting the pain in tenderness, to open to the great love that is within that pain. That love, alongside compassion and the wisdom that is telling us that it doesn’t have to be this way, can sustain us and provide resources for a skillful response.
I also invite people to reflect on the teachings as practices, and to find a thread of teachings/practice that feels accessible, supportive, and onward-leading. Lastly, I suggest finding a course of action. Despair is closely connected to helplessness. It is immensely helpful to remember the interconnected web of life we are all a part of, and to act in the service of that interconnected web in whatever ways are possible.
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In February 2025, watch Zohar Lavie’s Dharma Talk at tricycle.org/dharmatalks.
Lavie’s teaching schedule can be found at DependentOrigination.org.
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