Walk the Talk Show with Waylon Lewis.

Despite Redford’s chaos—laying on the camera, chewing bones, disconnecting the camera cords—and despite Google+ going down worldwide for two hours, Frank Berliner, Waylon’s mentor and Buddhist teacher, go off, have lunch, wait for Google+ to come back and have a nice chat about mindfulness becoming hyper-popular in the speediest country on earth.

Frank Berliner: The point that’s being made here about really going deeply into mindfulness is that it’s about making friends with one’s neurotic speed, one’s stress, one’s aggression, one’s anxiety. And that requires courage and it requires an actual commitment of one’s self. It’s not bad, but it controls our life.

Waylon Lewis: Our task or our duty or our path is to make friends with that speed and aggression, not to get rid of it. 

Frank Berliner: It’s not bad, but it controls our life. To the degree that we’re unaware of it, it is harmful. To the degree that we are able to see it and become aware of it, it no longer controls our life. We are only controlled by that which we do not see clearly. Part of mindfulness is being able to see clearly that which drives us.

Elephant is psyched to be working in partnership with Google+ on our new live video series, which features three live videos a week (that can be watched later, too).

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Last year, Frank was a guest on Walk the Talk Show with Waylon Lewis at Shine in Boulder:

Waylon talks with Frank Berliner about how meditation can help the everyday person and not just the ponytailed guru on the mountaintop:

In the second segment, Frank discusses his memoir, Falling in Love with the Buddha, which recalls his experiences with Chogyam Trungpa, his spiritual teacher and a major influence for many American Buddhists:

Frank Berliner 

Frank W. Berliner grew up in New York and was educated at Yale, where he received his BA, and Naropa University, where he earned an MA in Transpersonal Counseling. He has studied, practiced and taught meditation for 40 years as a close student of the founder of Naropa, the Tibetan Buddhist meditation master Chogyam Trungpa.

Over a 12 year period from 1980-1992, Mr. Berliner served as National Administrative Director of Shambhala Training, and the Executive Director and Resident Teacher of the Berkeley Shambhala Center.

He is now an Associate Professor of Contemplative Psychology at Naropa University, where he has taught Buddhist and Western Existential Psychology, and the practice of meditation, to BA and MA students since 1995. Mr. Berliner pioneered the teaching of meditation online at Naropa, beginning in 1999. Between 2001 and 2007 he was the buddhadharma columnist for elephant magazine.

In 2012 he published “Falling in Love with a Buddha”, a memoir of his experiences as a ‘warrior apprentice’ to Chogyam Trungpa. He is currently finishing “The Living Buddha Within You”, based on his integration of the Buddhist and Shambhala teachings of Chogyam Trungpa, which will be published in September of 2014.

Frank is also a psychotherapist and life coach in private practice in Boulder, Colorado.

Relephant:

Buddhadharma, via Frank Berliner: The Four Reminders, Meditation Practice, Renunciation and Retreat.

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Editor: Rachel Nussbaum

Photos: Frank Berliner