Buddhism, the four noble truths, mindfulness, interbeing, and the five mindfulness trainings — Dharma teacher Terry Cortes-Vega brings three decades of practice and teaching to this warm, wide-ranging conversation with Philip Jones.

Buddhism, the four noble truths, mindfulness, interbeing, and the five mindfulness trainings — Dharma teacher Terry Cortes-Vega brings three decades of practice and teaching to this warm, wide-ranging conversation with Philip Jones. Terry didn't come to Buddhism through calm or curiosity. She came through grief — the death of her father from brain cancer and the rage she directed at the God she'd grown up trusting. What she found instead, at a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh in Santa Barbara, wasn't doctrine but presence. The moment a small Vietnamese monk floated to a podium without saying a word, she fell in love. This episode traces her journey from Methodist Houston childhood to ordained Dharma teacher, exploring the four noble truths, the wave and the ocean, interbeing, beginner's mind, and why the Buddha's five precepts are not commandments but invitations — ones even the Dalai Lama doesn't follow perfectly. They also explore what it means to teach meditation inside prisons for 35 years, the difference between the wave and the water, why suffering is not the enemy but the teacher, and the twelve-word poem Terry offered at her lamp transmission ceremony: Be still and know. Be still and not know. Be still. Be. Drop a comment below — which of those four phrases lands most for where you are right now?