In a world that often feels like it’s spinning toward division and despair, the question of how to live a good life takes on a new urgency. This was the central inquiry of Lion’s Roar’s recent summit, How to Live a Good Human Life from 23–27 October, where a diverse group of meditation, mindfulness, and Buddhist teachers gathered to offer a toolkit for grounded, compassionate engagement. Against a US backdrop of what Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Clinic, described as a “full-court press move towards autocracy,” the message was clear: the Buddha’s diagnosis of the human condition—that suffering arises from greed, hatred, and delusion—is as accurate today as it was 2,600 years ago. And so is the prescription: wake up.
This call to wakefulness, however, was presented not as a distant, lofty goal, but as an innate capacity we can all access right now. A recurring theme was the profound demystification of mindfulness itself. Insight meditation teacher and author Dawn Mauricio playfully challenged the audience with a simple exercise: “For about 10 seconds,” she instructed, “don’t be mindful.” As the exercise demonstrated, this is almost impossible; the very act of noticing that one isn’t being mindful is, in fact, an act of mindfulness. “You were mindful that you weren’t mindful,” she pointed out with a smile. This, she explained, proves that mindfulness is not a special skill for a chosen few, but our “natural essence,” a quality of kind, non-judgmental attention already available to us.
Tibetan Buddhist teacher and author Gaylon Ferguson expanded on this, comparing mindfulness to a basic human faculty we use all the time, like paying attention to our clothes or toothbrush. “It’s something natural,” he said. “It’s a basic human capacity to pay attention and to be present in any activity.” The practice, then, is not about acquiring something new, but about training this innate ability, much like we strengthen a muscle at the gym. We learn to place our “bare attention” on a single point—like the breath—and gently sustain it there.
But what happens when we bring this trained attention to our inner world? The speakers were remarkably candid about the messy, human reality of practice. Dawn Mauricio shared her own early missteps, approaching meditation with the intensity of an overachiever. “I would almost approach my mind with the attitude of, ‘you have one job . . . and you can’t even do that,’” she confessed. This self-judgmental harshness, cultivated on the cushion, eventually spilled into her relationships until her family staged an intervention. Her realization was pivotal: “Not only what I was doing was important . . . but how I was doing it also mattered.” She learned to trade the “clenched fist” of striving for the soft, curious trust that allows genuine opening to occur.
This normalization of our human fallibility was a breath of fresh air. Gaylon Ferguson reminded us that the thinking process is a natural part of our existence (he even invited us to a “thoughts party” prior to engaging in formal practice!), while Buddhist teacher and professor of religion emeritus Jan Willis, with delightful honesty, admitted her own struggles with patience. “If you ever drive with me,” she laughed, “you know . . . I am likely to say aloud, ‘It’s a green light!’” Her point was that these human imperfections are the very field where we practice. “Until we attain enlightenment,” she noted, “patience is the best substitute.”
The summit made it clear that this practice doesn’t end with personal calm. Mindfulness is the anchor that enables insight and ethical action in the world. As mindfulness teacher and Nonprofit founder Caverly Morgan powerfully explained, “Energy follows attention.” She used the analogy of a flashlight: our life force illuminates whatever our attention lands on. When we unconsciously dwell on stories of not being good enough, our energy follows. The practice is to consciously notice this habit and redirect the flashlight of our attention to what is real and present—the breath, the sounds in the room, the sensations in our feet. “It’s about realizing that the flashlight is in our hand,” she said. “It’s about realizing we have choice.”
This choice extends to how we show up in our communities. Harvard professor and Zen roshi Bob Waldinger shared universal values drawn from Buddhist tradition—integrity, harmlessness, truthfulness, respect, and interconnection—as a tested foundation for a good life. “These principles are not just for formally religious people,” he said. “They are for anyone who wants to live with more alignment between their values and their actions.” He encouraged making these commitments public, transforming them from nice ideas into lived reality.
The ultimate insight was that our personal practice is inextricably linked to the well-being of the whole. The “good life” is a social one. Author and Asian American Buddhist advocate Chenxing Han addressed the modern crisis of loneliness, noting that “in an age where so many forces conspire toward destruction . . . the power of our collective karma to cultivate presence, care, connection, friendship, and kinship is greater than the countervailing forces.” This sense of radical interconnectedness was the summit’s heartbeat. Jon Kabat-Zinn urged us to move from the “story of me” to the “story of we,” recognizing that the divisions we see are the “auto-immune disease of humanity.” Jan Willis reminded us of our fundamental sameness: “In wishing happiness and wishing to avoid suffering, we are all exactly the same.”
Pastoral counselor and community Dharma leader Pamela Ayo Yetunde brought this message home with a stirring reflection on the Buddha’s own moment of doubt before his awakening. Faced with the suffering of the world, he considered retreating into a hermitage forever—a move she called “insecure introversion.” It took a divine nudge to convince him that others, too, had the capacity to awaken. “Are we, like the Buddha, afraid that the goodness we have to offer will not be understood?” she asked. In our current time of decline, the easy choice is to retreat to our own hermitages of despair. But the heroic journey, she argued, is to “push past the psychic barriers to connect with others,” to actualize our interconnection even when the quality of empathy is vilified.
The summit closed not with a naive optimism, but with a resilient hope, perfectly captured in a quote from historian Howard Zinn that Jon Kabat-Zinn shared: “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.”
The good human life, it seems, is not a destination we arrive at, but a moment-to-moment choice to cultivate our innate wakefulness, to meet our own imperfections with kindness, and to courageously choose connection over isolation. It is about realizing that the flashlight is in our hand, and directing its beam, again and again, toward the compassion and interconnection that have always been there, waiting in the same heart we all share.
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