E-letter No. 267: September 2025
Dear Friends,
Thank you for supporting our monthly e-letter. We hope this message finds you safe and well. Each month we feel deeply fortunate to be able to connect with you in this way and to share both the latest updates from our work and the timeless Dharma teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche.
In this issue, you’ll find news about our strategic planning process, an invitation to consider your Dharma legacy, and highlights from our work with Wisdom Publications.
From the archives, we’re featuring new video and podcast teachings by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, along with newly published excerpts from Lama Yeshe’s Big Love, now available on our website.
LYWA Strategic Planning: The Enduring Wisdom of Our Lamas
We are so grateful to all of you who support our mission to preserve and share the peerless wisdom of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. The LYWA team looks forward to continuing this work for many years to come, and to support this intention, we recently embarked on a strategic planning initiative. With the guidance of consultant Mark Green, we gathered input from staff, our Board, and FPMT colleagues to refine our vision, achieve alignment on our future direction as an organization, and create a Strategic Plan to share with you.
After the interviews were completed, the results were summarized and shared with participants in a group meeting. We confirmed our shared vision for who we are and what we excel at as an organization, aligned on future projects for transcribing, cataloging, publishing, and sharing the contents of the Archive and committed to strengthening our partnerships with the entire FPMT family.
Create Your Dharma Legacy
This month we feature below our collaboration with Wisdom Publications in preserving Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s lamrim teachings. The newly released How to Live and Die: The Transformative Power of Meditating on Impermanence presents Rinpoche’s guidance on the essential truth of impermanence—what death is, how to face it, and the mind to cultivate at the time of death. Rinpoche reminds us not to turn away, but to look directly at this reality.
With these profound teachings in mind, we invite you to consider including LYWA in your estate planning. Guided by our new strategic plan, we are committed to preserving and sharing the wisdom of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche for generations to come—and your support makes this possible. You can visit our Create Your Dharma Legacy page on our website to learn more about it. We deeply appreciate your consideration.
From the Video Archive: uniting the words with the heart
Visit and subscribe to the LYWA YouTube channel to explore our complete video collection of teachings by Lama Yeshe and many from Lama Zopa Rinpoche, available from our archive. For many more videos of Lama Zopa Rinpoche's teachings, visit the FPMT YouTube channel.
This month on the LYWA Podcast: The Best Use of Your Life
Ultimate happiness, liberation from samsara, enlightenment, everything,
—Lama Zopa Rinpoche
What's New On Our Website
This month, we’ve added two new teachings from Lama Yeshe, excerpted from Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe. In our first excerpt, Realizing Universal Reality, Lama Yeshe discusses how embracing totality itself becomes the antidote to a narrow, conceptualizing, dualistic mind. In the second teaching, The Tantric Viewpoint, Lama Yeshe explains the importance of recognizing and appreciating our divine quality.
Visit our new Big Love Teaching Excerpts webpage, where you’ll find a growing selection of teachings featured in the book. The teachings are organized by chapters, with easy navigation links. Be sure to check back often, as we’re adding new content every month!
LYWA & Wisdom: Preserving the Lineage Together
After years of working with Rinpoche on his Wish-fulfilling Golden Sun and the course transcripts from the Third through the Seventh Kopan Courses, I had this dream of publishing a series of Rinpoche’s detailed commentaries on each of the main lamrim topics.
We finally started to make the dream a reality when, in the early 2000s, Ven Labdron (Trisha Donnelly) and later Namdrol Adams went through all of Rinpoche’s teachings, putting the relevant teachings into what we called subject baskets: everything Rinpoche had taught on each topic. In the meantime, Ven Ailsa Cameron edited all of Rinpoche’s teachings on guru devotion into Heart of the Path, which in retrospect became the first volume in the series.
Then, in 2008, Gordon McDougall joined us and began editing the baskets, producing the next two volumes: How to Practice Dharma and The Perfect Human Rebirth. After that, Gordon began editing Rinpoche’s teachings from the path of the higher capable being (the great scope) for Wisdom, producing Bodhichitta, Six Perfections, Patience, Perseverance, and related titles Power of Mantra, Power of Meditation and Power of Mandala (see the Wisdom website for details). Now we return to Rinpoche’s teachings on the path of the lower capable being (the lower scope) with Wisdom's new book, How to Live and Die. Books on the three lower realms, refuge, karma and the path of the middle capable being are to follow.
Now we are collaborating with Wisdom Publications to carry this project forward as part of their Wisdom Culture Series. Wisdom is taking the lead on publishing the new volumes, while LYWA continues to support Gordon’s editing work and Wisdom’s efforts to bring the project to fruition.
You can read an excerpt from the newly released How to Live and Die in our monthly teaching below. Order a print or ebook copy by October 7 and save 20% with the code HLD20 at checkout on the Wisdom Publications website.
As always, thanks for all your love and support.
Big love,
Nick Ribush
Director and the LYWA team
THIS MONTH'S TEACHING: an education about death
We all need an education about death. Learning how to die doesn’t mean learning how to commit suicide. (I’ve heard there is actually a book written by a university lecturer on this subject!) The kind of education we all need is how to die well, how to have control over our death. If we ourselves can learn how to die well, that is the most important education we can gain in this life, and if we can help others die well, that is the most important service we can offer in this life.
To show somebody how to face death without fear and to control the mind is to do much more than close the door on the lower realms; it allows them to have a happy death and a better rebirth, where they can fully develop on the path. Irrespective of religious beliefs, the real key to a good death is to die with a mind freed from delusions, one full of compassion. If we can help somebody reach that level of mind, we have performed a very great service.
There are many examples of people who were not great meditators but who have died well. I remember an old monk living below the Everest center in Solu Khumbu who had been told by his abbot to continue his retreat on Chenrezig indefinitely. I think he was quite a fortunate person. After becoming sick, just before he died, he recovered a little. Not wanting to die in his room, he asked somebody to help him outside and to read the Bardo Thodröl (Tibetan Book of the Dead) to him. He understood that as the death process starts it is extremely difficult to recall all the things that are beneficial to remember, and that hearing the words of this book are a great guide to keeping a positive mind right through the death process. In that way, he was able to have an extremely peaceful and positive death.
At the same place there was a nun who had no problems at all at the time of death. She simply laid down in the lion’s posture and attained liberation. She evidently meditated for a certain number of days during the death process. When I checked with the other nuns in the nunnery about her, they told me that, while she had only taken a few lamrim teachings, she had done so much purification and had kept all her vows purely. She seemed to have been a wonderful person who, despite not having a deep understanding of philosophy, had a very kind and pure heart.