E-letter No. 268: October 2025

Dear Friends,

Thank you for supporting the Archive and for subscribing to our monthly eletters. We hope you are safe and well, and we deeply appreciate you showing up and staying connected.

In this issue you’ll learn how your legacy can help sustain and grow the “family feeling” that Lama Yeshe spoke about half a century ago, and how we’re carrying that spirit forward through our Family Feeling Project, including the exciting new step of printing LYWA books in India.

From the archives, we’re featuring a short video excerpt of Lama Yeshe, a podcast teaching on karma piling up by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, newly published excerpts from Big Love, and fresh additions to Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Online Advice Book.

your Legacy: Growing the family feeling

Books open the wisdom eye; you can understand death and the nature of the mind; they teach you how to develop compassion; they bring world peace.
—Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Thanks to the generosity of a legacy benefactor, LYWA can now ship books free of charge to any FPMT center, study group, project, or service worldwide (excluding Big Love). This is part of our Family Feeling Project, which aims to strengthen connections across the FPMT community by freely sharing LYWA books and making the Dharma even more accessible. Each group can request up to two boxes of books annually, with larger regional shipments available depending on stock. Reach out to us if you are interested or have any questions!

Your support makes our work possible and helps preserve a living legacy of Dharma benefit for future generations. One meaningful way to sustain these offerings and help grow the family feeling is through planned giving. By including LYWA in your will or estate plans, you help ensure that the teachings of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche continue to reach students far into the future. No matter the size, every legacy gift keeps these precious teachings alive and available to all.

In this same spirit, we’ve also started printing books directly in India to make them easier to access and to reduce shipping costs and customs challenges. In June, a printer in New Delhi produced 2,000 copies of Becoming Your Own Therapist and 3,000 copies of our new catalog, which were distributed to several centers in India and to Kopan Monastery. Encouraged by how well this worked, we went on to print two more of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s titles—Virtue and Reality and How Things Exist—with 2,000 copies of each going to centers in India and Nepal.

From the Video Archive: Overcome Problems with Dharma Wisdom

In this brief video excerpt, Lama Yeshe explains how partisanship is a manifestation of the dualistic mind, why our Dharma practice is weakened by ego-grasping at sense pleasures and how we can transform our problems into joy by applying Dharma wisdom. You can also watch all four sessions from these teachings on the LYWA YouTube channel. These teachings were hosted by Maitreya Instituut in Naarden, the Netherlands, in October 1980.

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.

On the LYWA Podcast: A Mountain of Karma

We have this negative karma collected on our mental continuum, and we have to do something to clean it, to purify it. If we do nothing, it piles up like mountains and we will experience life’s problems again and again, again and again, because the negative karma is still there. 
—Lama Zopa Rinpoche
 

This month on the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive podcast, Lama Zopa Rinpoche urges us to face the facts: our problems arise from our own karma. It is not enough to feel regret; we must apply the treatment, the method that will serve as an antidote to this poisonous karma piling up in our mind stream. Rinpoche gave these teachings on karma during a lamrim course at Maitreya Instituut in the Netherlands in August 1990. You can follow along with the transcript on our website.

The LYWA podcast contains hundreds of hours of audio, each with links to the accompanying lightly edited transcripts. See the LYWA podcast page to search or browse the entire collection by topic or date, and for easy instructions on how to subscribe. 

wrapping up The BIG LOVE AUDIOBOOK HEART PROJECT 

We are officially concluding the Big Love Audiobook Heart Project this month with Janet Brooke, the project’s organizer, offering a recitation of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Prayer for Lama’s Swift Return from the Appendix of Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe.

This heartfelt prayer for Lama Yeshe’s swift return was composed by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who wrote:

Because of the merits of writing this prayer, may our great virtuous friend reincarnate quickly, without delay, and guide us sentient beings by revealing with skillful means the profound and extensive teachings which have the power to subdue the minds of all those to whom they are shown; may all students fulfill Lama’s wishes, and may all migratory beings quickly achieve Lama Heruka’s stage.

Our deep thanks to all of Lama Yeshe’s students who contributed their time and voices to this audiobook. The project offers a rare and moving opportunity to hear Lama Yeshe’s extraordinary life story told by those who lived it.

And if you enjoy listening to audiobooks, you'll appreciate browsing the LYWA Audiobook Catalog, which features some of our most popular titles by Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche—available as free audiobooks on Google Play and for purchase on Audible. You can also listen on the LYWA YouTube channel, where you’ll find favorites like Becoming Your Own Therapist and How to Practice Dharma.

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, The Sadhana Within, featured as our monthly teaching below, Lama Yeshe discusses the burden of taking on too many commitments and that by doing one thing perfectly, we can attain everything. In the second teaching, The Nature of Dissatisfaction, Lama Yeshe advises that we must check up on our desire to be happy and to avoid suffering.

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!

Don't miss out on the new entries to Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Online Advice Book we've added this month. Each year, we include over 100 new pieces of advice on various topics, bringing the total to more than 2,600 entries now available on our website.

• How to Help the Turkeys at Thanksgiving: Rinpoche offered this advice on how to help the tens of millions of turkeys being killed for the Thanksgiving holiday in the USA.
   
• The Merit of Offering Service to the Guru: In this letter, with many quotations about correctly following the guru, Rinpoche advised that we collect skies of merit and purify eons of negative karma by pleasing the guru and making offerings with devotion and respect.
   
• Enjoy Your Life with Bodhicitta: A new student wrote to Rinpoche requesting life practices. In his response, Rinpoche emphasized the benefits of practicing tonglen and nyung nä.

You can always find a list of all the newly posted advices from Lama Zopa Rinpoche on our website.

Be sure to stay connected—we’ll soon be sharing our exciting (and truly not boring, we promise!) new strategic plan in upcoming mailings. We’re genuinely inspired by it and think you will be too. Together, we’re carrying forward the unique expression of Dharma taught and lived by Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Consider contributing today to help sustain our shared Dharma legacy.

As always, thank you for all your love and support.

Big love,

Nick Ribush
Director and the LYWA team

THIS MONTH'S TEACHING: The Sadhana Within

Sometimes Dharma becomes a complete hassle. Let’s say you have promised to do this sadhana daily, you have commitment. But whenever you see Tara Cittamani you feel sick. “Oh, it’s already midnight!” And you are disaster. But if you can do it in two minutes, that’s OK. So instead of having guilt feelings, just go and do it. Sometimes Westerners take too many commitments and don’t know how to do them. In other words, they are lost again, lost in spiritual materialism. You don’t know what to do. Chenrezig and Tara and all these deities and you don’t know what on earth it means and you don’t understand anymore.

Instead of becoming helpful for you, Dharma becomes your enemy. Dharma becomes cause for neurosis and guilt. I think that is useless.

In each sadhana you’ ll find a refuge prayer, maybe three times, five or six bodhicitta prayers and some kind of Vajrasattva practice. One good bodhicitta meditation is enough. Put your emphasis on one thing and go quickly over the others. Do this rather than allowing your practice to become a disaster.

Atisha once said, “Tibetan people devote themselves to a hundred deities and don’t attain one, whereas Indian people devote themselves to one deity and attain a hundred.” I think Atisha is reasonable and correct. The Indian custom is much better than the Tibetan. That’s garbage. Do one thing perfectly and attain everything.

Tara is a perfect example. If you practice every day and do retreat for months, years—maybe you do only Tara retreat for fifty years—then in fifty years, by attaining the realization of Tara, you can do anything. But right now, you are ambitious for other things because you don’t have anything. And the same thing happens with the Dharma. Let’s say that somebody is giving a really high teaching. “Wow! I want to take this one—this one is really powerful!” If you say this, you are really on a power trip. You want power. If you are not realistic, then this practice is useless. I’m sorry; I have no room for this. Such a student will never have any satisfaction no matter how many teachings he receives, because he won’t have any practical sadhana within himself.

Lama Yeshe gave this teaching at Kopan Monastery, Kathmandu, Nepal, in 1979. It is published in chapter 17 of Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe and can be found here on our website.