In this episode of Living Dharma, co-hosts Tsunma Kunsang Palmo and Justin Kelley sit down with Jess Morey, a meditation teacher whose own path began at fourteen, on a teen retreat at the Insight Meditation Society. Asked what applying the Dharma means to her, she answers in a single word, everything, and then narrows it to the work that fills her days now: mothering, and the delicate task of trusting a child's unfolding while gently steering it toward kindness.

Jess retraces a remarkable early journey, from those first retreats to a year in Burma and a wish to become a nun that a wise monk redirected with three words: go home and work. That redirection became a vocation. She co-founded Inward Bound Mindfulness Education to bring retreats to teenagers, and later the Contemplative Semester for young adults, learning along the way that the boss's chair reveals the qualities a meditation cushion can hide.

The conversation moves through the craft of teaching the young: why teenagers demand authenticity, how the crust on their hearts comes off so quickly in silence, and why diverse teachers, including those in recovery, matter so much. Jess speaks about trauma-sensitive practice grounded in unconditional positive regard, about when a young person is ready to meet emptiness and when they need a strong sense of self first, and about meeting her husband Doug in the shadow of serious illness. Throughout, she offers a quiet reassurance worth carrying: peace in the heart and mind is possible.

In this episode of Living Dharma, co-hosts Tsunma Kunsang Palmo and Justin Kelley welcome Nico and Devon Hase, husband-and-wife Buddhist teachers and authors who write about what happens when lofty ideals meet the rub of ordinary life. Their answer begins with getting real. The beautiful ideals of the Dharma, bodhicitta, compassion, stability of mind, have to come alive in exactly the places where we are pushed up against a wall.

Drawing on their books How Not to Be a Hot Mess and This Messy Gorgeous Love, and on the three-year retreat they completed together, Nico and Devon explore relationship as a genuine path of awakening. They talk about the ideal and the real as two ends of a rubber band, about making the inevitable rub of any relationship into practice, and about the conflict styles they call volcanoes, diplomats, and dodgers.

The conversation widens into some of the deeper questions facing modern practitioners. What is the difference between the worldview of Western psychology and the worldview of the Dharma, and which is the foundation? What does an honest, responsible syncretism look like when so many of us are weaving traditions together? And why might the best yogis not be the best teachers. Candid, funny, and unafraid of the tender places, this is a conversation about letting our humanness become more human as we practice, and growing sturdy and vulnerable at once, like small flowers on a high alpine ridge.

Some conversations we approach with a particular sense of reverence, and this is surely one of them. In this episode of Living Dharma, co-hosts Tsunma Kunsang Palmo and Justin Kelley are joined by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo. Her story needs little introduction. The cave, the long years of solitary retreat, the founding of Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery, and the revival of the Togdenma lineage are by now the stuff of legend.

What this conversation reaches for is something more intimate: the lived texture behind all of it. Jetsunma speaks with candour and warmth about how there need be no division between practice and ordinary life, using the image of a little yeast that lightens and transforms the heavy dough of the everyday. She reflects on the quiet work of befriending oneself, on the difference between the spacious, sky-like mind of old Tibet and the restless, over-stimulated mind of our own moment, and on raising children with integrity in a noisy age.

She also turns to the situation of women who come to monastic life from the West and beyond, the non-Himalayan nuns who often arrive later in life, already formed, and who face particular challenges in finding training, community, and belonging. Here she shares the work of the Alliance of Non-Himalayan Nuns and her hope of making real use of all that these women bring.

What strikes you, listening to her, is that here is someone who embodies the tradition and shares it openly, without pretense, with great humility and kindness.