Reviews

“Stress is a sure happiness killer, but the antidote just might be Pocket Peace by Allan Lokos, founder and guiding teacher of the Community Meditation Center in New York City. Lokos brings a calming Buddhist slant to urban angst, doling out creative, easy-as-pie practices (choose a belonging you really like and give it away to discover how you feel about attachment issues) to help soothe your way, offering another great option for turning over new pages in your life.” – Boston Globe

“Allan Lokos’ Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living is my new favorite recommendation. Lokos writes in an engaging, accessible style, sharing many personal stories from his own life to elucidate each of the paramitas and the pocket practices. This is a great book for anyone new to Buddhism who wants to approach it from a down-to-earth, daily perspective. It is also good for those not so new to Buddhism, who need some new ideas or a new way of looking at their daily lives as practice.” – BellaOnline

“In his new book, Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living, Allan Lokos offers a blueprint of simple exercises based on the 10 ‘Paramis’, or Perfection Practices, described in Buddhist philosophy. Lokos beautifully articulates these great spiritual teachings and distills them into concentrated dosages to address the realities of everyday life. He skillfully weaves together rich learning moments from his own life experiences with enlightened, yet profound lessons on virtues such as generosity, patience, and loving kindness. Lokos provides action steps to help you become more kind, compassionate, and generous. Beautifully written and incredibly effective, Pocket Peace combines Lokos’ poignant personal stories with practical advice making it an irresistible read and an invaluable road map for those looking to reduce their anxiety, improve their relationships, and lead more peaceful, joyous lives.” – Religiology News

“Author Allan Lokos has written a helpful guidebook to help transform everyday living into a conscious journey of practiced peace. There have been many books published that try to teach one how to ‘live in the moment’. And as much as we read about it, as much as we are encouraged to do it, it feels like old news most of the time. Lokos approaches the reader like a friend, sharing stories and personal experiences, with great warmth and compassion. The book feels much like a comfortable conversation. Broken into easy to read chapters, this text shows us how to nurture virtues within ourselves, such as morality, wisdom, patience and many more. Each chapter offers steps to practice these actions with meditative exercises. Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living can change your life. After all, in the long run, life isn’t so much what happens to us, it’s how we react and respond to things that happen to us. It is what we make of it.” – Sacramento Book Review

“For days, I carried this book everywhere with me. It fits perfectly in my pocket, goes well with a cup of coffee in a café, opens at just the right page for that moment, and disarms with its simplicity. Its clear compassionate message is that everything we do and think matters. It is so everyday in its stories, its musings, and its suggestions that the ‘perfection practices’ – generosity, wisdom, patience, determination, etc. – become not only attainable, but an absolute delight to try out in our daily lives. The author is an interfaith minister, and the founder and guiding teacher of the Community Meditation Center in New York City. Reading his warm, beautifully written book is like meeting a friend.” – Mandala

“Pocket Peace is a beautifully lucid and heartwarming book. Through many personal stories and simple practices, Allan Lokos shows us the possibility of wise living. His understanding, clarity, and open-heartedness move us from theory to action as we navigate through our lives.” – Joseph Goldstein, author of A Heart Full of Peace and One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism

“Pocket Peace is a beautifully written, practical guide to transforming our everyday experience into one of greater peace. Allan Lokos warmly takes us by the hand and leads us, as a friend, into an exploration of a genuine path to happiness.” – Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Faith

“The way up is the way down,” said Heraclitus, the giant Greek philosopher, and ever since, for twenty-five centuries, spiritual seekers have found this insight to be deep and true. But how to put it into practice? Allan Lokos hands us a guidebook. His Pocket Peace delivers what it promises: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living. It does so with a winning warmth and with altogether unpretentious wisdom. If we let him show us the way down into everyday spirituality, we may find ourselves raised higher up than we ever dared to hope.” – Brother David Steindl-Rast, author of Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer

“Allan Lokos turns the Buddhist Paramis (Perfection Practices) into tools for life for the urban seeker. No matter what religious stance you come from, if you work with these practices they will work for you.” – Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, author of A Heart Afire and Integral Halachah

“A wonderfully heartfelt and pragmatic toolbox of meditative skills that anyone can practice anywhere at any time.” – Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism without Beliefs and Living with the Devil

“Pocket Peace is a book of little gems for great progress. Hurdle with joy with Pocket Peace in your purse.” – Judy Collins, folk singer/song writer, author

“Lokos offers insightful and always practical commentary on many spiritual matters of consequence including the priceless gift of presence, the feeling of pleasure without attachment, the negative fallout from the judgmental mind, and the necessity of recognizing the impermanence of all things.” – Spirituality and Practice

Excerpt

What would it be like to consistently enjoy the ease of clear, insightful thinking? What would it be like to feel calm and to make intelligent decisions in stressful situations? The quality that supports this kind of experience is called wisdom. In the Buddhist tradition the development of wisdom is said to arise from the ability to see things as they really are, not as they appear to be. We can think of this type of discriminative awareness as a state of mindfulness in which one is fully present, lucid, and free from the consequences engendered by habitual responsive patterns and knee-jerk reactions. Here is a beautiful example of seeing things as they really are: during World War II, when housing was in short supply, a kindly lady said to a five-year-old, “I’m sorry your family doesn’t have a home.” The child answered, “Oh, we have a home. We just don’t have a house to put it in.”

Wisdom is not learned from books or teachers, valuable though they may be. Wisdom is learned through personal experience, which is why we tend to associate it with older people-those who have been around longer and had more life experiences. However, I’ve met a few people who exhibited signs of wisdom at an early age, and I’ve certainly known some old fools. Unfortunately, wisdom is often attained only after paying a hefty price. Confucius said, “By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is the noblest; second, by imitation, which is the easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.”

Wisdom enables us to see beyond ego and to gain clarity where there might otherwise be confusion. Wisdom is free from greed, hatred, and delusion. Wisdom sees that taking the same action over and over again and expecting the results to be different is a form of insanity. Through the eyes of wisdom we look at history and see that if war was the way to peace, we would have had a world at peace a very long time ago. We have tried war time and again through the millennia, and we still do not live in a world at peace. We can look at our personal history the same way. When we have been in conflict with others, has it brought inner peace? Wisdom invites us to explore other ways when our current approach is not working. Wisdom asks us to consider what the Buddha referred to as The Eternal Law: “Hatred does not cease by hatred, by love alone does hatred cease.” (Dhammapada 5)

Most of us tend to look at the people and conditions outside ourselves to provide our happiness. Yet the reality is that if we cannot find happiness within ourselves, we cannot find happiness anywhere. Our quality of life is determined not by the people and events in our lives but by how we experience those people and events. All that we are is the result of our thoughts-with our thoughts, we make our world.

The Buddha taught that all phenomena arise due to the causes and conditions that precede and accompany them. In other words, all events, all feelings, all situations are born, and likewise pass away, due to the concurrence of accompanying factors. Nothing exists by itself; everything exists in relation to everything else. Understanding and accepting the interdependent nature of all things lays the groundwork for the arising of wisdom. It is a vital element in seeing things as they really are. It is also wise to remember that it is the nature of a rosebush to produce roses. If we want lilies to appear, we will be disappointed. How often are we hurt when a friend or relative reacts in the same way he always has and not in the way we would want?

Holding on to negative feelings hardens the heart and closes us off from the happiness that can be ours, even during difficult times. When we hold on to anger because of what we feel another person has done, we are not being wise. When we allow ourselves to become bitter because we are in a difficult situation that we feel can never change, we are again not being wise. However, when we see that any situation can, and will, change, we are seeing things as they really are, and that is the ground of wisdom. It is also wise to do what we can to encourage the change within ourselves that will free us from anger, resentment, and bitterness. As mentioned previously, it is not situations and conditions that cause our happiness and unhappiness but how we experience those situations. When we see this clearly we can think, speak, and act in ways that relieve sorrow and misery and lead to greater happiness for ourselves and those around us.

Near the end of the Buddha’s life, his attendant Ananda asked who would be their teacher when the Buddha passed away. The Buddha replied that each person must be a lamp unto themselves, meaning that each of us must learn to see the true nature of things. That is the essence of wisdom-to see and understand for ourselves how things really are. The development of wisdom requires an open mind and the ability to listen to views that are different from our own, to be objective rather than knowing, and to be open to changing our views when truth contradicts them.

Pocket Practice: Consider how your discomfort with a particular situation might be eased by accepting things as they are.

Suffering usually relates to wanting things to be different than the way they are. Sit quietly, close your eyes, and open the spaciousness of mind and heart needed for a change of perspective. Remind yourself that even if a particularly difficult situation you are now confronting seems insurmountable, it is not fixed and solid. It will change. If after contemplating in this way for a few sessions you conclude that the situation is unacceptable, you should be better able to explore your options in a calmer and more compassionate manner.

Pocket Practice: When the words or actions of another elicit anger within you, stop before reacting and ask yourself, Am I about to speak and act as the person I want to be?

Even the wisest among us can become angry, but the wise wait to speak or act until the fires have cooled. Do nothing until you have asked yourself if you are about to respond as the person you want to be. Take your time. Then speak or act accordingly.

By Allan Lokos, from Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living (Tarcher/Penguin, 2010)

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Pocket Peace

Reviews

“As founder and guiding teacher of the Community Meditation Center in New York, Allan Lokos has an arsenal of tools for coping with stressful situations.” – The New York Times

“I have just finished reading Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living, by Allan Lokos, the founder and guiding teacher of the Community Meditation Center in New York City. It’s a timely read for a season in which the stresses seem to multiply in direct proportion to the peace and joy we’re supposed to be feeling – and too often, don’t! In many ways, the book is a very readable course in Buddhism 101, a primer in Buddhist thought and practice for those who will value the introduction; it is also an important refresher course for those of us who have been practicing for a while – and who recognize that it’s still, and always, about “beginner’s mind.” Patience is at the very heart of Buddhist practice: without it the noble Eightfold Path would be impracticable for even the most ardent of its followers. A wise and, yes, patient guide, Lokos leads his readers through the benefits of patience with, first, ourselves and then with others in our personal and professional relationships. He offers the inspiration of notable exemplars, and includes not only the words of wisdom of great teachers in the Buddhist tradition, but also simple, do-able exercises and practices to help us along the way.”

“Patience is a thoughtful and always interesting book, and one that engages our attention. It challenges many of the assumptions and misconceptions we have about ourselves and the world we live in, reminding us that there is always another side to every view. It invites us to do the hard work of continuous mindfulness, and offers us the means to find release from self-inflicted (and other-inflicted) pain. As its subtitle and its final chapter suggest, “peaceful living” is indeed an “art” that can be learned through mindful practice – a valuable lesson to all who seek surcease from the stress we bring, often unconsciously, upon ourselves. As The Beatles sang, memorably, many years ago, “we all want to change the world.” Patience would be a terrific place to start – not to mention an excellent New Year’s resolution!” – The Huffington Post

The Atlanta Journal Constitution chose Patience as one of six books recommended for 2012.

“Many people may consider patience nothing more than an old-fashioned virtue of little value in today’s world. Those individuals would probably gain the most from reading this book, which makes a strong case for patience as a building block for inner peace. Lokos, a Buddhist teacher and practitioner, refers to studies indicating that intelligence alone cannot bring success and that children who fail to develop patience and self-control are more likely as adults to commit crimes, struggle with addictions, and earn low incomes. Even more convincing are his statements about how a lack of patience fuels anger, which can be devastating to relationships and lives overall. Along with suggesting exercises and meditation practices for cultivating mindfulness and patience, Lokos offers testimonials from individuals who have enhanced their lives by learning patience. His laugh-out-loud chapter on raising children is a treasure. A great deal of the world’s problems could be solved by taking Lokos’ advice.” – Booklist

“It takes patience to develop patience,” Allan Lokos says in this thought-provoking book on a virtue that has gotten short-shrift in our speed-oriented society. Lokos taps into his many experiences as a Buddhist practitioner and a spiritual teacher as he explores the relationship between anger and patience. The cultivation of patience is not an easy task given the bad habits we have established based on ego and illusion. In a section devoted to establishing patience with ourselves, Lokos presents meditation as a worthwhile vehicle for change. In a chapter on relationships, he writes about the importance of skillful speech and listening closely to what other people say when they are in your company. At work we are called upon to not give in to our feelings of anger at co-workers or bosses. Lokos turns to Shantideva, a great Buddhist sage, for counsel on a cluster of issues related to the “mental misery” we bring on ourselves by impatience or giving in to the foolishness of anger. We agree that patience for many people must become a way of life and not just a virtue or an occasional practice. The end result of commitment to moving beyond impatience is a life animated by peace, wisdom, and compassion. – Spirituality and Practice

“This book, both practical and profound, is a wonderful demonstration of just how to bring patience and a new way of being right into our daily lives. It is filled with insight, warmth, and compassion.” – Sharon Salzberg, author of Real Happiness and Lovingkindness

“Allan Lokos has a depth of experience that is woven throughout this fine book. He reaches with both mind and heart into the nature of patience. As Lewis and Clark mapped our way into the timeless beauty of the Northwest, Lokos is a very wise and human guide who breaks trail into the country of patience, marking all the sacred sites along the way and honoring all the sacred guides who have come before.” – Mark Nepo, author of The Book of Awakening and As Far As the Heart Can See

“Down-to-earth, full of ways to become more patient in challenging situations at home and at work, this book helps you develop one of the most important of all virtues for fast-paced, stressful, and often frustrating life today.” – Rick Hanson, Ph.D., author of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

“Patience is an exquisite gift, a healing sanctuary, a balm for the soul. Allan Lokos gently guides us through the dark wood of the frantic, fearful reactivity that grows and festers in our too-hurried lives, negotiating safe passage through a world gone mad with impossible speed and inhuman expectations. He invites us to explore the root causes of our own impatience, offering simple tools as reliable practices for cultivating contentment, ease, and genuine peace. Make no mistake, Allan is no Pollyanna; he bravely lifts up the undeniably fierce, ugly consequences of our anger, violence, and impatient harming of ourselves and others, while confidently promising that these characteristics – too conveniently dismissed as “human nature”- can in fact be skillfully transformed into authentic strength, wisdom, courage, and inspiring leadership. Allan Lokos has offered us a precious jewel, a path to freedom, a fragrance of grace, for which we may all feel deeply and humbly grateful.” – Wayne Muller, author of Legacy of the Heart and A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough

“In this gem of a book Allan Lokos invites us to attend to and practice what is perhaps the most overlooked of all spiritual qualities. Patience is an important read for everyone.” – Andrew Olendzki, Ph.D., Senior Scholar, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, author of Unlimiting Mind

Allan Lokos has written an essential and profound book that can change your life. Spiritual growth is not like fast food. It takes time for its roots to grow and that requires us to be receptive and patient. Patience delves into its vital subject with wisdom and compassion and offers us a path to our own higher self. Understanding the challenges of our hurried and harried world, Lokos has written a remarkable and practical guide to becoming a truly patient and spiritually effective person.” – Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, author of Jewish with Feeling and All Breathing Life Adores Your Name

“Drawing on Buddhist teachings and his own deep wisdom, Allan Lokos reminds us of the peace and freedom that is possible when we cultivate genuine patience. The stories and exercises give practical guidance in coming home to an openhearted presence in the midst of difficulty. This book is a compelling and beautiful invitation to pause and arrive fully in our life.” – Tara Brach, Ph.D., Author of Radical Acceptance

“Even if you consider yourself the most patient person in the world you might want to put the book, Patience, The Art of Peaceful Living by Allan Lokos on your “must read” list for January. Allan Lokos takes the reader on a journey toward joy and fulfillment as he describes the benefits of introducing patience into our lives. He embraces life in the twenty-first century with all of its changes, joys and disappointments while providing ideas to help us develop habits of internal calm. One of my favorite quotes from the book is, “When we teach a child to be truthful we offer them the gift of an ethical life. When we teach a child to take responsibility for their actions we offer them the gift of an honorable life. When we teach a child patience we offer them the gift of a dignified life.” This quote seems particularly meaningful for retirees disgruntled with their lives because they feel they’ve been kicked out of the office, no longer have a purpose or have been passed over by the younger generation. Whether we are teaching a grandchild, a neighbor child or our own child within, patience offers the dignity we desire, in our retired years or at any point in our lives.I think you’ll enjoy this book. It’s possibly the best gift you’ll give yourself all year.” – Nora Hall, SurviveYourHusbandsRetirement.com

email: allanlokos@gmail.com

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Patience by Allan Lokos