Irreverently Orthodox: Taking Practice Seriously and Yourself Lightly | Sam Bercholz

This week we’re hanging with the legendary Sam Bercholz: refugee kid turned founder of Shambhala Publications, the prolific dharma press behind many of the books on your shelf. In 1968, a London publisher handed him a manuscript by a Tibetan lama in Scotland whom Sam had never heard of. He read it sitting on the bed of a five-pound-a-night room, and it felt like it was speaking straight to him. It was Chögyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action, and it became Shambhala’s first book. Thousands followed.

Sam’s path started with a burlesque-house-singing Chan teacher who’d break into song mid-teaching. It deepened over decades as a close student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Kyabje Thinley Norbu Rinpoche, who empowered him to teach. Sam calls himself irreverent but totally orthodox, and you can see where he got both. His new book Rude Awakenings: An Unconventional Guide to the Buddhist Path opens in the spirit of an AA meeting: he’s addicted… to believing his own thoughts! “I am like this total mess that’s cheerful,” he tells us.

Under the jokes is real conviction. Sam is orthodox about the integrity of practice because the dharma took shape through centuries of trial and error by people who were practicing deeply. He takes the practice seriously. Himself, not so much, as you’ll see from all the fun we have together 🙂

We talk about:

- How a manuscript from Chögyam Trungpa in 1968 became the first Shambhala Publications book

- Why Sam had a “panic breakdown” working in Washington politics, and how that sent him looking for something genuine

- Emptiness vs. fullness: how the word shunyata might be better translated as “full” than “empty”

- Why becoming “helpful, cheerful humans” is the real measure of the path

- What gets lost when practice skips the foundational groundwork

- Why meditation isn’t for lowering your blood pressure (as Sam puts it, you can just go to the drugstore for that!)

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