Over at One City: A Buddhist Blog for Everyone, Julia May Jones makes a bet with her readers: you started your practice because of relationship trouble.

Walk into any Buddhist dharma center across the country. Sidle up to a pleasant looking stranger. Compliment their eco-friendly aluminum water bottle to get a conversation started then ask them what started them practicing. I bet that at least half of the time a person will say, “I was having a hard time and the teachings of the Buddha helped me.” Glance sympathetically, breathe mindfully and then press them about the nature of the hard time. Nine times out of ten I bet they’ll respond: “I was really suffering because of a bad break up/divorce/inability to let go of a former love.”

While this wasn’t entirely the case with me, repeated heart break did play a part in influencing my practice. After sitting regularly for a while, I realized that I kept making the same mistakes in love and I credit stillness with helping me to break the pattern.

Anderson Cooper writes:

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new analysis.

Check out Pew’s full survey here.

What would Buddha do? Would Jesus do the same?

“We have to say no to same-sex marriage,” said the Rev. George Gilbert, pastor of Holy Trinity United Baptist Church in Northeast Washington, who concluded his remarks by leading a chant: “Not on our watch! Not on our watch! Not on our watch!”

Sounds like attachment to me.
(via washingtonpost.com)

I’ve been wondering when this topic might arise from these two.

KEN WILBER: At times like these, our spiritual practice becomes essential. We have to develop a heightened awareness of our own internal mechanisms and of what can throw us back into a contracted, survivalist mode. That’s really important, because there are some very serious survival issues right now. We might not make it as a species. And being able to watch yourself contract in the face of that is a supreme teacher. It’s a chance to really learn how you allow the survivalist mode to knock you out of your true self and your already-free awareness.
ANDREW COHEN: Yes. And the reason it’s so important is that it isn’t just our feeling experience that contracts; it’s our perspectives and our values. We fall out of touch with that which is higher, that which has inherent glory, and we contract into a very fearful orientation to life. Often, those who are able to really make a difference in times like these are those who are able to see global events and crises in the biggest developmental context—to see it all as part of a larger process, which itself is indestructible. Never losing touch with that perspective is critical, because when we lose touch with the bigger perspective, we lose touch with the best part of ourselves.

Update: Wilber and Cohen are holding a virtual seminar about this topic. If you’re interested here’s the registration link.

Just thought I’d throw this out there since it has been a subject of several recent conversations among Infinite Smile Sangha members:

Feelings occur when the mind interprets the physical energetic manifestations within the body. As an example, a woman on her cell phone in line at the local café bumped the stroller in which I had packed my daughter, causing my freshly made latte to spill down my pants. For those who haven’t experienced this, hot espresso drinks spilled down our pants will bring on intense and immediate feelings of discomfort. Emotions register themselves in the mind in the same way, except that rather than merely having a physical component to them, they incorporate psychological and energetic variations as well. The latte that spilled down my pants, for example, briefly carried judgment and blame with it, such as: Did that woman have to be so careless? Did that latte have to be the temperature of lava? Luckily, meditation practice can help lessen the intensity of situations like these.

I’ve received much mail about Chip Brown’s recent New York Times article, Enlightenment Therapy. In it we learn of a Zen Master who loses himself and then can not reconnect to his life. It’s a great piece and a reminder of what attaching to non-attachment can do. It also shows us what happens when our practice is about escaping the life we are given instead of becoming truly, and fearlessly, intimate with what’s really going on.

What I got from my life in Zen is not what most people get or want from Zen. Most Zen students are samadhi junkies. They like the buzz. There’s a suppression of anger in Zen which is another kind of alienation. Sometimes it makes me sad. Teachers should point this out — how risky samadhi is from a psychological point of view.

He’s right here. Teachers that don’t point these pitfalls out risk misleading their students. I was fortunate. My teachers, one in particular, was very clear about how one avoids what he calls “Zen sickness.”

“Don’t attach to any experience or you’ll defile its teaching,” he’d say. “Don’t push any thing away. Don’t avoid. Don’t do anything except meet your life, right now.”

Bows, teach.

Louis Nordstrom, the subject of this piece had this to say of his experinece of reconnection to the world and his life:

“This abandoned life of mine is like the abandoned boy, and I am the mother I never had who returns to claim that life and embrace it. It is a source of great pathos to reflect that without the therapy experience I might have died without having been reunited with my life! And in that sense, without having truly lived.” He was not sad, he said. Nor in any way disenchanted with the way of Zen. What could be more Zen than to restore the relish of the particular life? What he felt was joy. Not the unbordered joy of enlightenment, but the vernal joy that comes after the wintry work of mourning: the joy of a man with a life of his own.

"Grapes want to turn into wine." – Rumi

Originally uploaded by Michael G. McAlister

Enjoy your weekend.