Via PsychologyToday: Buddhism and the Blues

Buddhism and the blues

Buddhist psychology’s core techniques of meditation and awareness may have much to offer ordinary Westerners.
 
By: Hara Estroff Marano
From: Psychology Today

To most people Buddhism is an ancient Eastern religion, although a very special one. It has no god, it has no central creed or dogma and its primary goal is the expansion of consciousness, or awareness.

But to the Dalai Lama, it’s a highly refined tradition, perfected over the course of 2,500 years, of analyzing and investigating the inner world of the mind in order to transform mental states and promote happiness. “Whether you are a believer or not in the faith,” the Dalai Lama told a conference of Buddhists and scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you can use its time-honored techniques to voluntarily control your emotional state.

Yes, the Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of over 300 million Buddhists worldwide. Yes, he is the head of the Tibetan government in exile. But in the spirit of Buddhism, the Dalai Lama has an inquiring mind and wishes to expand human knowledge to improve lives. At its core, Buddhism is a system of inquiry into the nature of what is.

He believes that psychology and neuroscience have gone about as far as they can go in understanding the mind and brain by measuring external reality. Now that inner reality—the nature of consciousness—is the pressing subject du jour, the sciences need to borrow from the knowledge base that Buddhism has long cultivated.

Towards a science of consciousness
 
A comprehensive science of the mind requires a science of consciousness. Buddhism offers what MIT geneticist Eric Lander, Ph.D., called a “highly refined technology” of introspective practices that provide systematic access to subjective experience. Yet Buddhist psychology offers more than a method of investigation. Its core techniques of meditation and awareness may have much to offer ordinary Westerners, whose material comforts have not wiped out rampant emotional distress.

The Buddhist view of how the mind works is somewhat different from the traditional Western view. Western psychology pretty much holds to the belief that things like attention and emotion are fixed and immutable. Buddhism sees the components of the mind more as skills that can be trained. This view has increasing support from modern neuroscience, which is almost daily providing new evidence of the brain’s capacity for change and growth.

Buddhism uses intelligence to control the emotions. Through meditative practices, awareness can be trained and focused on the contents of the mind to observe ongoing experience. Such techniques are of growing interest to Western psychologists, who increasingly see depression as a disorder of emotional mismanagement. In this view, attention is hijacked by negative events and then sets off a kind of chain reaction of negative feeling, thinking and behavior that has its own rapidity and inevitability.

Techniques of awareness permit the cultivation of self-control. They allow people to break the negative emotional chain reaction and head off the hopelessness and despair it leads to. By focusing attention, it is possible to monitor your environment, recognize a negative stimulus and act on it the instant it registers on awareness. While attention as traditional psychologists know it can be an exhausting mental activity, as Buddhists practice it it actually becomes a relaxing and effortless enterprise.

One way of meditation is to use breathing techniques in which you focus on the breathing and let any negative stimulus just go by—instead of bringing it into your working memory, where you are likely to sit and ruminate about it and thus amplify its negativity. It’s a way of unlearning the self-defeating ways you somehow acquired of responding catastrophically to negative experiences.

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The Virtual Closet Experience - Armário Virtual.

Via Daily Dharma: Listening with an Open Mind

It’s hard to listen without judgment, to tolerate ambiguity, paradox, and in some cases, ignorance. But if we are ever to experience any measure of true peace, this is something we will all need to learn.

—Tina Lear, “Having Real Conversations (Even with My Sister)”

Via Daily Dharma: When the Curtain Drops

In order to open—in meditation and in life in general—we must let go of our familiar thoughts and emotions, we must step out from behind the safe curtain of our inner rehearsals and onto the stage of reality, even if it’s for just a brief moment.

—Michael Carroll, “Bringing Spiritual Confidence in the Workplace”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - June 9, 2019 💌

The first step of karma yoga is to get free of the attachments to your own life, to develop a witness. We have thousands and thousands of me’s and there is one me that watches all the other me’s, right? That’s the only game. It’s not trying to change any of the me’s.
It’s not the evaluator, and it’s not the judge, it’s not the super ego. It doesn’t care about anything. It just notes, ‘hmmm, there he is doing that.’ That witness, that place inside you, is your centering device. And that begins to be the work one does on oneself. Once one understands there is a place in oneself that one is not attached, the first job is to extricate yourself from attachment. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Beginning with the Present Momen

Even if you practice meditation to become a paragon of love and wisdom, all it can do is put you face-to-face with who you are and with what is, which is where all meditation begins.

—Stephen Schettini, “What to Expect When You’re Reflecting”

Via Daily Dharma: Let Self-Centeredness Breeze Through

Greed, hatred, and ignorance arise in our minds, and if we build a self on them, we’re trapped. But if we don’t make our nest there, though self-centered thoughts come, they also go like the wind that shakes the branches and then disappears.

—Rafe Martin, “The Brave Parrot: Being Small in a Big, Troubled World”

Via Tricycle: Five Stories to Mark 50 Years Since Stonewall

2019 marks 50 years since the New York City police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. Though police arresting people for expressing a different gender than listed on their driver’s license (or demanding bribes) was not uncommon, rebellion was, and the riots and protests that followed launched the Gay Rights Movement.

For the last 50 years, cities across the globe have held parades and cultural events during Pride Month to celebrate the LGBTQ community and to raise awareness on pressing issues such as AIDS and marriage equality.

In the words of meditation teacher Jay Michaelson: “It’s no secret that many LGBTQ people have found refuge in the dharma, and it’s easy to see why. It helps us with the wounds of homophobia, recognizing internalized self-hatred for the delusion and dukkha [suffering] that it is.” Here are five Tricycle stories to celebrate Buddhism’s inclusivity this Pride Month.

 

1.Does Buddhism Support Sexual and Gender Minorities?

Buddhism for Beginners

https://tricycle.org/beginners/buddhism/does-buddhism-support-sexual-and-gender-minorities/ 

 

2. Having Real Conversations (Even with My Sister) By Tina Lear

https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/real-conversations/?utm_source=Tricycle&utm_campaign=7b5a5bf107-Newsletter_19_6_7_Pride&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1641abe55e-7b5a5bf107-307231789

 

 

3. We’re Queer and We’ve Been Here

By Dr. Jay Michaelson

 https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/buddhisms-lgbt-history/?utm_source=Tricycle&utm_campaign=7b5a5bf107-Newsletter_19_6_7_Pride&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1641abe55e-7b5a5bf107-307231789

 

4. This Buddhist Life: Kodo Nishimura By Marie Scarles

 https://tricycle.org/magazine/buddhist-life-kodo-nishimura/?utm_source=Tricycle&utm_campaign=7b5a5bf107-Newsletter_19_6_7_Pride&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1641abe55e-7b5a5bf107-307231789

 

5. Becoming Jivaka By Pagan Kennedy

 https://tricycle.org/magazine/michael-dillon/?utm_source=Tricycle&utm_campaign=7b5a5bf107-Newsletter_19_6_7_Pride&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1641abe55e-7b5a5bf107-307231789

 

 

Intersections: Tales of the City

Via Daily Dharma: Meeting Emotions as Friends

We have our mind and our thoughts, and they can rev up emotions. But if we use our emotions as the object of meditation, as our friend and support, it’s like standing on the bank of the river and observing.

—Pema Chödrön, “Meditating with Emotions”

Via Lion's Roar / Is Buddhism a religion, philosophy, way of life, or science of mind?

Illustration by Nolan Pelletier.

I’m confused. Buddhism is considered one of the world’s five great religions, but some people say it’s not a religion at all, but a philosophy, way of life, or science of mind. Which is it? 

The answer is really about how you define religion. On one hand, Buddhism looks a lot like every other religion, with monastics, temples, sacred texts, rituals, congregations, etc. So by the “if it quacks like a duck” sociological definition, it’s a religion. On the other hand, most people define religion as believing in some sort of God or Creator, which Buddhism does not. They consider the concept of “nontheistic religion” a contradiction in terms, so they label Buddhism as a philosophy, way of life, or science of mind (and many Buddhists in the West agree). We would like to offer a third definition: religion is that which posits a nonmaterial spiritual reality (whether God or mind) and asserts we continue in some way after death. By that definition, combined with the sociological and historical realities, we come down on the side that Buddhism is a religion—and all those other things too.

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Topics: Beginner's Mind, Lion's Roar - July '18

Via Lion's Roar / The Math Koan: The practice of koan study isn’t so different from teaching math, says high school teacher Pat Higgiston.

As a high school math teacher, I run into plenty of obstacles: resistant students, anxious parents, not enough time or resources, and even my own burnout.

When I hit a wall, I find it valuable to return to the question at the beginning of it all: What’s the best thing I can do to help my students grow?

It’s easy to repeat this mantra to myself, but that doesn’t always help me access its core meaning. 

Sometimes I can’t realize the meaning until I manifest it in my life, new and fresh. Manifesting meaning isn’t about reciting, but creating. It requires work, patience, and not-knowing.

This persistence and discipline could describe Zen koan study just as well as it describes teaching. In my experience, koans are a ready guide for a high school teacher.

I spent the better part of a month reading and rereading Case 52 of The Book of Serenity, entitled “Caoshan’s ‘Reality Body.’”

Caoshan asked elder De, “‘The buddha’s true reality body is like space: it manifests form in response to beings, like the moon in the water’ — how do you explain the principle of response?”

De said, “Like an ass looking in a well.”

Caoshan said, “You said a lot indeed, but you only said eighty percent.”

De said, “What about you, teacher?”

Caoshan said, “Like the well looking at the ass.”

Koans in The Book of Serenity are accompanied by a commentary from Wansong Xingxiu, a 12th-century Chinese Chan Buddhist monk — an ancestor of my school of Zen. Wansong introduces this one saying, “Those who have wisdom can understand by means of metaphors. If you come to where there is no possibility of comparison and similitude, how can you explain it to them?”

In the koan, Caoshan’s metaphor of “the moon in the water” symbolizes the realization that enlightenment isn’t something outside of us. The moon is reflected in the ocean, in lakes and streams, in puddles after the rain, in droplets of dew in the early morning, and even at the bottom of wells. Likewise, enlightenment is reflected in every drop of our lived experience. One of the key realizations in Zen is that when we meditate, we manifest the meaning of Zen. We become aware of the moon’s presence, having somehow doubted it before. And looking for it outside, we find it closer than we expect.

This koan probes me to ask myself, “What do you see when you look at your students?”

Enkyo O’Hara Roshi says a koan is “a form that obscures what it intends to communicate.” This seems unhelpful in the classroom. As teachers, our intention is to clearly and concisely communicate a specific subject. At the same time, we understand that a bare presentation of facts — historical dates, mathematical theorems, a list of an element’s properties — isn’t enough to communicate the meaning behind a subject. More often than not, the student will look at the majesty of a mathematical proof and ask, “So?”

The challenge of teaching math is that you are communicating to an audience about math, while simultaneously communicating how to be an audience for math.

That kind of comment can send teachers to the bar on a Friday afternoon, exasperated and shaking our heads. We peer into our wells and wonder if there’s anything down there.

I think part of the challenge of teaching math is that you are communicating to an audience about math, while simultaneously communicating how to be an audience for math. To paraphrase scholar and educator Magdalene Lampert on teaching fractions to fifth graders: you are teaching them how to be the type of people who talk about math.

A math teacher doesn’t present proofs to an audience. Rather, a math teacher poses problems that have to be worked through. A problem is a form that obscures what it communicates, similar to a koan. In this regard, a good math problem is a koan for the student. Just as a koan is both a symbol of enlightenment and a means to realize enlightenment, so a math problem can be an expression of the problem and a means to solve the problem.

Among my students, not-knowing math seems to be the most shameful thing you can imagine. I remind them often that if they knew all of this math already, they wouldn’t have to be here. But they are here, and they’re facing what seems to be an insoluble problem. They work at it and it works at them, until suddenly the “problem” drops away and they communicate its meaning without speaking a word.

As teachers, sometimes we forget that this is what we’re trying to accomplish. Staring into the well, we think nothing will peer back. We throw up our hands and say, “The kids just don’t care!” And of course, at first, they don’t. Not now, not yet. We are in the business of cultivating people who care, who think, who create, imagine, argue, and collaborate.

I think the hard part about teaching—and about life—is that this is true for us, as teachers and as adults. We are always learning and growing, and every challenge that confronts us is a new koan, a new problem that obscures the truth of our lives. Working with koans and working with young people share this quality of resolving the insoluble. At the start, all you have is a jumble of words and feelings that you’re trying to convey.

What do you see when you look at your students? Wansong warns us against saying that we’re here to teach them. If I simply say, “I am here to teach,” then that isn’t a realization of my intention. In order to actually teach, I must do more than say I am teaching. I embody how to talk about math, and then how to observe and manifest its meaning. The meaning of math is communicated in every aspect of my being, and in every aspect of my students’.

With this understanding, I can turn to the next group of students, listen closely, and respond to them with a question or two. As we learn and grow together in this classroom, peering down the wells of mathematics, the meaning comes into view. How did I not see it there before?

Click here to make the junp here to read the original and much more!

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - June 5, 2019 💌

The technique of the witness is to merely sit with the fear and be aware of it before it becomes so consuming that there’s no space left. The image I usually use is that of a picture frame and a painting of a gray cloud against a blue sky. But the picture frame is a little too small. So you bend the canvas around to frame it. But in doing so you lost all the blue sky. So you end up with just a framed gray cloud. It fills the entire frame.

So when you say 'I’m afraid,' or, 'I’m depressed,' if you enlarged the frame so that just a little blue space shows, you would say ‘ah, a cloud.’ That is what the witness is. The witness is that tiny little blue over in the corner that leads you tosay, ‘ah, fear.’

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: The Grace of Impermanence

The grace of impermanence is that we belong to everything, that we are not separated from anything, that we are not isolated. We may be waves on an ocean, but we are waves that know we are waves.

—Interview with Sallie Tisdale by Marie Scarles, “Travel Guide to the End of Life”

Via YAHOO News: Ethiopian churches oppose gay travel company's tour plans

Addis Ababa (AFP) - Ethiopia's religious leaders on Monday urged the government to block a US gay travel company from touring the country's ancient sites, and one group warned visiting homosexuals could face violence.

The Chicago-based Toto Tours, which describes itself on its website as "the only gay tour company in existence" that has been operating with the same ownership and management for almost three decades, told AFP it has received death threats since announcing a 16-day trip to Ethiopia, which includes numerous historical religious sites.

Their itinerary has sparked ire in Ethiopia, which like many in Africa is deeply homophobic and has strict anti-gay laws, punishing homosexual acts with up to 15 years in prison.

"Tour programmes and dating programmes that try to use our historical sites and heritage should be immediately stopped by the Ethiopian government and we urge Ethiopians supporting these sinful and evil acts to desist from their acts," Tagay Tadele of the Inter-Religious Council of Ethiopia told journalists.

The council counts seven Islamic and Christian denominations as members.

An influential Ethiopian Orthodox organisation, the Sileste Mihret United Association, also held a press conference Monday to condemn the tour company.

"Homosexuality is hated as well as being illegal in Ethiopia. Toto Tours are wrong to plan to conduct tours in our religious and historical places," the organisation's vice chairman, Dereje Negash, told AFP.

"If Toto Tours comes to Ethiopia where 97 percent of Ethiopians surveyed oppose homosexuality, they will be damaged, they could even die," he said.

Dan Ware, the president of Toto Tours, said the company had been "terribly misunderstood", in an email to AFP.

"Our company is not aimed at spreading values contrary to local cultures when we travel around the world. We are simply an organization where like-minded people can travel comfortably together to experience the world's most precious wonders.

"We come with only the greatest respect and humility."

He said the tour had been advertised on the company's social media pages and spotted within Ethiopia, leading to "death threats", and called for protection for the tour group from both the US State Department and the Ethiopian tourism ministry.

"This is terrible discrimination, and when the word of this spreads internationally, as it is most likely to do, it will have a negative impact on the important tourism industry in Ethiopia."

He said that by the time the tour takes place in October "the eyes of the entire world will be on the people of Ethiopia to see what happens to us."

Twenty-eight out of 49 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have laws penalising same-sex relationships, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Some countries, like Angola, Mozambique and Seychelles, have moved to scrap anti-gay laws.

However Kenya's high court earlier this month refused to do so, in a major blow to gay activists on the continent.

make the jump here to read the full article and more

Via Friend of Dorothy Book / FB:

Manila Luzon - "Gay Man" Official Music Video

Via Daily Dharma: Universal Gratitude

In my pursuit of mindfulness I have found myself giving thanks for all things at a far deeper level… As I become more mindful I am even grateful for difficulties and pain, as they allow me to access greater compassion for those going through their own hardships.

—Jim Owens, “Bible Belt Buddhism”

Gay Men's Chorus Confronts Protesters With Music