dharmapunx NYC

There’s a great deal of societal emphasis on presenting life as a competitive encounter, a challenge to see ‘who can reach the sweet life in time to grab the goodies, for there’s only so much stuff left to go around.’ And dwindling social safety nets, spiraling healthcare costs and constant pressures to perform amidst educational institutions and workplaces add untold stress to the mind which, by default, is already set up to fret and worry. After all, our brains have the same structure, regions and circuits as they did roughly 40 - 50,000 years ago, which was the last time we humans had an evolutionary transformation—and during those times the brain’s wiring was set up to survive each day without being eaten. You’d think we’d be calmer now that we’ve attained the dominant species status, but we’re living in the same cognitive set up, only we’ve replaced outrunning wild animals with the stresses of a go-for-the-gold rat race; an unfriendly expression on a supervisor’s face can

Waking up into life is liberating. It's how we stop the war with the way things are, and find a way to embrace life as it is, rather than how we'd prefer it to be. It is an attainable state; clarity is not reserved for monks and nuns alone. When life becomes stressful, obligations and responsibilities weigh heavily, its tempting to resist the pressures by falling into dissociative diversions; escape fantasies, illusions of martyrdom, head trips, blame games and on. The path to stability and clarity becomes hard to find when we're at war with the fleeting experiences life has presents us. Peace begins when we give up the fight.  Waking up doesn't mean fixing or solving all of life's challenges. Waking up can involve stepping back from the trance of busyness, to allow events to unfold on their own, creating space for new information to arrive in our awareness. We can can step out of the spiral of assigning fault in self or others by examining the expectatio