dharmapunx NYC

The goal of spiritual practice can be seen as 1) relieving stress and emotional agitation wherever possible and 2) alleviating our attachment to the small, trapped, limited sense of self. The latter is achieved by learning to break down and separate our inner experience into discreet, separate entities. When the mind adheres to the limited sense of self, it believes that our identity consists entirely of our inner events: body sensations, emotions and thoughts. Unfortunately, our inner experience, all those images, words, emotional sensations, etc become interwoven and tangled. Enchanted by confusion and drama, the mind becomes imprisoned, as awareness shrinks and identifies —tammayata in the Buddha’s languages—generally with thoughts. We begin to believe our thoughts comprise our “self,” while external sensations (sights, sounds, etc) are deemed to be “other.” Of course, the problem with firmly believing our thoughts to be 'me' or my 'self’ and outer experiences as ...