dharmapunx NYC

The following piece was written to summarize some of the experiences I've encountered in providing ten years of one-on-one buddhist mentoring, as well as to pay homage to the wisdom found in the works of Bessel A. van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, Joseph LeDoux's The Emotional Brain, Peter A. Levine's Waking the Tiger and other classic texts on trauma and its healing. ~ Let's suppose a situation occurs during which you feel threatened by an aggressive individual or animal...but you feel confident enough in your strength to overcome whatever danger they represent. In such a case you may well go into fight response : your sympathetic nervous system will activate excitatory, stress-response hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol, which in turn will create emotional and physiological conditions allowing--even impelling--you to fight off the attack. You'll start to gulp air, your heart will pump blood, which will be diverted to your limbs, whil

Integrating The Head With The Heart Summary of Insights Winter 2016 - Josh Korda ~ I’m an empowered Buddhist dharma teacher, which means I spend a lot of time addressing groups of students, in the course of annual retreats and two or three weekly classes around Manhattan and Brooklyn; however, the focal point of my life’s work involves providing one-on-one spiritual and psychological mentoring to individuals. What’s of central importance to my interpersonal work is emotion integration, by which I mean the practice of bringing one’s underlying, spontaneous, instinctive feeling states into ongoing conscious attention and decision making. Now, you may well wonder, why would anyone need help perceiving or assimilating emotions? Aren’t they readily apparent? However, I’ve found, over the course of working in depth with hundreds of individuals, that many of us live at estranged distances from our authentic feelings, depending on strategies of denial, numbing, and