dharmapunx NYC

Most of us, by the time we reach adult life, develop ways of relating to the obsessive thoughts that visit us; those inner voices that relentlessly detail bleak tales about the future, mistakes made in the past, inventories of what's missing from life. The brain’s set up to fret, and we all have to learn how to function in life without being dragged under by its constant jabbering. Despite these self-destructive tendencies, all we're after is a little peace of mind. While we may understand that certain types of thoughts cause us a lot of stress, it’s less obvious that the mind's tendency to jump around, from one inner narrative to the next, plays a large part in our suffering. The mind doesn't generally roam in search of peace. The brain's subsystems that activate our impulses tend to reward us for cogitation about issues that effect our survival, from whether or not we'll ever find a lasting relationship, to attempting to predict our unknowable financial f...

As is the case of so many everyday catch phrases, "you are what you eat," contains an important message—though wrapped in a trite idiomatic saying—that the food we take into the body eventually becomes and sustains the body. If we are to maintain health, its beneficial to consume a nourishing, balanced diet. Now, we might find such a message obvious, but it asks us to perceive experience in a manner that’s both essential yet not easy for many of us, namely taking into consideration the long term results our actions. The Snickers bar tastes sweet, the Red Bull provides a quick energy boost, but they don't provide path to lasting health and vitality. When we suppress thoughts about the long term ramifications of a cheeseburger and milkshake, we’re living as actions don’t have results; like an infant covering its eyes to avoid a scary situation, we act as if what we don't acknowledge can't hurt us. It was quite clever, then, of the Buddha to use appetite and ...

Back in the late 1970s Jon Kabat-Zinn realized the potential value the 2,500 Buddhist meditation and awareness technique called sati—commonly translated into english as “mindfulness”—would have in therapeutic settings if it was stripped of its spiritual trappings and presented as a course in stress reduction. And so secular mindfulness was born, the wholsesale transformation of one the many, integrated tools of Buddhist practice into an entire self-help cottage industry. The new mindfulness was employed towards a vast array of ends, from reducing stress in the workplace to preventing addiction relapses, developing well being and so on. The list is potentially endless (check out a catalogue from your local 'well being' institute for the details). Naturally, an essential development in presenting mindfulness as a marketable commodity was to extract it from the less market friendly tools in buddhist practice, such as the demands to participate in a spiritual community (sangh...

In the Buddhist practice known as Theravada, awakening, or Nibbana  (pali) is the achievement of of inner peace that sustains itself regardless of conditions beyond control. Awake to the true nature of life, we observe how experiences unfold in a process of constant flux and upheaval; we are all subject to the ravages of aging and sickness, the grief of separation and loss. The mind’s default setting is to search for contentment in the quickest fixes available to us: the spiritually nutritionless candy bars of material wealth, fame, power, short term sensual pleasures. No matter how much we accumulate, we feel that underlying awareness that the sugary sweetness of sensory pleasures will end and we’ll once again realize how exposed we are to inevitable losses and separation. While the lures of money, objects, sex and privilege lose their luster, liberation through spiritual practice provides a complete form of happiness; awakening means becoming aware of a calmness and eas...

The Buddha recommended five daily recollections as a catalyst for spiritual practice: “I am of the nature to grow old, sick and die; I will be separated from all that I love; my peace of mind rests dependent on the quality of my actions." While these reflections may at first appear grim, it is important to note that they do place happiness within our control. Furthermore, it is necessary and foundational for any serious spiritual inquiry to remind us of the fragility of the human condition, as the delusion that “there’ll always be another day” needlessly delays the efforts required to develop lasting inner peace; skillful attributes such as forgiveness, gratitude or acceptance are not easy to sustain. And so day in and out we must return to the bedrock: we live in bodies without guarantees for endurance or health, and we live dependent on conditions that are constantly in flux. Now, it is not uncommon to misinterpret this and other teachings as an instruction to detach and dist...

It has long been established that the transformation from the vulnerable and fragile states of childhood to the relative independence and self-navigating states of adult life is profoundly influenced by the early relationships we experienced with our core caretakers. The nature of these influential experiences—whether or not we felt securely connected to and emotionally tolerated by our parents—establishes a set of unconscious 'internal working models,’ or road maps, to the world (note the work of Bowlby, Ainsworth, Masterson, Kohut, Shore, Fonagy, etc). These internal maps guide our behavior in relationship to others—friends, romantic partners, etc—and establish our expectations of what others can provide. These models are what motivate our wise and startlingly self-sabotaging choices for romantic partners. The sturdiness of our early relationships in essence affects all our important, subsequent relationships, even our deepest views of human nature, to positive or negative deg...

The following is what I wrote for, and read at, last night's Dharma Punx New Year's Eve celebration, which had a full house throughout the evening. Practitioners asked me to make this available; it's a long, and may or may not be of interest. Metta, j _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ It is both human nature and culturally instilled behavior to seek lasting security, happiness and transcendent meaning amidst the roller coaster ride of fleeting conditions: sexy pleasures followed by gastric discomforts, financial gains followed by losses, approval one day, criticism the next; our 15 minutes of fame giving way to insignificance. Just as the youth of today may respond with blank expressions when The Clash is mentioned (this has already happened), so too will Miley Cyrus’ ascendance prove ephemeral. In hunting down and latching onto what feels good, we inevitably experience the disappointment that arises when day gives way to night or,...

The Buddha taught that we live surrounded by "mountains that are moving in on us from all sides, crushing all in its path…" such are the inevitable experiences of aging, sickness, separation from the loved and death. He continues in the sutta by noting that "troops can hold no ground, nor wealth win out" against these forces. Yet, aware of our fragility amidst such unsparing outcomes, we seek false refuges, attempts to deny and avoid our disappointments, to live life without truly opening to the emotional cost of loss. Alas, there is no inoculation from pain, even in spiritual practice. It should go without noting that life is not only loss: Sadness and delight, separation and connection, easeful and challenging states are intertwined and braided throughout our days. Just as we cannot outrun the darkness that arrives after a beautiful day, if we try to bypass disappointment and depression, we cannot truly relax and appreciate times of excitement and joy. Whe...

Over the years I've frequently encountered the perception that referring to oneself as a Buddhist, or advocating any variation of “ist” or “ism,” is somehow unskillful, just another form of attachment or clinging. This idea proposes that proclaiming oneself a practitioner of a single spiritual path results in getting stuck in opinions and practices, leading inevitably to a denigration of other spiritual paths. Those who advocate the “Don't be a Buddhist or Any Other Ist” explain that compassion and harmlessness are universal qualities that don't fall under the exclusive domain of any spiritual practice, and this is certainly true. Additionally, it's often claimed that we should be encouraged to “take the best” from a variety of sacred traditions, creating a personal philosophy “cafeteria style.” Certainly I have sympathy for those who seek to remain free of those 2,500 year old rituals and perspectives that make little sense today, and I feel every entitlement to ...

What does it mean to really pay attention to another, as opposed to simply being in the same space at the same time? Does it merely involve waiting patiently for our turn to talk, ruminating over what to say, while another speaks? Does giving attention to another mean hearing just enough of their words that we understand the content? There is a quality of loving presence that is far greater than the ability to simply repeat back what has been said to us. It's a form of being truly available to another. Senses are awake, the chattering mind quiets, and we hear far more than words and observe more than the obvious, easy to narrate events. Attending to another means being fully receptive, wherein the subtleties of another's emotional state are read: we are hearing their tone of voice, observing their facial expressions and body language, feeling empathetically—via the miracle of our mirror neurons—their inner experience and perhaps even reflecting it back through our own look...

We all like to believe that our memories are accurate, that the inner films and images of our past that bubble up into our awareness are true, and the stories we tell of ourselves are accurate. But what if our autobiographies are actually constructions, that each time we recite our life’s events—to someone else, or in our thoughts—we rewrite each remembrance, forever changing the contents? What if our memories have always been, in essence, fabrications built of the expectations and moods present in each retelling. Just as it appears that the sun revolves around the earth, it generally seems to those uninformed that the sounds and images of memory are essentially neurally written into the memory centers of the brain after a significant event, and that our recollections are activations of the original cognitions. If a past event seems crisp and clear, in this belief, its because the original encodings have remained essentially unaltered. Yet despite how real our past appears, sig...

There's an old saying that if we want to understand why its so difficult to change other people, we need only pause and reflect on how difficult it is to change our own habits and tendencies. Easier said than done: the mind tends to note ca use and effect effortlessly when it applies to other people—why can't Sue stop hooking up with Sam? he's such bad news! etc—but we're slow to acknowledge karma—which actions lead to good or bad long term results—when it applies to our own thoughts and behaviors. So we wind up stuck in routines, confused and frustrated by friends and loved ones who dial pain or ignore our requests. Learning to acknowledge and let go of our irritation with annoying behaviors of friends, work colleagues, family members, roommates et al is an essential part of our spiritual practice. Irritability and judgment turns us into the proverbial tree that cannot bend with the wind; we no longer let life—with all its inevitable first arrows of suffering, such ...

Research by psychologist Benjamin Converse at the University of Virginia finds that human beings tend believe in a kind of karma, namely our western skew on the spiritual axiom that good deeds result being treated well by fate; we believe we can influence uncontrollable outcomes by performing good deeds, with the often underlying expectation that the universe will pay us back in kind. Confronted with bad news, we may think "If I can get through this, I'll be a better person from hereon." Karma is thus a kind of reciprocity: I'll buy this round, you'll buy the next, however the deal is made with the universe itself, rather than specific individuals. It's an attempt to steer life towards expected and advantageous directions. We hope our acts of kindness to pave the way for journeys through life that are safe and not too challenging; we hope our kind words inoculate us from pain and discomfort; alas, life doesn't comply with these demands. Yet, as the ...

A recent revelation of developmental neuroscience is the understanding that the brain was designed, by evolution, to be an organ shaped and programmed by the environment it is situated in. The brain is in essence a social organ, with a central role played by human interactions. While the development of language allows us to connect with each other via language, via the conscious operations of the left hemisphere, we first communicate to others in a non-symbolic manner, through body language, facial expressions, glances, tones of voices, under the control of the right hemisphere. In successful encounters our emotions are signals that sync us up, establishing security, emotion regulation and social communication. When we are attuned to another, or "emotionally locked in" with or "mirrored" by others, we can temper states of excitation and move slowly into vulnerable situations that might previously trigger dissociative episodes. Skillful caretakers provide this ...

What creates the mind's inner chatter? For lack of a better term, "The Narrator" is created by the language loop of the brain's left hemisphere (a circuit of fibers that connect Broca's and Wernicke's areas of the frontal cortex to the temporal cortex). Developmental psychologists like Lev Vygotsky suggested that the formation of inner talk in childhood begins as a self-regulating tool, a way to internalize the instructive voices of our caretakers for occasions when we are alone in the world, or caught in circumstances we cannot interact verbally to seek guidance. The calmer and gentler were the voices of our parents and guardians, along with those we admire and mimic, the calmer and gentler The Narrator we will hear in the mind, and vice versa. At its most useful, the Narrator can offer a calming presence amidst the threatening chaos of life, when events seem stacked against us. Without The Narrator we would quite feasibly be overwhelmed by random experi...