dharmapunx NYC

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 ...

We all live in two different worlds at the same time—no, not fantasy and reality, or thought and experience, but rather the differing perspectives provided by the bilateral—left and right hemispheric—brain. This division is useful to understand if we want to appreciate our emotional activations, not to mention the often mysterious ways in which we operate. Even 2,500 years ago The Buddha was well aware of the composite nature of the mind, suggesting that meditation is best served when experience is broken down into components  (note the satipatthana sutta ) : 1) rupa,  basic body sensations,  2)  vedana, underlying, largely somatic states of comfort and discomfort,  gut feelings,  and the two higher cognitive realms of 3) citta —the mind's higher, non-verbal processes, such as emotional activations and the quality of attention; 4)  dhammas ,  the realm of   thought based mental content.  ~ So let's review the research ...

Mind 2.0: Upgrading Your Brain’s OS Buddhist Methods of Advancing the Human Mind’s Performance The mind can be radiant, but it is often dim and further darkened by all that it takes in. The commonplace individual isn't aware this is the case, and doesn't evolve the mind. The mind can be radiant, and it can be liberated from that which makes it dark. The learned spiritual practitioner is aware of this and evolves the mind. (Pabhassara sutta: Radiant mind) When a new laptop is brought home from the store and removed from its packaging, the computer will operate using its default, out-of-the-box settings; the system is oriented to implement basic tasks for the garden-variety user. Over time the surrounding digital landscape changes, bringing about new demands, such as new file formats or bugs; at this juncture the machine requires simple updates, or patches, to continue performing well; eventually, however, changes to the computing environment are so great, that an e...