It is important when practicing not simply to go off in a corner and practice, but to rely on community help keep you on track. This is a story about a recent experience I had with community, and the benefits I got from it in my practice.
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What is the point of loving our enemies, anyway?
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The inner toddler really, really doesn’t want to keep sitting. How do you get it to chill out?
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One of the bugaboos of practice is the difference between right and wrong. I say “bugaboo,” because although virtuous behavior is very important to practice, there is no right that can be stated. There is no wrong that can be stated.
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If you have read about or studied Buddhism at all, you’ve heard the idea that part of the Buddhist path is to “overcome desire.” This can be a bit off-putting, because it leaves us with the impression that wanting things is bad, and on the one hand this sort of seems true, but on the other hand, if we entirely give up on wanting things, won’t we starve? The confusion actually boils down to the difficulty of translating Pali or Sanskrit to english: “desire” means more than one thing.
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We all have a powerful mental function, the problem finder, that looks for potentially life-threatening problems in our environment and brings them to our attention. In most of us, it is tuned way too high, and so it’s always telling us stuff that not only don’t we need to know, but that will actually make us feel unsafe and insecure and even worthless. What to do?
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