Thich Nhat Hanh often said that “compassion is born of understanding,” but it wasn’t until I read In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction by the physician Gabor Maté that I actually experienced what Thay was talking about. Maté’s book looks at addiction through the lenses of psychology, neurobiology, trauma, social policy, patients’ stories, and the author’s own compulsions. It was Maté’s self-inquiry that pushed me to become more honest with myself, to lean into understanding my pain instead of trying to meditate it away. In conflicts, I started asking myself: How do I do this too? When I was no longer outside looking at the cruelty or ignorance of another, my heart just opened.

Among all the stories I’ve heard of the bodhisattvas and the lessons I’ve received on karuna, including during my nine years in robes, Maté’s human and humane example of understanding was what awakened true compassion in me.

The post Turning Word appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Addiction, depression, and illness seem to plague modern society. According to renowned physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté, these conditions all point back to the same underlying cause—unaddressed trauma. In this documentary feature, join Dr. Maté for an exploration of how true healing becomes possible once we learn to embrace our deepest wounds.

For more information on the film, visit https://thewisdomoftrauma.com/

This film will be available to stream until midnight EST on Friday, July 1, 2022. 

Photo courtesy Science and Nonduality

Photo courtesy Science and Nonduality

Photo courtesy Science and Nonduality

Photo courtesy Science and Nonduality

Photos courtesy Science and Nonduality

The post The Wisdom of Trauma appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Before I came to the US from Korea, I was under the impression that middle-class Americans were living a worry-free existence. They were materially affluent and had access to technology that streamlined their lives, and from where I stood, that seemed like enough for a flourishing human life.

In 1979, I moved to Pittsburgh, and the following year, I started my doctoral studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. Around this time, I learned just how many people around me were in therapy or undergoing some kind of psychological counseling, and my notions about Americans living without suffering started to waver. As my life in the US progressed, I felt more and more compelled to understand why, despite the material abundance, mental suffering was rampant around me. 

When I started looking at this conundrum with some depth, and as I continued to study and read Buddhist teachings, I came to realize that the dominance of material wealth was weakening the human spirit. The US had started to show signs of a material illness by that time, and now, I think, the whole world shows signs of this same phenomenon.

Siddhartha Gautama—the Buddha—said immediately after his awakening: Life is dukkha, which means suffering or dissatisfaction. This lesson is probably pretty familiar to everybody now.  Gautama declared that “life is dukkha” regardless of any human situation: rich or poor, young or old, from a noble family or not, with or without power. He also explained that we have no choice about what happens to us physically: getting old, being sick, and eventually dying. We must face this reality, whether we like it or not. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the boundlessness of dukkha. How much loss we have experienced during this pandemic! We have endured separation from those we love, and many of us have faced material losses—all against the already changing and transient nature of life itself. 

One way to think about suffering is as a failure of getting what we want. But have you ever been successful in getting everything you want? The Buddha diagnosed desire and greed as the causes of suffering. Despite the pandemic, our contemporary worldview remains quite different, or even opposite to, the Buddha’s position. Capitalism, which has become the driving ideological engine for business and the economy, promotes profit above all, and this has also become the lens through which we think we can satisfy our human desire. But we can never get all that we want. 

Venerable Sotaesan, the founder of Won Buddhism, defined suffering as enduring what we dislike. Ven. Sotaesan categorized suffering into different types: everlasting or temporary; appropriate or inappropriate; self-created or happening inadvertently or accidentally. But even within the realm of “accidental suffering,” we have a measure of responsibility. (As the pandemic has shown, is any one of us truly free from responsibility?) 

During my first semester of my PhD studies at Temple University, I faced many challenges due to my limited English-language capacity. In the beginning, I couldn’t even understand the simplest instructions, such as “There will be no class next week,” or “Read this chapter for homework.” 

I was overwhelmed and frustrated. I would come home from class, and to escape this miserable feeling I would start eating sweets. And I wouldn’t stop eating until I felt really sick. The sweets, I realized, consumed me, instead of me consuming the sweets. I think this represents a universal expression of any addictive behavior: the drink drinks me, the drug drugs me, the shopping shops me. In light of the pandemic, I revisited this particular struggle. At that time, I was eating a lot of sweets, but I didn’t have the awareness that I was doing so. My struggle stemmed from the absence of awareness; I avoided facing negative emotions by burying myself in the sensory taste of sweets. This lack of awareness I came to understand as a weakened spirit, or the spirit that has lost its sovereignty. 

As a result, I actually started to blame the sweets and the external environment for my suffering. It may sound funny, but it’s true. I would wonder: Why does the store sell sweets? Why do my roommates bring me sweets? Why does a factory make sweets? Why were sweets invented in the first place? I went through seven years of this vicious cycle, feeling lost in a dark tunnel. The moment of awareness happened when I visited the hospital for an indigestion problem. There I met patients senior to myself—I was in my thirties at that time—who had very similar symptoms. I identified with their suffering. Their suffering was the same as the suffering I saw in my mirror. 

At that moment, I realized that my suffering was not going to end by itself. I had created it. I had caused it to happen. I realized that I needed to own the suffering and its cause. It was now in my hands to change the situation. From that moment of awareness grew a moment of determination. 

COVID-19 seems like a snapshot of the present human situation. The 21st Century is characterized by the dominance of matter and our weakened spirits. We can think about the dominance of matter in terms of desire, craving, and addiction. Any food, any medicine, any matter can cause addictive behavior. If that is so, is matter itself the cause of addiction or suffering? 

To recognize suffering is the beginning of healing. The weakened spirit must recognize its source of suffering in order to recover its sovereignty, which characteristically is calm and clearly aware. We can, as the Buddha taught, recover the sovereignty and soundness of our spirit. 

♦

Adapted from Dr. Bokin Kim’s Dharma Talk, “Material and Spiritual Balance”

The post Sweets and Suffering  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Meditating is supposed to help you live in the moment, but I never thought that was a problem for me. I lived so much in the moment that I tried to make adulthood into something unknowable. Concepts of aging and time were stagnant in my mind. It wasn’t until I began meditating on the Buddhist truth of suffering that I came to know and accept my own pain.

For much of my life, the thought of living past my twenties was imponderable. From ages 12 to 19, I suffered from severe depression and self-medicated with drugs and alcohol. Completing college and starting a career in the sciences were the false goals that I repeated to others when asked about my career path. I had no real intention of doing any of these things. I rejected contemplating about my future.

There was a deep fear within me. I was caught in the idea that youth is the embodiment of success. I saw that beauty and charisma trumped any deeper respectable ethical values; this was reflected in nearly every piece of media that I consumed. My personal outlook began to mirror society’s, and I found myself grasping at all the things that I thought resembled youthful exuberance.

You only live once, I told myself. And I was “lucky” to have an iron stomach. At my worst, I could down two bottles of wine a night, and still adamantly claim––albeit with slurred speech––“I’m good.” Then ill health moved from my mind to my body, and I began to suffer the physical symptoms of alcohol addiction. One day I noticed my hands shaking. It was about four in the afternoon, and I had only been awake for a few hours. I realized I had the “shakes,” which happens when the body is not getting its anticipated supply of alcohol. Even through my cloudy, hungover brain, I realized that, for a 21-year-old, this was not normal, and I decided to stop drinking.

Around six years have passed since then, and I can now see that the deep sadness that drove me to intoxicants had its origins in two tragic events at age 12: Hurricane Katrina hitting my home state of Louisiana and the death of my beloved grandmother six months later. Before the storm, my family and I were forced to evacuate from where we lived, a town slightly north of New Orleans. Being out of school and away from home for several weeks was utterly disorienting, and by the time we returned, the hurricane and its aftermath had rendered the area around our home unrecognizable. My grandmother, who lived in a nursing home nearby, had always been my source of support and comfort. She had survived the storm, but her death soon after was like the levees breaking for my 12-year-old mind.

As a teenager, the reality of suffering demonstrated by these events seemed unfathomable. I felt the suffering of my home state. I felt the suffering from my family after my grandmother’s death. There’s a certain power in being able to articulate one’s feelings, and I didn’t have that power at the time. I was too young, perhaps, to understand this kind of hurt. I could not understand that aging and death were parts of existence, and my inability to accept these facts led to greater suffering. They led me to drinking. Ultimately, they led me to the Buddha’s teachings.

Today, as a monastic in my late 20s, the training of abstaining from intoxicants to support attentiveness in actions goes hand in hand. When I think about that time, I recall this particular gatha [verse], which Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh includes in his book Stepping into Freedom, a manual to Buddhist monastic training.

Whose hand is this
that has never died?
Has anyone been born?
Will anyone die?

Our loved ones are not the only ones who age, become sick, or die. This process has been happening since the beginning of time, and will continue into the future. When I look at my hands, I see my maternal ancestors. I have my mother’s hands, and she has the hands of her mother. My hands speak to the truth that we are our parents’ continuation—a skillful teaching on emptiness or not-self. Contrary to finding it ominous, I find comfort in knowing that I am not alone in experiencing these truths of life.

Practice: A Meditation on Suffering

Witnessing the aging, ill health, and death of three strangers were pivotal moments in the Buddha’s life. It was seeing an elderly person, a sick person, and someone who had just passed that lead him to leave princely life in his palace and begin a wandering journey for spiritual awakening. Meditating on the reality of suffering may inspire you to deepen your practice as well.

Buddhism has a plethora of meditations to practice. Noticing the breath, the body, and the thoughts that race across the mind are the most common meditation objects taught. The Buddha also recommended daily reflection on broader aspects of reality. The Five Remembrances is a contemplation taken from the Anguttara Nikaya (often translated as the “Book of Numbers,” as this collection of writing consists of many teachings outlined in lists).

Here is the translation from the Pali, as written by Thich Nhat Hanh:

1. I am subject to aging. There is no way to avoid aging.

2. I am subject to ill health. There is no way to avoid illness.

3. I am going to die. There is no way to avoid death.

4. Everyone and everything that I love will change, and I will be separated from them.

5. My only true possessions are my actions, and I cannot escape their consequences.

Not so sweet, but they are universal truths essential to one’s personal practice and growth. The text goes on to describe why someone should take up this contemplation, and each line is an antidote to a particular mental affliction. It goes to show that obsession with youth, beauty, health, and unreasonable longevity are not modern problems.

There are many ways to practice this meditation. You can start by writing or mentally repeating each phrase individually, then allowing any memories or feelings related to the phrase to arise—perhaps thoughts of a parent or grandparent. It is helpful to allow the mind to settle on the word, image, memory, or thought for at least several minutes. Since most of us are not accustomed to actively thinking about aging or dying in this way—it’s normal to experience feelings of aversion, pain, or fear in the mind, or tension in the body. Notice these feelings as they arise.

Bonus: Dialoguing with Physical Sensations

This meditation is body-based. It is not recommended for those who are experiencing severe PTSD symptoms or have insufficient rest or strength, or have not yet developed stability with a meditation object.

Finding a comfortable and quiet place, gently bring your attention to your breath. You can focus on the rise and fall of your stomach or the area around your nose.

After you’re more relaxed, bring your attention to an area of the body where you notice tension. The upper body and face are easy regions to notice.

Gently hold the tension-filled area with awareness, tenderness, and openness. Awareness helps to stabilize the mind in concentration while tenderness allows the body to relax. Openness is two-fold: the body will be more willing to share the root cause of the discomfort and by staying open, you allow whatever needs to be heard and acknowledged to present itself without judgment (also known as equanimity).

You might experience recent or forgotten memories of an event, repressed or muted emotions, or maybe just the physical relief of the body relaxing.

Remember to stay open and nonjudgmental to whatever you are experiencing, and return to the breath of the emotions you feel are overwhelming. You may also like to shift attention away from that specific area to a less active part of the body as well. Personal discernment is key.

The post Meditating on Suffering appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—these sites and other social media platforms can be emotional minefields, and they eat up far more time than many of us are OK with. Although the Buddha didn’t offer guidance on how to act mindfully on Facebook, he did outline five practices that can help us disengage from the compelling trains of thought that often dominate our use of social media. In this video, Bodhipaksa shows how these practices can help us to take control of our online impulses.

Bodhipaksa is a Buddhist author and teacher who was born in Scotland but now lives in New Hampshire. He is a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order and the author of This Difficult Thing of Being Human: The Art of Self-Compassion and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buddha!: What Fake Buddha Quotes Can Teach Us About Buddhism. When not debunking Fake Buddha Quotes, he runs Wildmind (www.wildmind.org), a leading online meditation resource.

Learn more about Bodhipaksa in our Visiting Teacher profile.

The post Digital Detox: Reclaim Your Mind From Social Media Addiction appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We may call it different names—peace, or awakening, or enlightenment, even love—but what most of us are looking for is happiness: deep, abiding fulfillment and completion. The problem is that we’re looking for it in the wrong place. We’re looking in the places where society or our conditioning tells us to look—in the fulfillment of our desires. But that is not where true happiness is found.

The Buddha was quite specific about the quality of mind that keeps us bound to the long journey of samsara, our endless pursuit of happiness: “I don’t envision even one other fetter—fettered by which beings go wandering and transmigrating for a long, long time—like the fetter of craving.” So what is the craving the Buddha says binds us to samsara—the cycle of birth and rebirth—and how do we experience it in our lives?

“Craving” is the word we use to translate the Pali word tanha, and the root meaning of tanha is “thirst.” Sometimes this is expressed as “the fever of unsatisfied longing.” When we think of thirst or the fever of unsatisfied longing, it gives us a very visceral sense of what craving is like. Often the words “craving” and “desire” are used interchangeably, as I will use them here. But “desire” has many meanings: it can be the motivation to do something, to accomplish something—a desire for enlightenment, perhaps, or to become more compassionate, or to serve. That is a very different mind state from the mind state of craving. The desire of craving—the thirst, the fever of unsatisfied longing—is rooted in greed and attachment.

If we want to free ourselves from the grip of this fever, we have to understand where to look, where to investigate. The Buddha pointed to particular kinds of craving that misdirect us in our search for true happiness, including the craving for sense pleasures and the craving for becoming.

The craving for sense pleasures is the most obvious form of craving and the most familiar. This is the desire to experience pleasant sights and sounds and smells and tastes, pleasant sensations in the body, and pleasant mind states. (In Buddhism, the mind is generally considered the sixth sense.) Our engagement with desire for sense pleasures is just our usual engagement with life, with the world—wanting and enjoying what’s pleasurable and trying to avoid what’s unpleasant or disagreeable.

To us, this seems so natural, so normal. But here is where the Buddha begins a very revealing analysis of our enmeshment with the world of sense pleasures. He didn’t condemn sense pleasures as sinful; rather, in a systematic way he asked basic questions about the kinds of experiences we find enjoyable. His first question was What is the gratification in the world? As a young prince, before he left home on his quest for enlightenment, the Buddha thoroughly enjoyed all the sense pleasures. Then at one point, the thought came to him that whatever pleasure and joy there is in the world, that is the gratification in the world. If there were no pleasure and joy in the world, human beings would not become enamored of samsara. It is precisely because there is joy and pleasure in this realm that we desire and crave sense pleasures. If they weren’t enjoyable, we wouldn’t crave them.

If you examine your own life, as the Buddha examined his, what is the gratification? What experiences of body and mind do you become enamored of? What do you desire? When we look within ourselves and at the world around us, it’s evident that cravings and gratifications vary widely in intensity and frequency. At one end of the spectrum are obsessive cravings that can become all-consuming: addiction to food or sex or alcohol or drugs or success or power or fame or wealth or possessions or comfort—even to love.

These are strong, universal, driving forces in our lives, and in many ways our culture feeds them. I once saw in a store window in New York a sign that said: “Don’t let desire pass you by.” And back in the day when magazines carried cigarette advertisements I saw an ad showing a handsome man and a beautiful woman with cigarettes in their hands. The slogan read: “I don’t let anything stand in the way of my pleasure.” We’ve been getting messages like these all our lives.

Many of our desires are not obsessive, but they still may be a driving force behind many of our actions. The object of craving or desire can be small, even insignificant, but the power of desire is deeply rooted in our minds, almost like a primal energy. Momentary or seemingly trivial desires can, through repetition, strengthen into habits. We go from “I want this” to “I need this” to “I must have this.”

I really look forward to my cup of coffee in the morning, to get the day going. When I was doing a self-retreat at home one time, I got up every morning and enjoyed the sense pleasure of a good cup of coffee. Then one morning the coffee grinder didn’t work. What was the first word that came to mind? Disaster! And I meant it. In the realm of human experience that certainly wasn’t a disaster, but to my craving mind it felt like one.

Instances of craving and desire like this are so familiar to us that they’re mostly invisible. They are so much a part of who we take ourselves to be that we don’t even notice these deeply conditioned patterns until we bring the power of awareness to them. That is why the Buddha said he didn’t see any fetter as strong as craving that binds us to the wheel of samsara.

The power of mindfulness is that we can begin to notice where craving arises in daily life. We can start by really paying attention to the gratification we feel in experiencing different sense pleasures. What experiences give you moments of delight? What do you become enamored of? For me it was that early morning coffee. For you it might be lunch or a cup of tea or a hot shower. When you finally stretch out in bed at night, and the body feels “Ahhhh,” that’s a sense delight, a sense pleasure.

Whenever you notice the pleasure associated with these experiences, explore further and see if there’s a subtle level of craving for them in your mind. I noticed this on retreat while I was doing walking meditation. I could be grounded in my body and fully aware of each movement, and then when the lunch bell rang, I might continue walking just as slowly, but I could feel my mind being pulled into the lunch room, anticipating the enjoyment of the meal.

We can investigate that same conditioning in noticing our enjoyment of pleasant fantasies. It’s so easy to be caught up in pleasant thoughts, to be carried away by enticing sexual fantasies or food desires or fantasies about relationships. But at some point in our exploration of this realm of craving and desire, we might resonate with the Buddha’s words: “Whatever gratification there is in the world, that I have found.”

We’ve all had innumerable pleasurable experiences in the body and the mind. Maybe you’re still looking for some new taste, new sensation, new thought. But the Buddha didn’t stop there. The desire for sense pleasures and the gratification we get from them is just the first step in becoming aware of what moves us in our lives. “I then set out seeking the dangers of the world,” he said. “Danger” here is a translation of the Pali word adinava, which can also mean a drawback or disadvantage or the downside of things.

So what is the downside of gratification in the world? What are the drawbacks? The Buddha said, “Whatever dangers or downsides there are in the world that I have also found, namely that the world is impermanent and because of that, ultimately unreliable, subject to change.” We all know this conceptually. But we’re not living this awareness. If we were, we wouldn’t get attached to things, because we would know that whatever we crave or desire and become attached to is impermanent and is going to change. But how many of us, when we’re in the midst of enjoying sense pleasures, have enough interest to ask ourselves, “What is the downside of this? What is the drawback?”

It’s good to reflect on the drawbacks of sense pleasures so we can integrate that understanding into the choices we make. But what are the drawbacks? For one thing, sense pleasures do not deliver on their promise. We’re enamored of them because we think they’re going to make us happy. And they do for a while. But the happiness we feel is short-term and comes not because of anything inherent in the sense objects but because of the pleasant feelings we associate with them.

Sense pleasures are continually changing, continually disappearing. So we go after another one, then another one, and then another, each time anticipating the next one until all too soon our lives are at an end. We chase after the illusory happiness of sense pleasures, but unless we start paying attention to the drawbacks, we’re just living in the forward momentum of craving without ever coming to a place of completion, of contentment, of real peace. How much of your life and energy do you want to spend in this endless pursuit?

So the first drawback of relying on the gratification of sense desires for our happiness is that it doesn’t actually accomplish our aims. The second danger or drawback is that when craving becomes a strong or excessive force, it often leads us to very unwholesome actions that create unwholesome karma, bringing suffering to ourselves and others. One time I went to a teaching on sense desires by Sayadaw U Pandita, one of my Burmese teachers. He went on and on for at least ten minutes in Burmese. Then the translator summed up what he had said: “Lust cracks the brain.”

Just four words, but absolutely true. Whether it’s sexual lust or lust for anything else, it really does crack the brain. Lust is a powerful force in the mind and in our lives. It takes a lot of interest and even courage to look deeply into your heart and mind to see these patterns so that you won’t have to go through life on the momentum of habitual conditioning. We’ve all been conditioned in so many ways, some of them wholesome, some of them not. The only way to become free is to become aware, to really see that This is leading to a good result, or This is not so skillful, not wholesome.

The second type of craving the Buddha identified is more subtle than the craving for sense pleasures and mostly goes unnoticed. He called it craving for becoming—the basic urge or desire to become this or that. One familiar manifestation of the craving for becoming is the obsessively planning mind. We get caught up in endless planning, in imagining ourselves in some future situation and then engaging in all the thoughts and actions that will get us there. Indeed, a good part of our mental activity is making mental creations of a future self: I’ll do this, I’ll go there, I’ll become that. I’m not suggesting that all planning is unskillful, but being lost in fantasies about our future is very different from mindfully planning for things that need to be done.

Another way to identify the craving for becoming is to notice the many times expectation arises in your mind. One of the biggest hindrances in both meditation practice and daily life is being caught up in expectation. In meditation, when you’re being with your moment-to-moment experience, notice when you’re leaning into the next moment energetically. You’re with this breath in order to get to the next breath, or with this sensation in order for it to become something else. It’s a very common pattern, thinking that the next moment somehow is going to resolve everything. We forget that the next moment is just as impermanent as this moment, so it’s not going to offer resolution of anything.

A big problem with expectation is that it inevitably brings agitation to the mind. Certain kinds of expectations are so seductive because they masquerade as dharma aspirations. But there’s a big difference between aspiration and expectation. Aspirations can inspire us. We might have an aspiration for awakening, for example, or an aspiration to become more compassionate. That sets a direction for us. Aspiration can be beautiful and ennobling. Expectation, however, leads us into the agitation of hope and fear. When there is expectation, we’re hoping that something we want will happen and we fear that it won’t. That’s a very different experience from aspiration.

Expectation also feeds the comparing mind. There’s a big difference between being inspired by someone else’s life or practice and getting caught up in comparing and self-judgment. Years ago, Sayadaw U Pandita came to the Insight Meditation Society to teach a three-month course. He was a very demanding teacher, and it was a high-pressure retreat. We had to report on how long we practiced: the aim was 14 hours of sitting and walking a day. A lot of stuff was coming up for me during the retreat, but when I looked around, it seemed clear that other meditators were doing well while I was struggling. Comparing myself with them brought more suffering and self-judgment. Then one day, I was walking outside and saw that the spring flowers were coming up. I noticed that some flowers were already blooming, while others had buds that hadn’t yet opened, and still others were just poking out of the earth. In that moment, I realized that like the flowers, we are all unfolding in our own way, in our own time. And one flower doesn’t compare itself to the others: “Oh, that one has bloomed already. Why haven’t I?” Nature can be a great teacher.

One of the easiest ways to notice the craving for becoming and leaning into the next moment is to become aware of the very common feeling of rushing. When we’re rushing, our mind is ahead of our body, energetically pushing us forward into whatever we think we should be doing. The phenomenon of rushing has nothing to do with speed. You can be rushing while moving very slowly. You can be leaning into the next moment while sitting. When we’re rushing, we’re forgetting the central understanding of practice—that liberation is not about getting anywhere, not about craving, not about holding on or clinging. It’s all about letting go, and we can let go in any moment. The Buddha gave very specific instructions for this; they are really instructions on how to live an awakened life: “Not reviving the past. Not hoping to be in the future. Instead, with insight, see each arising state, not craving after past experience, not setting one’s heart on the future ones, not bound up in desire and craving.”

There is a traditional meditation instruction: Notice when your mind is reviving the past or longing for something in the future; then, with each arising state come back to the present, even if just for short periods of time.

It is said that on the morning the Buddha experienced full enlightenment, he thought: “Realized is the unconditioned; achieved is the end of craving.” He is saying so clearly that the nature of the liberated mind is freedom from craving—from desire for sense pleasures and craving for becoming. And we can practice this in any moment and aspire to its complete fulfillment.

This is true happiness. It is not beyond reach.

♦

This article was adapted from a talk given at Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, in February 2018.

The post Peeling Away the Promise of Desire appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Pani: Women, Drugs and Kathmandu shows the global reach of the opioid crisis and the courage of drug users who strive to overcome their addiction. In Kathmandu, where women’s drug use and addiction is taboo, life is hard for female opioid addicts. Shunned by society and with limited access to rehabilitation services, many turn to sex work and petty crime to survive. This documentary offers unique access into the lives of eight brave women who strive to recover against heavy odds and the former users who help them along the way. Evoking empathy, understanding, and compassion for those affected, it uncovers the impact of a worldwide epidemic on Nepali society.

Rated PG-13; includes graphic depictions of drug use. 

This film will be available for streaming until midnight on Saturday, October 5th.

To learn more, visit https://www.panidocumentary.com/

Related: Download the Tricycle Teachings e-book Addiction, a collection of Buddhist wisdom and advice on addiction and recovery.

The post Pani: Women, Drugs and Kathmandu appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Leaders of Buddhist-based addiction approaches gathered in Washington state October 20–22 for the Buddhist Recovery Summit 2017. Their gathering was timely: addicts seeking freedom from drugs and alcohol are increasingly turning to Buddhist-based recovery groups for help, and the rising wave of opioid addiction in the United States and Canada is causing increasing demand for new responses beyond the usual milieu of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) recovery groups.

At the event, organized by the Northwest Dharma Association, more than 100 people from around the world met at a Christian retreat center near Washington’s capital city of Olympia. They shared their progress in applying the Buddha’s teachings to addiction recovery and planned to make more Buddhist recovery groups available to more people.

Most of those attending were Buddhist, and many were meeting in person for the first time, often after years of collaborating online.

“It was very fruitful, primarily due to the fact that we have not had a meeting like that since 2009, since we really got the Buddhist recovery community together in a meaningful way,” said George Johns, president of the Buddhist Recovery Network (BRN), one of the organizations at the summit.

Buddhist Recovery Network has emerged as a go-to place for people seeking a Buddhist approach to fighting addiction. The umbrella organization now includes more than 250 recovery groups of many types on its website, less than a decade after its founding, and the number of groups continues to climb. The intent of the network’s website is to offer all approaches to people without bias, to help them find meetings where they live.

“There is an audience out there that is looking for effective recovery techniques, and BRN is speaking to that need,” Johns said.

Related: Using the Buddha’s Teachings to Overcome Addiction 

The complex relationship between the fast-growing Buddhist recovery approaches— including Noah Levine’s Refuge Recovery program, Vimalasara’s Eight Step Recovery method, and Vince Cullen’s Hungry Ghost recovery retreats—and the 84-year-old AA movement was a central topic that emerged throughout the summit. While the Buddha’s teachings are expressed somewhat differently in the various groups’ programs, they are all without the theistic overtones found in traditional 12-step addiction recovery work, something that  is attractive to many non-theistic people seeking relief from addiction.

Many at the summit have been AA participants for years and credited AA with their own recovery; it was often repeated during the event that nobody has to choose between AA and the Buddhist groups.

“I’m so grateful for being in both of these lineages,” said Barbara West, a Shambhala practitioner and poet from Davis, California. “Sometimes the Christian level of 12-step helps me get to the Buddhist goal I’m trying to get to. People aren’t seeing it as an either-or.”

Still, the rising secularization of U.S. society has attracted some addicts away from the 12-step approach to Buddhist alternatives, even when they aren’t Buddhist themselves, conference leaders suggested.

“There’s a burst of energy; it’s the next wave,” said Vimalasara. “It’s really important for us to let the wider world know that this is an alternative to the 12-step model, or a complement to the 12-step model.”

Related: The Suffering of Addiction 

Lindsay Shea, a chemical dependency professional from Seattle, said she’s increasingly referring non-Buddhist people to Buddhist recovery groups.

“The biggest block I encounter with people with 12-step is the view that it’s Judeo-Christian in nature, and a lot of people have had bad experiences with religion and church,” she said. “Buddhist recovery doesn’t have the same connotation for them. . . . In my personal and professional experience, the different Buddhist recovery groups are incredibly inclusive.”

The heart of the Buddhist Recovery Summit was October 21, a daylong marathon that started with a 7 a.m. silent meditation. The day included two panels and two small group discussions, while a drenching rain continued outside in true Northwest fashion.

On Saturday morning summit-goers were able to choose among four different styles of  recovery meetings: Refuge Recovery, Sit and Share, Noble Steps, and Eight Steps. It was an opportunity to try new approaches to witnessing their addictions and supporting each other in recovery.

And while the event featured the big names in the Buddhist recovery movement, those people seemed to downplay their own importance. Levine was probably the highest-profile person there, whose father is the late Stephen Levine, also a well-known Buddhist teacher and author. But Levine also seemed to be pushing away personal attention.

“My hope is that the Buddhist recovery movement is bigger than any of its personalities,” he said. “I feel very interested in, and committed to, getting out of the way.”

Johns said he emerged from the summit re-invigorated about the importance of the work Buddhists are doing to help people free themselves from all forms of addiction.

“At the core of the Buddhist teachings is mindfulness and the way out of suffering,” he said in a closing statement. “Buddhist recovery offers a host of teachings and practices to live a life free from the misery of addictions, and BRN is committed to nurturing and disseminating these ideas to help the still-suffering addict.”

Related: Recovery and the Fifth Precept 

The post Recovery Summit Attracts Buddhist Leaders appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Bernie Flynn, a longtime student of Chögyam Trungpa, recently told me about the time he and the Rinpoche tried to quit smoking cigarettes. A few days in, he was driving the Rinpoche to a meeting. Antsy and in withdrawal, Bernie couldn’t help but notice his teacher sitting calmly in the passenger seat. Finally, his nerves on edge, Bernie turned to Trungpa and asked how the whole quitting thing was going. “It’s easy,” said Trungpa. “Either you smoke, or you don’t smoke.”

Ah, so simple.

Later that evening, Bernie entered a room to find the Rinpoche gleefully chain smoking.

Oh, not so simple.

The psychoactive effects of drugs, alcohol included, don’t exactly jibe with the goals of Buddhist practice. Sure, some people stumble into the dharma after stumbling through an acid trip, but the fact that LSD can be a gateway to practice doesn’t mean it’s allowed beyond the gate of any respectable dharma institution. And though many Buddhists drink, it’s generally understood that this should occur in moderation and off the cushion. Hence, refraining from intoxicants is one of the five basic Buddhist precepts.

Cigarettes, however, seem to exist in a hazy gray area, both literally and figuratively. Caffeine, a substance that might otherwise find itself in similar ambiguous territory, has a sexy origin story: the Ch’an patriarch Bodhidharma, angry at himself for dozing off during zazen, rips off his eyelids and flings them to the ground, from which sprout the first tea leaves. Thus caffeine has long been accepted by Buddhists the world over as a mild performance enhancing drug, endorsed by legend. Tobacco, lacking such an auspicious beginning, has long been tolerated in Buddhist communities anyway, though the Buddhist stance on smoking is vague at best. 

Thus, the question remains. Either you smoke, or you don’t smoke, yes, but should you smoke? I found the answer, like a good koan, to be both elusive and entirely dependent upon who is answering.

_____

Smoking is not technically prohibited in Buddhism, but then again, neither is juggling chainsaws or playing Russian roulette. It would be tedious if all prohibited actions had to be spelled out (which doesn’t mean people haven’t tried. See: the Vinaya). I pointed this out to Dr. Joel Smith, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Skidmore College. “Of course [smoking is not prohibited],” said Smith, “but if you look at the eightfold path and you have any kind of subtle interpretation about right action and right effort, it doesn’t take much to argue that [right action and right effort] should be applied in that kind of way.”

Smith traveled in Japan with John Daido Loori Roshi, longtime abbot of the Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York, when Daido was receiving his confirmation rituals at Eihei-ji many years ago. He remembered Daido stepping outside the Eihei-ji buildings to smoke in between ceremonies.

“I asked him about it once,” Smith said, “and he responded, ‘Zen is not a health trip.’”

While this may be true, it glosses over the fact that smoking is, at its most basic, a harmful action. Dr. Smith has been teaching Buddhism and Eastern philosophy for decades, and over the years he has brought many students to dharma institutions to hear teachings. A number of them, he said, are turned off by the fact that they see monks smoking. “This is really where the rubber hits the road,” said Smith. “You can talk generally about compassion, but if you can’t apply it to something so basic in one’s personal life, then what the heck is going on?”

Aside from the issue of alienating the dharma-curious, the fact that Buddhists smoke raises a deeper issue for Smith. “If you love life and affirm it and want to do good in the world and be compassionate to other people, then you want to make your body and your mind as much of a vehicle for that as possible for as long as possible.” Smoking cigarettes would seem to undercut that possibility, limiting the amount of time one has to be a vehicle for the dharma. So why do Buddhist teachers continue to allow their addiction to impinge on their responsibilities? Shouldn’t overcoming their addiction be of the utmost importance, both as exemplars of the teachings and as vehicles for them?

I put this question to Dr. Judson Brewer, the director of research at the Center for Mindfulness. Brewer and his team at Yale University have developed the Craving to Quit app, which uses mindfulness to help people kick their addiction. “It’s a great question and I would want to talk to these folks and get their story,” said Brewer. “Is it just a habit that’s so much in the background that you’re not paying attention or is the level of suffering that it causes so minimal that there’s no drive to change the behavior?”

I asked Brewer if Buddhist teachers have a moral imperative not to smoke.

“If I had a gun and I killed myself, that wouldn’t be that helpful if I were a good teacher. And smoking has obviously been linked to increased mortality and morbidity, as well as a number of illnesses, including cancer.”

Indeed, John Daido Loori Roshi died of lung cancer in 2009 (though he did give up smoking later in life). Like shooting yourself with a gun, smoking will ultimately aid in your demise. “It’s not exactly suicide,” said Brewer. “It’s just a slower burn.”

_____

In 2005 I was one of 33 college students who lived in a Burmese monastery in Bodhgaya, India, where we studied Buddhism and lived according to the five basic precepts. Though it may have gone against our youthful inclinations, we refrained from taking intoxicants, sex, stealing, lying, and killing.

Cigarettes, however, were not prohibited, and like many of my fellow students, I took up smoking. We spent countless afternoons on the roof of our dorm, watching our cigarette smoke drift away while ruminating over deep questions like, is killing a malaria-ridden mosquito bad karma or good karma? Since we were suddenly living a life of previously unimaginable austerity, smoking didn’t seem like such a big deal. It gave us something to do, and though we were learning about the emptiness of self, smoking seemed like the last way we could fill ourselves up, albeit with smoke. It gave us something to cling to, the last iceberg in a sea of melting vices.

Maybe the fact that Buddhists smoke is as simple as that. Maybe Buddhists the world over puff because it is one of the few remaining ways they can puff themselves up. For a spiritual tradition so devoted to compassion and helping others, cigarettes may be the final frontier of autonomy. In a spiritual tradition so devoted to the eradication of self, cigarettes might be the last shred of selfishness. Fumo ergo sum.

I smoke, therefore I am.

_____

Google Buddhism and smoking and the resulting hits are not what I would describe as particularly helpful (unless you want lurid details about the monks recently arrested for smoking Crystal Meth in Phnom Penh, Cambodia). However, I did come across an amusing anecdote from the blog of the Scottish-born Buddhist teacher Bodhipaksa:

A young monk strolled into the office of the head monk.

“Say, man. Would it like be okay if I smoke when I meditate?”

The head monk turned pale and began quivering. When he recovered, he gave the young man a stern lecture about the sanctity of meditation. The novice listened thoughtfully and went away.

A few weeks later, he returned with another question.

“I’m concerned about my spiritual development. I notice that I spend a lot of time smoking. I was wondering, do you think it would be okay if when I am smoking, I practice my meditation?”

The older man was overjoyed and of course said yes.

I’m not so sure about the credentials of this pale, quivering head monk (or, for that matter, the novice), but I found the anecdote surprisingly informative. Perhaps the point isn’t what we do, but how we do it. Perhaps, in taking a “thou shalt not” approach, we miss the moment for the creed.

When I emailed the Bodhgaya alumni to ask for help researching this topic, one person responded, “Wouldn’t a Buddhist smoking cigarettes be kind of hypocritical, irresponsible, and ironic?” It is attitudes like this that reveal the gap between what people believe about Buddhists and how Buddhists actually behave. And maybe this is the crux of this issue. Maybe this isn’t about smoking at all but about the ideals we place on our teachers.

In his book Sex, Sin, and Zen, author and Zen teacher Brad Warner writes, “When we project our expectations about what a divine being ought to be onto real people, what else can we hope for besides disappointment?” After all, addiction does not discriminate between enlightened and unenlightened, and perhaps, in smoking, teachers unwillingly demonstrate that addiction is not a roadblock to realization. This notion—that an enlightened person can be an addicted person—might shatter our preconceptions about realization, but to practice Buddhism and believe one’s preconceptions will remain neatly intact seems about as naïve as believing a teacher is a divine being.

Warner’s own teacher, Gudo Nishijima, was himself a heavy smoker. But, said Warner, it wasn’t a problem. “He told me once that he just happened to notice one day that smoking was a bad habit, so he stopped doing it.”

“I tend to think Buddhist teachers are like artisans who take on apprentices,” said Warner. “If we take that viewpoint, it’s not such a big deal whether the teacher smokes or not. But a teacher who smokes should know that their behavior is going to be imitated. If the teacher cares about that, then maybe they should not smoke.”

So should Buddhists be required to refrain from smoking?

“I don’t think Buddhism should be in the business of requiring people to do or not do things. That seems to go against everything Buddhism is about. If you demand people follow the Buddhist rules, that demanding itself is counter to the Buddhist philosophical approach. The precepts are not requirements.”

Randall Ryotan Eiger, sensei at the Village Zendo in Manhattan, who studied with Daido for eight years, was himself a smoker for 20 years, and as a freelance speechwriter in the 80s and 90s worked for a major tobacco company. His Buddhist smoking credentials run deep, so I asked him the same question. Should Buddhists refrain from smoking?

“To be a Buddhist means to take refuge in the three treasures of Buddha, dharma, and sangha,” said Ryotan. “I don’t believe one needs to be a non-smoker, or any particular kind of person, in order to take refuge.”

Indeed, such stringent requirements would create a culture of exclusion, leaving out those with addictions who might otherwise benefit immensely from the dharma. As Dr. Brewer pointed out, his app has exposed many people to the dharma “through their own doorway of suffering, which is smoking.”

As for Buddhist teachers, Ryotan disagreed with the idea that they have a “moral imperative” not to smoke.

“One sign of the moral confusion in our market-driven society is that people have the tendency to elevate consumer and lifestyle choices into matters of high moral drama, leading to overblown talk of ‘moral imperatives.’ Tortuous analysis of one’s thoughts and actions produces a facsimile of moral seriousness that is pleasing to the ego, but it is no substitute for the wisdom and compassion that arise from the awakened heart.”

He continued, “Is smoking inherently unhealthy, unwise, and maybe a little selfish? The answer is ‘yes.’ Are smokers inherently unable to realize their buddhanature and save all beings? The answer is ‘obviously not.’”

_____

Zen is not a health trip. Depending on your view of smoking, this response is either frustratingly reductive or refreshingly concise. For some, like Dr. Smith, smoking remains one of the largest thorns in Buddhism’s side. “Smoking involves in a personal, immediate way the core Buddhist issues of suffering, craving, death, compassion, and awakening,” said Smith. “What matters is how well one deals with those issues concretely, in smoking and other concrete immediate situations. Smoking isn’t the only place where we can engage these issues—they come up elsewhere, obviously—but it’s one of the ways, and we must engage them there.”

For others, the fact that some Buddhists smoke is as mundane as the fact that some Buddhists eat meat. But even Brad Warner understands the reservations one might have about teachers who smoke. “As a learner, I would steer clear of teachers who have such obvious bad habits on the grounds that if they can’t even get it together to stop smoking, how can I believe they can guide me to get past my own bad habits?” And yet, Warner’s own teacher smoked, and perhaps that is why he and other teachers are unwilling to take a stance against cigarettes.

Nirvana means “extinguishing the flame.” When faced with the issue of human suffering, the burning ember of a lit cigarette might not seem like the highest priority. There is a more pressing conflagration at hand. Either you smoke, or you don’t smoke, yes, but in the end, we are all part of the slow burn anyhow. And maybe in the end, to borrow a phrase from the smoker Charles Bukowski, what matters most is not whether or not you smoke, but how well you walk through the fire.

[This story was first published in 2015.]

The post The Slow Burn appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We’ve recently been faced with a number of heartbreaking events that involve esteemed Buddhist teachers. These range from the shocking, as in the accidental overdose of the wonderful and inspiring Michael Stone, to the revolting case of the Tibetan Buddhist lama Sogyal Rinpoche, who was accused of coercing and intimidating numerous young women into ongoing sexual relationships, among other offenses.

While the family of Michael Stone and the victims of the alleged predatory monk are first in mind, such events also remind us of a very important issue: transparency between teachers and their students.

As the lead teacher of a Buddhist community for more than a dozen years, I feel it’s more important than ever that I, along with other spiritual leaders and authorities, practice disclosure to those we serve. And frankly, I’m dismayed that anyone who accepts the profound role of professing the dharma would choose to withhold significant issues that affect our ability to wisely counsel those who seek guidance. 

Related: How Student-Teacher Relationships Go Awry in the West 

I’m not suggesting that a spiritual figure reveal every personal issue they’re working through. But it is our fundamental duty to disclose any long-standing psychological disorders or addictions that impinge upon our emotional stability or interpersonal relationships. We should be rigorously open about these matters, as honesty is exactly what we should be offering to others. 

In eastern Buddhism the concept of the teacher as indisputable, faultless, and unquestionable may fly, but the West is a different milieu when it comes to blind allegiance. As the Buddha said in the Kalama Sutta: “Don’t believe what anyone says, nor what’s written in holy texts; believe what you see to be true and harmless.”

Disclosure is even more essential as it helps demythologize the fantasy that Buddhist teachers have transcended the inexorable, universal human emotions and struggles. When spiritual figures present themselves with a social mask that suggests imperturbability, they do a great disservice to those they guide. If you believe that I’ve somehow risen above anger, which is a universal emotion, then you will feel there’s something wrong with you the next time you feel angry.

Believing that a teacher is emotionally composed at all times will only lead to disappointment for the practitioner. If I believed my teacher Noah Levine lived utterly without hardship or challenges, how would I greet my own challenges with kindness and compassion? Would I even be able to relate to him if he claimed perfection? Of course not. Fortunately I studied with Noah specifically because he was so up front with his own issues with addiction and recovery.

I’ve certainly got my fair share of challenges that I reveal in hopes of transparency and increased mutuality with those I teach:

• Until 1995 I was an active alcoholic and addict. I now have more than 22 years of continuous sobriety, thanks to my Buddhist practice and an array of 12 Step fellowships.
• Like so many other New Yorkers—and those around the world—I experienced an acute depressive episode after witnessing 9/11 firsthand.
• I have insomnia that flares up in tandem with anxiety, which I developed during a childhood spent cowering from a violent, alcoholic father.
• For a long period I experienced Irritable Bowel Syndrome symptoms when teaching at large gatherings.
• While I’ve have a daily meditation practice for decades, I often find those 30 to 40 minutes a challenge.
• Unlike so many of my fellow dharma teachers, I prefer short three- or four-day retreats over the long Vipassana-style endurance tests.
• While I’m not particularly possessive—and love to give things away—I do have a needless collection of gimmicky electronic gadgets, hoodies, shoes, and eyeglasses.
• At times I avoid individuals who I find to be annoying or aggressive, rather than taking the time to reveal my displeasure and set secure boundaries.
• Loneliness, dread, enviousness of others’ successes, and general physiological unease still visit me.

These issues require all of my spiritual practice, not to mention some psychological assistance, to address.

Related: Putting to Rest the Myth of the Heroic Self 

There’s often little material reward for disclosing the truth. It doesn’t polish your reputation. But presenting an euphoric social mask, which many yoga and dharma teachers seem to excel at, isn’t a valid choice for me. Rather, it’s a form of unskillful speech that lacks integrity. As the Buddha taught his son, Rahula, the prerequisite for the spiritual path is honesty: “If you act, speak or think in a way that causes harm to yourself or others, reveal it to others on the path.”

To truly connect with other human beings, especially if we choose to teach, we must dare to present ourselves in ways that depict the true variety and complexity of our human experience. Without honesty there is no real bond between us and our practitioners, and without connection, nothing else really matters.

The post Why I Come Clean to Students About My Insomnia, Anxiety, and Sobriety appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.