tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49111940920377019092024-03-13T09:34:07.076-03:00One Human JourneyDennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.comBlogger232125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-60470674076012705502023-09-25T17:27:00.002-03:002023-09-25T18:54:22.423-03:00The Temple<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV_IDAsqjS95ZK5TbIxJbQKY87sLeJYabTUcCH36Q7u4NQKkWm82fBEl1qmEfhhVL1dAQAxHFI6q1EtZBT9gZGqsWjg1Tvbar9-1NNXwJ1TLvMyzlSEpu4eGu9xKVe-7wgEPiSSSLmpOp4py1vrAzKgnJBn8zwbzLUbFdL1mOEvQLRae1OdUnVqHhACOCp/s2615/IMG_8988.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2615" data-original-width="2615" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV_IDAsqjS95ZK5TbIxJbQKY87sLeJYabTUcCH36Q7u4NQKkWm82fBEl1qmEfhhVL1dAQAxHFI6q1EtZBT9gZGqsWjg1Tvbar9-1NNXwJ1TLvMyzlSEpu4eGu9xKVe-7wgEPiSSSLmpOp4py1vrAzKgnJBn8zwbzLUbFdL1mOEvQLRae1OdUnVqHhACOCp/s320/IMG_8988.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div>The heat in Miami this summer made me question everything:<div style="text-align: left;">My sanity and my life choices, for living here.<br />Every summer I’ve lived in Miami had this effect.<br />But now the weather is cooling again. <br />In this city there are no visible signs that fall is here: <br />No deciduous trees changing colors,<br />No apple orchards or pumpkins to pick. <br />But the air has a quality of mercy to it.<br />There are pleasant walks outside at sunset. <br />Last month I moved into a new place by the bay,<br />And I visit the water’s edge often. <br />It is my temple, my place of worship.<br />I have met God there many times, swimming<br />In the shallows by the rocks, in plain view<br />For anyone with eyes to see.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Last night my teacher was a manatee —<br />Some call them sea cows — who surfaced <br />Ten feet away from me to take a breath, <br />Before lazily diving again. He moved in slow motion, <br />Like a monk doing swimming meditation. <br />All 1500 pounds of him <br />Gliding as if weightless, unfazed<br />By the harsh gravity that grips in its tight fist <br />All the mammals who choose to walk on land.<br />Going forward, but with no rush to get anywhere. <br />With a slow push of his enormous tail<br />He slipped beneath the surface.<br />I waited five minutes to see him surface again.<br />All those years following my own breath <br />On the meditation cushion<br />Brought me to this moment: transfixed, <br />At one with the breath of an aquatic mammal.<br />Other people walked by, unaware of God<br />Ten feet away from them, gliding<br />Just beneath the water’s surface.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />“I think it pisses God off if you walk by <br />The color purple in a field somewhere <br />And don't notice it,” wrote Alice Walker. <br />So I try to appreciate the face of God<br />When it is shown to me <br />In this temple at the water’s edge.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Last week it was a nurse shark<br />Who comes to the shallows hunting <br />The little fish with black and yellow stripes. <br />Or any fish she can sink her teeth into, <br />Really. She doesn’t discriminate. But<br />I like to imagine the striped ones taste better to her<br />Because they are so colorful. <br />The way she slithered in the water, <br />Her entire body spiraling, undulating<br />Side to side: grace in motion.<br />She stayed close to me, putting on a show,<br />For several minutes, and then it happened:<br />She did what sharks are known for,<br />Which is bringing death. <br />The fish she ate did not appreciate <br />Her as I did: as the face of God. But<br />“God is everything or else He is nothing,” <br />Wrote someone else. “God either is, or <br />He isn't. What was our choice to be?”</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />And I think of this quote often: <br />“By means of all created things, without exception, <br />The divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us.”<br />That’s the theologian Teilhard de Chardin.<br />“We imagined it as distant and inaccessible,” he said,<br />“When in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.” </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />The lion, the shark, the scorpion,<br />These are also numbered among God’s infinite faces,<br />No less so than the lamb, the puppy, or<br />The colorful striped fish who is eaten.<br />Your choice is starkly laid out before you:<br />God is everything or God is nothing. Which will it be?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />A couple days earlier, a spotted eagle ray<br />Came to me in the temple at the water’s edge.<br />She too hunts the little fish hiding among the rocks. <br />She too is a bringer of death, but she too reveals<br />Ineffable beauty for anyone with eyes to see. <br />Bird-like, she glides through the water<br />By gently flapping her wings. Her fearsome tail,<br />Barbed with venom, trails behind her.<br />They are actually close cousins, the ray and the shark,<br />But then — truth be told — we are all cousins. <br />Are we not? We all come from the same sea.<br />Our ancestors crawled from the water’s edge <br />400 million years ago and made a choice<br />To remain on land. Yet. Still. 400 million years is nothing.<br />We are not so very different. <br />We too are, each of us is, the face of God<br />Seeing itself reflected in the mirror of creation. <br />I see myself reflected in the glassy, calm surface <br />Of Biscayne Bay at seven thirty in the morning. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div><div>As vast as the oceans appear that gave birth to us,</div><div>They are, after all, just a thin layer of water </div><div>On the surface of a tiny orb. Earth is a single mote</div><div>In a dust cloud of solar systems in our little corner</div><div>Of one spiraling galaxy among 200 billion galaxies.</div><div>Let your mind expand outward into space,</div><div>And let it remind you how insignificant you are. </div><div>Let the vastness and the mystery and the beauty</div><div>Humble you and remind you where you come from,</div><div>Where you are,</div><div>And where you are going. Ask yourself:</div><div>How could all of this be anything other than God?</div><div>Why would a whole universe have sprung into being</div><div>Out of nothingness? </div><div>They say: “God is everything or God is nothing,”</div><div>But the truth is: Both. “Wisdom tells me I am nothing,” </div><div>Said the sage Nisargadatta Maharaj. “Love tells me </div><div>I am everything. Between the two, my life flows.”</div><div>Everything and nothing. Between the two, let your life flow.</div><div>Do not try to understand it with your mind. Feel it. </div><div>A deeper part of yourself knows this, </div><div>The same way you know your own face in the mirror. </div></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><div>There will always be much we do not understand. </div><div>I do not understand these people I see </div><div>By the water’s edge, oblivious to the manatee </div><div>And the shark and the ray.</div><div>Walking quickly past, talking on the phone, gossiping, </div><div>Complaining about coworkers, parents, children, lovers. </div><div>Asleep in their lives, believing their dreams are real.</div><div>Unaware that it is God looking back at them</div><div>In the mirror, through their own eyes. </div><div>Somehow believing they are separate from the shark </div><div>And the manatee and the eagle ray </div><div>And the water itself and the land </div><div>And the stars and the air and the rest of nature. </div><div>Why do we forget what we are made of?</div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />I do not understand these people.<br />And yet it would also be true to say that I love them. <br />For that is what love is, as I understand it:<br />The felt recognition that we share the same being. <br />You. Me. Lambs and lions, fishes and sharks,<br />Manatees and rays, even the earth itself,<br />And all the trillions of other planets <br />And all the life as yet undiscovered and unsuspected:<br />We all share the same being. <br />This is why I come here each day,<br />To this temple at the water’s edge:<br />To remind myself about truth, and love, and beauty, </div><div style="text-align: left;">And death, and God, and spirit.</div><p style="text-align: left;"></p>Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-61361167921368830212022-12-11T13:05:00.001-04:002022-12-11T13:05:27.045-04:00Death in Taormina<p>I want to tell you the true story of how I almost ended up as another dead body floating at The White Lotus beach resort in Sicily.</p><p>Okay, The White Lotus is a fictional hotel in a TV show. But the rest of my story is true. Watching the TV show has brought it all back so vividly.</p><p>Along with most of my friends, I've been obsessing over season 2 of HBO's The White Lotus. We've been discussing it at length in our group text chat as we await the season finale. Which character will the dead body shown at the start of the first episode turn out to be? What will happen to poor Jen Coolidge, every gay man's favorite dumb blonde archetype? And how did I not know who Aubrey Plaza was before this? </p><p>Having been to Sicily, where this season of the show is set, gives me an edge over other viewers. The White Lotus resort may be only a fiction, but I recognize the filming locations quite well.</p><p>Which, as an aside, gives me the only beef I really have with the show. The hotel scenes are filmed in Taormina, but the beach scenes are filmed in Cefalù. If you know Sicily, you know why this is preposterous. Taormina and Cefalù are almost three hours apart by car, over winding mountain roads. The show's creators have taken excessive liberties with Sicilian geography and scenery for the sake of creating an idealized, fictional resort. Whatever. I expect this sort of thing from American TV. (But if I were Sicilian, I might be highly offended.) </p><p>I say all that because it's significant for my story to know those two place names. Because this is a story about me, and Taormina, and Cefalù. This is the story of my Sicilian trauma.</p><p>I fell in love with the scenic beauty of Taormina in the 1988 Jean-Luc Besson film "The Big Blue." When I saw that film more than three decades ago, I had never traveled more than a few hundred miles from the Oklahoma town where I grew up. But I swore a solemn vow to myself that one day I would visit Taormina in the flesh and experience this breathtakingly gorgeous destination for myself. I had largely forgotten about my vow until a few years ago when my ex-husband Adrian suggested we go on vacation to Europe, and he let me choose our destinations. At long last, my dreams of Taormina were to be fulfilled.<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicEHGi2yArMQjI-jKFaDCTnboLGzBZtXnwwX2ImWEK4nRZMwAECgQVoJ2L_KxK7zBgqnB-3zxd5ctNapPEc7Tn3Zey9D7lLlKfcNFm_-ljprbD4lTgiybZ96x_49i8ZQie9n1iBPZwo3hcQySsyGFg2OhxwE0toupQ-2y-Yr_bXF3_6bdhX5zvQbkzYg/s2048/Taormina%201.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1266" data-original-width="2048" height="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicEHGi2yArMQjI-jKFaDCTnboLGzBZtXnwwX2ImWEK4nRZMwAECgQVoJ2L_KxK7zBgqnB-3zxd5ctNapPEc7Tn3Zey9D7lLlKfcNFm_-ljprbD4lTgiybZ96x_49i8ZQie9n1iBPZwo3hcQySsyGFg2OhxwE0toupQ-2y-Yr_bXF3_6bdhX5zvQbkzYg/w400-h248/Taormina%201.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>It was the trip of a lifetime: romantic and adventurous and expensive as hell. After visiting Paris, Rome, and Tuscany, we landed in Catania on the island of Sicily and rented a car to drive to our hotel in Taormina. At the rental counter, the agent suggested that we might enjoy our drives in Sicily better with a convertible, and we enthusiastically agreed. But the only convertible available was a Volkswagen Beetle with a manual transmission. Confident that my stick-shift driving skills from my college days would come back like riding a bicycle, I again agreed. </p><p>I began to regret this decision as we tried to exit the car rental parking lot, and I could not manage to put the car in reverse. Adrian lost his patience and we began to yell at each other, until another tourist got out of his car and took pity on us and showed me what to do.</p><p>Little did I know that the real horrors and humiliations of driving in Sicily were yet to come. My actual trauma — I mean real, bone-chilling terror that still lives in my nervous system today as low-grade PTSD — began in earnest when we got to Taormina, which is a diabolical maze of narrow, vertically inclined mountain roads winding up and down the rock faces of cliff sides dropping hundreds of feet to the ocean. </p><p>We were there in the summertime, and to get to our hotel we had to drive through Taormina itself, a picturesque Italian village that's difficult to see through the clouds of tourists choking the streets in buses, in cars, and on foot, as thick as mosquitoes in the Florida Everglades.</p><p>In the center of Taormina, surrounded by charming sidewalk cafes and high-end clothing boutiques, we found ourselves behind one of those large tourist buses, inching our way up a steep hill, with other cars directly behind us. The convertible's top was down and our suitcases were in the back seat. One of Adrian's suitcases, purchased in Paris when his old suitcase literally fell apart while being repacked, was brightly festooned on every side with comic book superheroes: Superman, Batman, the Incredible Hulk, and so on.</p><p>On the hilly street in the town center, I struggled furiously with the gas pedal and clutch and brake, stricken with terror at the thought of rolling backwards downhill and hitting the cars behind us, or giving the car too much acceleration and hitting the bus in front of us. We lurched our way forward up the hill in small, violent bursts that made the car's tires spin and the brakes screech each time we started and stopped. Adrian began giving me helpful driving instructions again from the passenger seat, and in return I offered him kindly suggestions on how to sit in the passenger seat and be quiet. </p><p>The Volkswagen's engine revved loudly each time we shot forward and then died each time we stopped. After a few minutes of this, the engine began to emit smoke, and the air was laced with the smell of burning metal. Throngs of tourists milling nearby stopped and took in the spectacle of two gay Americans in a convertible Beetle with a child's superhero suitcase in the back seat, yelling at each other and lurching forward and backward in barely controlled movements.<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCrzTouHy-Ky4zZMFPvRyZbSpVSlyjl4R43raRK6qiQlIGHGO9Ri6WqxRIFu4GZcWnT9AieL0N-9tkWnO4Tjdc20yieohenHKfbf_c_M1xcTq5iy1p-TI3nkEmKWgMLwvEew37cswLCHP1Q_AXJty3Eq4QVBTqnjvdExKrDVqcZW-rhNq-NYR39mnlrw/s960/driving%20in%20sicily.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="594" data-original-width="960" height="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCrzTouHy-Ky4zZMFPvRyZbSpVSlyjl4R43raRK6qiQlIGHGO9Ri6WqxRIFu4GZcWnT9AieL0N-9tkWnO4Tjdc20yieohenHKfbf_c_M1xcTq5iy1p-TI3nkEmKWgMLwvEew37cswLCHP1Q_AXJty3Eq4QVBTqnjvdExKrDVqcZW-rhNq-NYR39mnlrw/w400-h248/driving%20in%20sicily.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>We made it safely through the town center without striking any other vehicles or pedestrians, and again I thought the worst was finally over. Then we got to our hotel, which was a more budget-conscious version of The White Lotus perched high on the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean. I made a hairpin turn from the road into the long, steep driveway going several hundred yards up to the hotel, which felt like it ascended at a 45-degree angle from the road below. </p><p>I slammed my foot down on the gas pedal to make sure we made it all the way up the hill to the front door, where we pulled our suitcases out of the back seat and checked in at reception. That's where I was informed that the parking situation for guests was to simply parallel park between other cars, anywhere along the driveway. The driveway we had just driven up. </p><p>I cannot now describe parking the car there, because I have suppressed the memory. I know I did it, because Adrian didn't do it, and somebody did, but I couldn't tell you, for example, if the sun was overhead or if it was nighttime. The one detail I do recall with total clarity is that we looked at each other afterwards and made a pact that we would leave the car parked there for the rest of our stay, and would take taxis if we decided to show our faces in the town center again.<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxQkhKliZ57Z3dsxcCD5Ia0-4GmtKdSqgQpBtTWEKmiNQQYFU324IoR9aZq3sVr2TZInrws2Ns7MqeG48nuiiWTUo_6nSPzUn8t9ciXpurbIjSmpB8EGau9ZGHTp4vPp3l9ZjSGjL7A1hc_1z_Td8iGJaO67at3PT0LC_m71t0AqmyOzTw47DH-QkaCg/s1320/taormina%206.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="841" data-original-width="1320" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxQkhKliZ57Z3dsxcCD5Ia0-4GmtKdSqgQpBtTWEKmiNQQYFU324IoR9aZq3sVr2TZInrws2Ns7MqeG48nuiiWTUo_6nSPzUn8t9ciXpurbIjSmpB8EGau9ZGHTp4vPp3l9ZjSGjL7A1hc_1z_Td8iGJaO67at3PT0LC_m71t0AqmyOzTw47DH-QkaCg/w400-h255/taormina%206.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>We relaxed once we made it to our room, which had a balcony overlooking the sea from high up on the cliffs. This is why people come to Taormina. To say that the scenery of Taormina is spectacular is akin to saying that Rome perhaps has a few antiquities worth looking at. In a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/18/archives/the-scenic-overkill-of-taormina-the-prospect-from-taormina.html" target="_blank">1979 travel review for The New York Times</a>, Robert Packard wrote:</p><p>"If on a fine day the unsuspecting visitor [to Taormina] strolls to the parapet to look at the view, cardiac arrest may be the reward. There, hundreds of feet below, is the Mediterranean coastline studded with white crescent beaches between rocky promontories. To the left is a monumental Greek theater, refurbished by the Romans. To the right, high on a snowcapped peak, a thin trail of smoke pours from the volcanic mouth of Mount Etna. As a view, it is preposterous, an exercise in scenic overkill, and clearly its excesses are humanly irresistible."</p><p>Our hotel did not have beach access per se, but the next morning after breakfast we found our way hundreds of feet down an intricate series of sometimes hidden staircases and steep foot paths to a jagged, rocky coastline. Like kids on a playground slide, we climbed atop huge boulders just off shore and jumped from them into the frigid Ionian Sea, again and again. It was great fun and highly Instagrammable content.<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMiplUFhwy6wIhM3PR_9LFJyy2u_XRE_xnPozlMFiuRdYwFiBu7Du6NUFAp3APf9Me9NhNw_UOueizgPyIQEUYYnJ9L0gDrXnwtCJhSObGa_1x3iywZjr5gz1gFg0ZB0uvS6X9PKCxL5KqVYdEdXfQw8u7feMGYJHXHcAYAQX83LtPStkFMwP1eRrGDw/s960/taormina%205.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMiplUFhwy6wIhM3PR_9LFJyy2u_XRE_xnPozlMFiuRdYwFiBu7Du6NUFAp3APf9Me9NhNw_UOueizgPyIQEUYYnJ9L0gDrXnwtCJhSObGa_1x3iywZjr5gz1gFg0ZB0uvS6X9PKCxL5KqVYdEdXfQw8u7feMGYJHXHcAYAQX83LtPStkFMwP1eRrGDw/w400-h225/taormina%205.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>But while climbing over some other smaller boulders in the shallows, my foot found a slippery spot under the water's surface, and I face-planted, with the force of all my body weight, into a half-submerged volcanic rock about 50 times larger than my head. My nose took most of the impact, and I was momentarily stunned by blunt force trauma. In a daze and gasping for breath, I struggled to find a solid hold on the rock with my hands so I could stand up again. Adrian was somewhere up ahead of me, finding his own way across the rocks, and did not witness or hear my fall. With only a slightly harder impact, I might have slumped over into the two or three feet of water, unconscious, and drowned within a few seconds. I understood in my bones that I could have died in an instant, and I pictured the whole scene in my head: the lifeless body of an American tourist, floating face-down in the Mediterranean, just like the one in the opening scene of The White Lotus season 2. Fear and adrenaline and stress hormones raced through my veins.</p><p>The adrenaline probably kept me conscious, and as my shock gave way to panic, I began to suspect I had broken my nose, and my mind raced ahead to imagine all the ways a broken nose would spoil the rest of our vacation. I found my breath and began to scream to Adrian to turn around and come back. When he got back to me he looked slightly annoyed. He surveyed the damage to my face, concluded that my nose was not broken and that the various cuts and scrapes from the volcanic rock would not leave lasting scars. He helped me find my way back through the rocks to the shoreline, where I sat on the sand and hugged my knees, my body shaking, my face aching and stinging. I didn't move for the next 15 minutes, as the fresh, visceral trauma of a true near-death experience in Taormina worked its way through my nervous system, settling in on top of previous layers of trauma from driving in Sicily. At the same time, I had to psychologically prepare myself to reckon with the climb back up the cliffside staircases and paths to our hotel, which loomed, hidden, at cruising altitude somewhere above us.</p><p>The following day we got wanderlust and decided to break our pact about leaving the car parked, and to visit some other part of Sicily on a day trip. We surveyed the options. The nearby volcano Mount Etna was interesting but would involve a lot of walking and hiking. The city of Palermo called to us but seemed altogether too much to bite off in a day trip. We settled on Cefalù, a seaside town halfway between Taormina and Palermo. <br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCi3A7x-pQZgjjjqz4KJFF3tDtxW6Jjgqd1QiGVaNbUap7fIkOcLCK6kCbYeVhfMZgOYxdBf5HtwxehfoGnNQYAKIVPblYoxIpzG14QykCBBTgdAQLcKvp1MfoCR5kdTmfJevsqlw9cw1P6NnuZNGKe-1GonmK3fUEpiZVDFhg3vXghi0FBQal2oAPOQ/s2048/cefalu%201.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCi3A7x-pQZgjjjqz4KJFF3tDtxW6Jjgqd1QiGVaNbUap7fIkOcLCK6kCbYeVhfMZgOYxdBf5HtwxehfoGnNQYAKIVPblYoxIpzG14QykCBBTgdAQLcKvp1MfoCR5kdTmfJevsqlw9cw1P6NnuZNGKe-1GonmK3fUEpiZVDFhg3vXghi0FBQal2oAPOQ/w400-h300/cefalu%201.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>The morning drive to Cefalù fully redeemed our decision to rent the convertible. I felt exquisitely chic with the top down, winding through mountainous roads and cutting through manmade tunnels in the larger mountains. I'd gotten comfortable enough again driving a stick shift that we had no more traumatic moments in the car. We laughed and played music on the stereo with the wind in our hair and filmed more enviable Instagram content.</p><p>Cefalù is dominated by single, massive mountain with a sheer vertical rock face that the Greeks who settled this place in the 4th century BCE called "head." The mountain overlooks a large village of medieval buildings, with a massive 12th-century cathedral rising high above them all. It calls to mind, more than anything, an ancient city in Game of Thrones — specifically King's Landing — except for the striped umbrellas dotting the single small beach that sits in the very middle of town. This beach is, of course, the one shown in The White Lotus, complete with Cefalù's medieval townscape and cathedral in the background, and viewers are asked to believe that the beach sits at the foot of the hotel shown in Taormina. Perhaps now you understand my outrage.<br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgysq8K6KfxqG3cwM7nzo-MG9NR61YeE-Hin2GNRmmJq2lpTTvzczP_kv32hPEfdsYz5mCbGZ8VJbN5tPp1U-AdZ_Sk7LyHHYaVYI3PugcwIEfhKFYjIOlGzMpVxzrhWxC543u1t2reyhoWU7R1HBvmk-TQMrUaZpPdq3MvkBuRjrKa4JxHxP9ZzfrR0w/s2048/cefalu%202.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgysq8K6KfxqG3cwM7nzo-MG9NR61YeE-Hin2GNRmmJq2lpTTvzczP_kv32hPEfdsYz5mCbGZ8VJbN5tPp1U-AdZ_Sk7LyHHYaVYI3PugcwIEfhKFYjIOlGzMpVxzrhWxC543u1t2reyhoWU7R1HBvmk-TQMrUaZpPdq3MvkBuRjrKa4JxHxP9ZzfrR0w/w400-h300/cefalu%202.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>We visited the cathedral, explored the ancient streets, had lunch in town, and then took a boat out for a snorkeling trip. Unlike Taormina, the water in Cefalù was warm and inviting. There wasn't much to see under the surface, but we blissfully jumped from the boat into the Mediterranean, again and again. My memories of that day are all happy ones. Even lunch was great. No trauma in Cefalù. As the late afternoon sun began to wane and we prepared for the drive back to our hotel, I confessed to Adrian that I wished we didn't have to return to Taormina, and he agreed. It was a bitter prospect. </p><p>After three decades of ardent longing to experience the "exercise in scenic overkill" that is Taormina, my dream destination was a series of public humiliations and near-death experiences. </p><p>Some day, I'd love to go back to Sicily and see more of the island, but I would never set foot in Taormina again. Not even to stay at The White Lotus.</p>Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-87583428275553531352022-09-05T13:31:00.002-03:002022-09-05T14:12:02.394-03:00The Living<p>Tragedy struck in 1922, shortly after my grandfather's family had migrated by wagon train from Texas to Oklahoma. The seven family members who died that one horrific month, exactly a century ago, are buried together in a small cemetery in a rural town near where my mother grew up.</p><p>As many as 10 family members came down with typhoid fever, including my grandfather who was just a boy at the time. The survivors recalled desperately "turning from one sick bed to another" as they tried to comfort and care for those who were ill.</p><p>The person who looms largest in my mind here is my great-grandmother, Mary. The seven people who died that month were all her children and grandchildren. </p><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTlC-rsTsmEzWLQSW2yre2TAW7po4myK2D89h_o_4z9ymTXVHelD83ftj6-InglkOKQDxzKZNXtYWh_I2RYe-L1js_liQHLumjX4pFkz70hBfX_JjicBJBA0gfWZHnHd9JXgDSwIoW-CvxqAJW1iPlZPU71nOt6ov1jCc0nwPhZKL-W6VcjWfmi3jGEQ/s1024/My%20Great%20Grandparents.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="952" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTlC-rsTsmEzWLQSW2yre2TAW7po4myK2D89h_o_4z9ymTXVHelD83ftj6-InglkOKQDxzKZNXtYWh_I2RYe-L1js_liQHLumjX4pFkz70hBfX_JjicBJBA0gfWZHnHd9JXgDSwIoW-CvxqAJW1iPlZPU71nOt6ov1jCc0nwPhZKL-W6VcjWfmi3jGEQ/w373-h400/My%20Great%20Grandparents.JPG" width="373" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">My great-grandmother Mary, in the white dress, circa 1912.<br />My grandfather was not yet born when this photo was taken.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>I try to imagine myself in her shoes. I try to fathom the cataclysmic loss she suffered in such a short period of time. The sheer scale of it makes the mind reel.</p><p>I wonder how she survived. I don't mean surviving typhoid — I mean how did she go on living after such a personal apocalypse? How did she not die of grief? How did she not lose her mind? </p><p>I asked my aunt Nova, the family historian, how she thought her grandmother managed to go on. </p><p>"She didn't have any choice," Nova replied. "She had all those other kids and grandkids to look after."</p><p>"I can't go on. I'll go on," the existentialist Samuel Beckett wrote in his novel The Unnamable. So that's it. You go on because it's choiceless. Death will have its way with you, but so will life. You rise from the ashes, pick up the nearest spoon, and use it to put food in the mouth of the next hungry child, sister, husband, friend.</p><p>I exist today because typhoid failed to kill my grandfather, and because of my great-grandmother's resilience. A full century later, hundreds of people in my extended family exist for the same reasons. Babies are still being born today on this family tree. We are the living, and the ones who are yet to live.</p><p>For the rest of her days, Mary never went back to the cemetery where her seven children and grandchildren were buried. I don't fault her for that. She didn't want to forget about the loved ones she had lost. But I suspect that the wounds in her soul were so deep — unfathomable even for her — that to risk reopening them would have been too much to bear. Others around her, including my grandfather, needed her to go on, and that was the only way she could.</p>Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-44908861994745000622022-08-08T14:38:00.006-03:002022-08-08T16:39:48.567-03:00Remembering Our Place in NatureAt the end of my block there's an avocado tree growing in front of a 40-unit apartment building. Nobody seems to pay any attention to it, and right now it's heavy with fruit. Avocados are literally falling on the ground. Those babies are $4 or $5 each in the store. I brought these three home and will probably go back for more tomorrow. My friends in New York City laughed and shook their heads when I shared this news with them. I'm still trying to figure out the joke.<div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL9b2boYqPCZx2emUHOYhcIN13R3_dMpkgKMDvvra1BFGO86s2kOMVq7w7hqJj76-G6KzOgZ2YZd1Jtu5vRnoIq80lrRNTIk_rOv4dKEtQUv_2R_hRWCRliRnc_Basz-VvQ_YpXSaxzCulY0XJEMSJ5Z9xvbi3QK0HerhLo35xzbQVZiiDH8sQUPlT4w/s3024/IMG_5109.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL9b2boYqPCZx2emUHOYhcIN13R3_dMpkgKMDvvra1BFGO86s2kOMVq7w7hqJj76-G6KzOgZ2YZd1Jtu5vRnoIq80lrRNTIk_rOv4dKEtQUv_2R_hRWCRliRnc_Basz-VvQ_YpXSaxzCulY0XJEMSJ5Z9xvbi3QK0HerhLo35xzbQVZiiDH8sQUPlT4w/s320/IMG_5109.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><div>Those of us who live urban and suburban lives are largely (sometimes entirely) disconnected from the land and from the sources of our food. So it gives me a certain thrill to find a legitimate (and free) food source growing just a few steps from where I live in Miami Beach. I also found a banana tree in my neighborhood this year, full of fruit, but then someone cut it down. </div><div><br /></div><div>It makes me think of how my parents and grandparents lived. My mother grew up in rural Oklahoma. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, she would walk home from school along a dirt road, and pick an onion out of the ground as an after-school snack. An onion! </div><div><br /></div><div>My grandfather, at that time, was a sharecropper. Our family lived on someone else's farm and helped cultivate the land and the crops, and received compensation in the form of food they themselves had harvested. The stories passed down in my family about that time instilled in me, from a young age, an appreciation of what it meant to live off the land.</div><div><br /></div><div>And it reminds me of places I've visited where people, even today, live closer to the land, closer to their food. Rural places, mostly, in Tuscany and Colombia and Canada and upstate New York. Places where it doesn't seem odd, at all, to walk outside and pick avocados or bananas or mangos or olives or apples from a nearby tree growing wild (or sort of wild). </div><div><br /></div><div>However small and insignificant it may be in the larger scheme, this gesture — picking these avocados and bringing them home and washing them and setting them aside and waiting to see how long it will take for them to ripen — is a gesture of reclaiming my relationship to nature. </div><div><br /></div><div>At some point this week or next (or the one after that) I will squeeze one of these avocados and know that it is ready. I'll enjoy it with a meal or by itself, and be satisfied knowing that at least this one thing in my diet didn't get trucked across the United States or shipped across the Gulf of Mexico, and I didn't pay $5 for a single piece of fruit at Whole Foods. And with this single piece of fruit, I'll be momentarily opting out of <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/02/19/1081948884/mexican-drug-cartels-are-getting-into-the-avocado-and-lime-business" target="_blank">supporting the violent cartels</a> that now control the $2.8 billion avocado industry in Mexico.</div><div><br /></div><div>And it is also a gesture of remembrance, of how people survived before food became so industrialized, remembrance of a time and place when bringing home sustenance from a tree on your block didn't seem like something funny or anachronistic. It was just life. </div><div><br /></div><div>For tens of thousands of years, this was just life. When nature offered bounty you took advantage of it, with gratitude, with delight, and with full awareness that it's only temporary. The avocados, the bananas, the trees themselves, and even you. All of nature moves in cycles, and nothing lasts as long as you think it will. There will be dry seasons and fires and hurricanes, or the bees will fail to pollinate the avocado tree one year, or someone will come and chop down the banana tree. And one day the reaper will come and chop you down too. </div><div><br /></div><div>All of nature's bounty — which even includes us, no matter how far removed we've become from nature and from knowledge of our place in it — is temporary. Enjoy it while it's there, in whatever form you can.</div></div></div>Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-60840468452894696982021-07-04T13:20:00.002-03:002021-07-04T13:20:10.236-03:00Here's to Freedom (Well, Sort Of)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zQq3XLM_u4U/YOHfbaqt-QI/AAAAAAAAExU/INFjBxl9nrkhMWg8NLuObaWYf2i7g7BuACLcBGAsYHQ/s873/Blue%2BRed%2BStars%2BStripes%2B4th%2Bof%2BJuly%2BCard.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="620" data-original-width="873" height="284" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zQq3XLM_u4U/YOHfbaqt-QI/AAAAAAAAExU/INFjBxl9nrkhMWg8NLuObaWYf2i7g7BuACLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h284/Blue%2BRed%2BStars%2BStripes%2B4th%2Bof%2BJuly%2BCard.png" width="400" /></a><br /><br /></div><br />Happy 4th of July! Celebrate independence!<p></p><p>While honoring this day, let's also take a moment to reflect on where we came from, and the people we exploited and murdered to get here.</p><p>July 4th is a bitter pill for the Native American/Indigenous people who had all of their land and resources stolen and were virtually wiped off the face of the earth in a long, intentional campaign of genocide.</p><p>July 4th is also a bitter pill for the descendants of enslaved Africans in America, whose backs were broken to build our economic prosperity. A prosperity they still don't fully share in.</p><p>As a country that asserts itself as a moral authority in the world, let's start with a searching and fearless moral inventory of our own history, which is bloody and cruel beyond imagination.</p><p>We owe apologies and reparations to those whom we've hurt. We all know it. Some of us just don't want to admit it.</p><p>And when I say reparations, I do mean money. Because money talks in America. It's one of the only things that does. Our blood is green from placing the value of money above all other things. From Day One.</p><p>Why reparations, so long after the fact? Because they are still hurting. Black and Indigenous People of Color in America — the descendants of those who were slaughtered and enslaved — still suffer from mass incarceration, police brutality, restricted access to employment, healthcare, and educational opportunities, economic disparity, and just plain old bigotry.</p><p>Let's start using July 4th as an occasion to celebrate all of what we are as a nation, and not to whitewash the past away. Because it's still haunting us. And until we do right by it, it will always haunt us. That's what ghosts do.</p>Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-48047704062949878002021-06-27T22:16:00.003-03:002021-06-28T01:41:41.772-03:00I'm Out of the Closet Now<p>37 years ago I first met one of the great loves of my life: Tarot cards. I've been studying and working with Tarot ever since. In Tarot and oracle cards, I have discovered one of my truest gifts and one of my life's deepest callings.</p><p>But for most of these 37 years, I kept this love hidden. I read Tarot cards mostly for myself, and occasionally for friends. I kept it on the down low. I didn't talk openly about it or present myself as a Tarot reader to people outside of my immediate circle.</p>I didn't dare.<br /><br />I doubted myself, my intuition, and my ability to interpret the cards. I felt like an impostor.<br /><br />And I feared what people might think. After all, the Tarot is mysterious and widely misunderstood, and people tend to fear and mock what they don't understand. Would I be mocked? Would I be rejected?<br /><br />My own fears and insecurities led me to keep my gift to myself, hiding it from others for fear of how I might be judged. All along the way, I felt a persistent urge to express this part of myself and to share this gift with others. But I suppressed it.<br /><br />No longer.<br /><br />This year, in the wake of the pandemic lockdown and some precipitous life events, something shifted within me, and I knew it was time to come out of the Tarot closet. 37 years inside was enough. So I put it out there.<br /><br />(This reminds me of another chapter in my life, and another kind of closet I had to come out of in order to be my authentic self. But that's a story for another time.)<br /><br />What has happened since I came out of the Tarot closet has been nothing short of amazing.<br /><br />I've done more than 100 readings for people in the past several months. A few for friends; most for strangers. Some that lasted 90 minutes; many that were shorter. Some in person; many online. Time and time again I've been astonished by the deep connections made during even short readings, and how the messages that people need to hear keep coming through.<br /><br />Some people come out of curiosity, for a general reading. Others come seeking guidance for navigating a difficult or uncertain chapter in their lives, or for insights on how to deal with challenges in love, work, or family. Some are struggling with addiction, anxiety, or depression. Some are looking to turn a new page in life and wondering in which direction they should go next.<br /><br />The woman whose husband passed in his sleep three months ago, and she's having troubles with his kids, relieved to hear from the cards that she is exactly where she is supposed to be right now in her journey with grief and healing.<br /><br />The musician who wondered about love and relationships, and received a message about childhood trauma and how attachment styles formed in early childhood have shaped her adult relationship experiences.<br /><br />The Tarot reader who came for a reading, and broke down in tears as she gained insights into some past relationship difficulties.<br /><br />The CEO of a thriving startup company in finance, constantly taking care of his employees, hearing that he needs to make more time for himself to journey within and do his own soul work.<br /><br />A woman who lost her twin brother, receiving a card depicting a pair of twins, male and female.<br /><br />Some people get messages they already knew, but needed to hear confirmed. Others get messages they were not expecting, bringing them to tears of sadness or tears of laughter and joy, or some combination of the two.<br /><br />And occasionally, someone gets the rug lovingly pulled out from under them, like the New Age person who wants to be all about love and light, good vibes and ascension, hearing from the cards that they need to descend into the dark depths of the psyche and reckon with their own hidden pain and shadow material. Not what they wanted to hear!<br /><br />You never know what's going to come up in the cards until you lay them out, and look, and listen to the silent, wordless voice of intuition.<br /><br />And so, I'm out now. All the way out.<br /><br />Hello, I'm Hunter, and I'm a Tarot reader.Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-25191649147864092322021-06-11T01:23:00.001-03:002021-06-11T01:28:11.784-03:00Let Go or Be Dragged<p>A conversation I had today prompted me to reflect back on one of my previous relationships. It was a really short-lived relationship, only a few months in actual "time" (whatever "actual" time is). But it occupied much more space than that in my heart and my mind. When it ended, I found it very difficult to let go. In fact, I didn't let go. I held on to the idea of it inside, even after it was gone, and that was really painful.</p><p>"Let go or be dragged." Some poorly informed sources on the Internet and social media have attributed this quote to the Buddha. He didn't say it, but he might as well have. It's very <i>Buddhist</i> in a quippy sort of way. < Oh, snap! ><br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fjUCtWiL0-4/YMLkh6U80dI/AAAAAAAAEuo/A0RdjFzIchg_22Du9PMXCYPiERNevGhQQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2000/Let%2BIt%2BGo.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1428" data-original-width="2000" height="285" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fjUCtWiL0-4/YMLkh6U80dI/AAAAAAAAEuo/A0RdjFzIchg_22Du9PMXCYPiERNevGhQQCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h285/Let%2BIt%2BGo.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>Attachment is the cause of suffering. When we attach to things in a fixed way, we create suffering for ourselves, because guess what? Things change. When asked to summarize the Buddha's teachings in a single phrase, Zen master Suzuki Roshi simply replied: "Everything changes." </p><p>And so he changed. He announced he was moving to a different state. And, abruptly, any fantasies I was harboring about our future together were suffocated. But because I wasn't willing or able to let go in my heart, I got dragged. And the dragging actually went on for longer than the relationship did. True story!</p><p>"You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers," says a pro-gun bumper sticker in some red states like the one where I grew up. For me, just substitute "relationship" for "gun" and the same was true. I wasn't willing to let go of my fixed idea of a relationship that was, in reality, bound to the laws of change.</p><p>There's a teaching story in Buddhism about hunters who trap monkeys by hiding a sweet inside an empty shell with a small hole. The monkeys reach inside and grasp the sweet, but then they can't withdraw their clasped fist from the shell. They're not trapped by anyone else. They are trapped by themselves. Because they don't let go.</p><p>That relationship was many years ago now, and one of the things that came through to me today when I reflected on it was how perspective changes everything. Looking back now on that relationship, there were so many red flags that I chose to ignore. And I actually can't imagine being attached to that person anymore, or who I thought he was. Hindsight is 20/20.</p><p>A certain moment came, as a result of meditation and introspective practices, when I finally (and rather suddenly) let go of any attachment to the ghost of that old relationship. And when I did, I experienced freedom and a renewed lightness of being. But I didn't get that freedom from him. I got it from myself.</p><p>I was no longer behaving like the monkey who traps itself by refusing to let go of the sweet.</p><p>Nobody else is holding the key to your inner freedom. Only you can hold that key. And only you can unlock the door.</p><p>And here's the thing: your capacity for joy and happiness in this life depends on your inner sense of freedom. So what do you want? Do you want to be trapped, or do you want to be free? It's really up to you.</p>Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-35873170843888237192021-05-28T03:16:00.136-03:002021-05-28T16:41:12.203-03:00Violence and Non-Violence in Yoga and Buddhism<h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">One of my yoga students approached me with an interesting question today. Here's how the Q&A unfolded....</span></h3><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b>QUESTION:</b></h3><p>"What does “violence” mean in the Yama (Yogic ethical precept) about practicing non-violence? Is violence never justified?" </p><p><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zOQHW7pxcQQ/YLCAv--5OJI/AAAAAAAAEqY/BRMaK3jB-OMfUBusdCD88KU3BqOlV4TDQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1080/Q%2526A%2Bwith%2BHunter.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="495" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zOQHW7pxcQQ/YLCAv--5OJI/AAAAAAAAEqY/BRMaK3jB-OMfUBusdCD88KU3BqOlV4TDQCLcBGAsYHQ/w495-h495/Q%2526A%2Bwith%2BHunter.png" width="495" /></a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b>RESPONSE:</b></h3><p>I’m not fond of translating that particular Yama with the English term "non-violence." It evokes certain things that are not germane to the ethical principle we're talking about. The Sanskrit word for this Yama (which, by the way, is also the foundation of Buddhist ethics, using the same Sanskrit word) is “Ahimsa”. "Himsa" means “harm” and "a-" is a negating prefix, so a more literal translation of "Ahimsa" is simply "non-harming." It’s the ethical commitment to try to <b>avoid creating harm</b>, and to <b>reduce harm</b> as much as possible.</p><p>Some people say “violence is never justified," but I believe that (while well-intentioned) this is something of a empty platitude. I mean, look. Reducing harm in World War II meant annihilating Hitler and the Nazis with violence and destruction. This is not up for debate. At a certain point, violence towards Nazis became the moral imperative. Their unchecked aggression and their murderous, genocidal actions were spreading like wildfire, and needed to be destroyed with an equal or greater show of violent force, for the sake of all humanity. Period. Full stop. 🛑 </p><p>So while it may not be often, I do believe violence is sometimes justified, in order to protect the greater good and eradicate very harmful situations.</p><p>In the Jataka Tales — which are moral stories or fables about the Buddha's previous lives — there's a story about him being on a boat with many, many other people, and knowing that one wicked man on the boat was planning to sink the boat and drown everyone. So he killed that man in order to save the lives of the many other people on the boat. In doing so, he took on the negative karma of killing, but it was in the greater interest of protecting so many other lives from being destroyed. That could be another example of reducing harm.</p><p>If you were on a crowded plane and the person in the row in front of you stood up with a gun and a hijacking threat, and you knew (okay, let's chalk it up to your extensive martial arts training and your lightning reflexes) that you had a very brief but viable window of opportunity to take him down through a swift and unexpected attack from behind, what would be the right and ethical thing to do? Would you choose to respect the life and safety of the terrorist over the lives and safety of the other 300 passengers and crew on the plane? Think about this.</p><p>In Tibetan Buddhism there are many "deities" or spirits and some are depicted as "protectors" of the teachings and of those who practice the teachings. There are peaceful deities and there are wrathful deities. Most of the "protector" spirits manifest as wrathful energies. They are depicted iconographically as angry, scary, demonic-looking figures who brandish fierce weapons and often hold severed heads in their hands or dance on corpses (which represent the ego and all its bullsh*t). They cut through what needs to be cut through, they restrain what needs to be restrained, and in some cases they destroy what needs to be destroyed.</p><p>An example of wrathful protector energy manifesting in everyday life might be the moment when you're about to go into the other room to yell at your spouse or your coworker, but as you're closing the door behind you, you slam your fingers in the door. BOOM! Suddenly you're stopped dead in your tracks, and there's this moment of shock. You didn't want it, but there it is. You've just received a sharp, painful reminder to pay attention to what you're doing.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-dotdLkpQ7Ys/YLCFGfwOkuI/AAAAAAAAEqg/bCyOnkVzuWkSdYibqsECupNKxP8IyG2PwCLcBGAsYHQ/image.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="599" data-original-width="551" height="507" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-dotdLkpQ7Ys/YLCFGfwOkuI/AAAAAAAAEqg/bCyOnkVzuWkSdYibqsECupNKxP8IyG2PwCLcBGAsYHQ/w466-h507/image.png" width="466" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p>I have a fair amount of wrathful protector energy in me. People often perceive me as being very gentle and soft-spoken and perhaps a "Yes" man, but in doing so they're only seeing one side of my nature. I can also be very cutting and direct and manifest a strong "No!" energy. In my understanding, it is part of the path of awakening to learn how to experience ALL of our energies, and learn how to utilize them skillfully. Sometimes, skillfully channeling our wisdom energies may look like a peaceful, smiling Buddha or an angel, but other times it may look like a scary demon or a wrathful protector who cuts through what needs to be cut through, without hesitation.</p><p>Like, BOOM! Stop it with this harmful bullsh*t, right now! And if you don't, then you're going to face the consequences. And I have a box in my hand, full of those consequences, and it's wrapped up with a bow and it has your name on it. You want to open this box? Are you feeling lucky? It's <i>that</i> kind of energy. </p><p>Wise compassion isn't always syrupy sweet and gentle and passive, being a doormat and letting every harmful situation play itself out endlessly. We have a term for that in Buddhism: it's called "idiot compassion."</p><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">QUESTION:</h3><p>"Thank you. This is good food for thought. I was thinking of this in relation to sports or shows. Lots of what you could consider violence going on."</p><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">RESPONSE:</h3><p>Yes. It’s important to be mindful of the images of violence you consume, and be aware of how they affect your mind and your nervous system. As Ben Okri wrote, "Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world."</p><p>I really enjoy some violent movies like <a href="https://www.miramax.com/movie/kill-bill-volume-i/" target="_blank">Kill Bill</a>, where the violence is cartoonish, and mixed with dark humor, and it's sort of all in good fun. And each viewer, each consumer of images, is unique; I'm simply describing my own tolerance and proclivities here. "Kill Bill" does not negatively impact my mind-stream or leave me feeling nauseated afterwards. In fact, it makes me laugh and I can identify a lot with Uma Thurman's character: her ability to be 100% befuddled and vulnerable in one moment, seemingly hopeless, and then to bounce back in the next moment with a fierceness and a furious commitment to what she perceives as justice.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vCjsXW3VIUk/YLFGHvljZfI/AAAAAAAAEq0/_u38IIAAlJkvBPZcJFuVtGN0LkeJnkjpQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2630/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-28%2Bat%2B2.18.08%2BAM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1196" data-original-width="2630" height="293" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vCjsXW3VIUk/YLFGHvljZfI/AAAAAAAAEq0/_u38IIAAlJkvBPZcJFuVtGN0LkeJnkjpQCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h293/Screen%2BShot%2B2021-05-28%2Bat%2B2.18.08%2BAM.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p><br />I DO NOT enjoy movies like the “Hostel” or “Saw" franchises or any of their ilk, which are basically fictionalized snuff films where the violence is pornographic, and you just watch psychopathic people killing and torturing other people because they enjoy watching them suffer and die (we're sort of back to talking about Nazis again) and there’s no point in the depiction of violence other than to indulge in images of graphic violence and killing for their own sake, to derive some very morbid and sociopathic kind of titillation. Those kinds of violent films leave me feeling deeply, spiritually nauseated. </p><p>Likewise, whenever the 45th President of the United States (and voilà! for the third time in this Q&A we are talking about <b>Nazis who needed to be stopped</b>) used to come on the TV screen — and thank God that doesn't happen much anymore these days — I would have to turn it off or leave the room. Or if I'm in a public space and they set the TV to Fox News — same thing. What slithers off the TV screen and into your mind from Fox News is so painfully grotesque and spiritually violent that it nauseates me. </p><p>I boycott these violent images and discourses. They do not have permission to enter or occupy my mind-space. For me, that's part of practicing self-care, reducing the harm that would potentially be done to my mind and my heart by absorbing such hateful and belligerently ignorant rhetoric and images. It's not burying my head in the sand. It's fierce and compassionate self-protection. Ahimsa.</p><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><b>WHAT ABOUT YOU? </b></h3><div><b><br /></b></div>Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-84184859034206422932020-02-05T02:51:00.000-04:002020-02-05T02:51:45.676-04:00Gradual vs. Sudden Awakening<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Almost 20 years after embarking on an earnest spiritual path of meditation and study of Buddhism and other philosophies and approaches to awakening, I’m discovering (okay....I’m a late bloomer) that the old Buddhist debate about gradual awakening or sudden awakening is a big red herring and sort of pointless to debate. The path is both gradual AND sudden.<br />
<br />
I’ve been through stretches in my life and my meditation practice (sometimes these stretches can last for years) when it seems like the practice is not really having much impact, and I’m not really growing very much in spiritual terms. Progress towards the ever-elusive goal of awakening, if it’s noticed at all, is measured in small amounts. And it seems like the obstacles encountered along the way and the hot messes and tragicomic dramas in my life are all bigger than any progress that might’ve been made on the path.<br />
<br />
But I’ve also been through times in my life and my meditation practice (and these times can be like the 5-day silent meditation retreat I did around my birthday at the start of 2020, or the 14 weeks I spent enclosed in intensive silent retreat and teachings with Pema Chödrön when I was a monk for two years at her monastery from 2009 to 2011, or they can be like a week or a day or a single instant when you turn a corner and the unexpected is suddenly right there in front of you) when suddenly the energy of life surges forward unexpectedly in a great leap, and in a single moment you feel the huge momentum behind your meditation practice and your dedication to it pushing everything forward so rapidly that it takes you by surprise. You can observe meaningful changes happening rapidly within you and all around you, in your heart and in your mind, in your world and your sphere of influence. Suddenly all these things feel aligned in the same direction, and a jump forward happens.<br />
<br />
It may or may not be THE jump forward, like the fabled one the Buddha suddenly experienced the night that (as legends tell us) he sat beneath a bodhi tree and shot forward like a bolt of lightning through all of the many stages of awakening, and by the following morning he was Enlightened with a capital “E” — fully awakened, fully realized, all his personal obstacles and hang-ups and the psychological shadow material that every human being lives and struggles with, suddenly left behind in their entirety, with no remnant of the life that came before except his consciousness and his body and his memories. But now suddenly omniscient, suddenly fully awake, suddenly at one with all of existence, suddenly free of any psychological or spiritual limitations, suddenly all-knowing, suddenly thrust forward into a moment of awakening that actually has no end. Sudden awakening. Complete awakening. Permanent awakening.<br />
<br />
That overnight, cosmic, metaphysical leap forward — into a permanent oneness with the very highest mode of consciousness possible for any sentient being — is not something that I've experienced.<br />
<br />
But what I HAVE experienced are the smaller quantum jumps forward. The “Aha!” moments on the spiritual path when you do see sudden progress happening, and you recognize that it’s happening suddenly. Who knows, maybe it's because of all the practice you did in years past that you can experience this little forward leap in this moment of your life. And even if this forward leap turns out to have been a small one when you reflect back on it next week, next month, next year, next decade, next lifetime, that forward leap FEELS big when you're experiencing it. It enables you to see, to know that sudden awakening does happen.<br />
<br />
So it's not THE sudden awakening — the big cosmic, transcendent, earth-shaking kind like the Buddha’s, with angels trumpeting in the sky and forest animals frolicking in the dewy grass to celebrate the glory of your divine achievement — but, still, it’s something. Something big (or small) has happened, is happening. And it’s happening....suddenly.<br />
<br />
The old debate about gradual vs. sudden paths to awakening is a bust.<br />
<br />
It’s gradual. AND it’s sudden. It’s both. It was always this way, you just didn’t know it.<br />
<br />
But (suddenly) you know it.<br />
<br />
<br />
Hunter<br />
February 4, 2020Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-91107333215675231302020-01-12T16:03:00.000-04:002020-01-12T16:03:40.937-04:00The Wayby Dennis Hunter<br />
January 7, 2020<br />
San Carlos Retreat Center<br />
Delray Beach, Florida<br />
<br />
<br />
"The Way"<br />
<br />
The way the hummingbird seeks out<br />
the color red, tasting the nectar<br />
of flowers, its tiny heart beating<br />
twelve hundred times per minute.<br />
The way the green grass feels<br />
on the soles of your naked feet.<br />
The way the spider's web is built<br />
of filaments almost too fine to see,<br />
the shocking symmetry<br />
of its architecture, the way<br />
it bends and stretches, holding<br />
to the branches as it twists<br />
in the breeze: its strength<br />
arising from its flexibility.<br />
The way the sound of the water<br />
flowing from the shower head<br />
changes pitch when<br />
the water becomes warm.<br />
The way the warm water soothes<br />
your naked and fragile body.<br />
The way water, softest substance<br />
on earth, also carves valleys<br />
in the stone, eroding mountains<br />
and reshaping the beaten earth.<br />
The way the seed dropped by the tree<br />
carries inside the genetic code, the DNA<br />
for creating a whole new tree.<br />
The way the code remains locked<br />
inside the seed, until the seed<br />
is convinced to extend roots<br />
down into the beaten earth,<br />
and offered water and sun from above.<br />
The way the new tree will bear red flowers,<br />
seducing the local hummingbirds just as its<br />
ancestors have always done.<br />
<br />
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<br />Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-84273132304551203132020-01-10T12:58:00.000-04:002020-01-10T12:59:44.808-04:00On How to Be<div style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.3); caret-color: rgb(69, 69, 69); color: #454545; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; text-size-adjust: none;">
<span style="font-size: 17px;">by Dennis Hunter</span></div>
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January 5, 2020</div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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Be like the water of the lake:</div>
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Calm and steady, but fluid,</div>
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reflecting the clear sky above.</div>
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Let the cool morning breeze make ripples</div>
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Across your surface and pleasant goosebumps on your skin.</div>
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Watch the ripples come and go</div>
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without disturbing the nature of the water.</div>
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You do not need to climb down in the lake</div>
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with the alligator and the catfish,</div>
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and try to smooth out the water's wrinkles</div>
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with your hands, like a bed sheet.</div>
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Be like the sky above,</div>
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clear and bright and open,</div>
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the low Florida sun beaming across it,</div>
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warming your bones and reflecting</div>
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on facets of the rippling water like glittering jewels,</div>
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inviting the trees and the grass to stand up straighter,</div>
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to reach higher, towards the life-giving light.</div>
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Here, there, a cloud dots the sky, lingering,</div>
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passing across the open expanse.</div>
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The sky doesn't mind.</div>
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You do not need to stand up</div>
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and wave your arms at the clouds,</div>
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gesticulating like a madman, trying</div>
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to chase them away.</div>
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Only stay. The way the lake stays,</div>
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ripples not disturbing its deeper stillness.</div>
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Only stay. The way the sky stays,</div>
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holding space for clouds to come and go.</div>
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Only stay, the way the sun stays,</div>
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bringing light and life to each part</div>
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of the turning world, this part then that part,</div>
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each corner waking and sleeping, sleeping then waking again.</div>
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Each new day that breaks is an invitation</div>
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to root down in stillness like the water</div>
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and to stretch open in welcoming like the sky,</div>
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to both root down and stretch open like the trees and grass.</div>
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But look, now. You stood up too fast,</div>
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and startled the catfish</div>
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in the muddy shallows at the water's edge,</div>
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where she had come, like you,</div>
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to warm her scales and blood</div>
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in the morning sun.</div>
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Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-29870913658195441872020-01-08T12:06:00.000-04:002020-01-08T12:06:13.990-04:00How Are Your Alligators Doing? <div>
I've just returned from a 5-day silent meditation retreat, and I want to share the first meditation instruction I received when I arrived at the retreat center, before the retreat even began. This sage advice was posted on several signs surrounding the lake behind the retreat center: </div>
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"Do not molest or feed the alligators." I never saw an alligator while I was there, but it's practical advice, given that we are in south Florida. This is gator country.</div>
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As the lessons of this retreat rippled within me, I realized that this pragmatic warning is also a teaching. The theme of our retreat was the Five Hindrances — the five cognitive and emotional blockages that, according to the Buddha, keep us from being fully mindful and present, both on the cushion and in our lives:</div>
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<li>Sense Desires (the attachment and craving that arise from them — the grasping state of mind)</li>
<li>Ill-will (aversion and anger — the pushing-away state of mind)</li>
<li>Sloth and Torpor (the dull, murky state of mind, like falling asleep or being in a fog)</li>
<li>Restlessness (agitation, anxiety, and the worried, fidgeting mind)</li>
<li>Doubt (the confused, hesitant state of mind that doesn't know which way to go)</li>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-h8s0Xrvf_Gk/XhX8pkvxPWI/AAAAAAAAEGg/vBJIAM9aOBobx8_m0mTC5BFV5WCF-MxtgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/IMG_8935.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-h8s0Xrvf_Gk/XhX8pkvxPWI/AAAAAAAAEGg/vBJIAM9aOBobx8_m0mTC5BFV5WCF-MxtgCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/IMG_8935.jpg" width="240" /></a>These Five Hindrances are the alligators in our minds: the creatures that attack from the dark depths of our unconscious, thwarting our practice, upsetting our lives, holding us trapped in their powerful jaws. When these alligators attack, there is nowhere to run and no way to escape, because the alligators are us. At times it can feel like we are under assault by all five alligators at once, the hindrances in our minds confounding us from every direction. We joked during the retreat (during the times we weren't in silence) about "multiple hindrance attacks," but our laughter was a way to diffuse the tension of recognizing how often we all fall under the spell of the hindrances, and how much suffering they cause for us in our relationships and our lives.</div>
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"Don't molest or feed the alligators" is good advice. We are the ones who molest our own minds with the Five Hindrances, and our afflictive emotions only have as much energy as we feed to them. </div>
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But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and this advice is not of much practical value when we find ourselves under attack by the alligators in our minds.</div>
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Here's the thing about alligators, though. Their ghastly jaws are fearsome and strong when they chomp down on their prey. But the opposing muscles of their jaws, the ones that open the mouth, are quite weak. The powerful jaws of the alligator can be held shut with a simple rope or elastic band.</div>
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That rope or elastic band is our meditation practice. To the extent that we are able to be mindful and stay present with our experience and fully open ourselves to its energy — even if it's painful and chaotic, or perhaps especially if it's painful and chaotic, because life so often is — letting go of the storylines and drama that we habitually attach to our experience, then we are able to at least partially subdue the alligator's attack by binding its jaws. </div>
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I came back from silent retreat to the news of Iran launching ballistic missiles into Iraq, attacking U.S. bases, and the devastating earthquakes in Puerto Rico, already afflicted so much by the hurricane two years ago. The president is being impeached, while at the same time instigating *another* war in the Middle East by ordering the assassination of one of Iran's top generals. This world we live in is angry and confused, full of sloth and ill-will and worry and agitation — ravaged and devastated, in other words, by the Five Hindrances.</div>
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When Thich Nhat Hanh was fleeing Vietnam, he said that the crowded Vietnamese refugee boats would sometimes encounter storms or pirates on the journey to safety. During these crises, everyone would start to freak out and panic. But he said that if just one person on the boat could stay calm and centered, not freaking out, it could diffuse the panic and, as he stated, "show the way to survive."</div>
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I am that person on the boat. If you've read this far, *you* are that person on the boat, too. It's up to us to bring the mindfulness and compassion we cultivate in our practice into this aching, burning world of pain, and offer it to those around us, showing the way to survive. Each of us who lives with conscience in this suffering world bears a huge responsibility. This is the world we are in. This is the world that needs the healing gifts each of us can bring. </div>
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As one of the teachers at the retreat, Piero Falci, kept reminding us, "This moment is the first moment of the rest of your life." What are you going to do with this precious moment? And this one? And this one? And this one? And this one?</div>
Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-50964567037322828172019-02-10T02:23:00.000-04:002019-02-11T00:14:54.042-04:00Why Roma Should Win Best PictureIf you follow my writing, you know that I only write about a film when I feel strongly compelled to do so — and that doesn't happen very often. In July 2014, I wrote about Richard Linklater's <a href="http://onehumanjourney.blogspot.com/2014/07/boyhood.html" target="_blank">Boyhood</a>, a deeply moving coming of age story and a wildly ambitious 12-year-long act of filmmaking that eschewed special effects make-up in favor of filming the same actors as they aged in real life. And in October 2016 I gave accolades to Barry Jenkins' <a href="http://onehumanjourney.blogspot.com/2016/10/moonlight-is-years-most-human-film.html" target="_blank">Moonlight</a>, before it was nominated for any awards, calling it "the most human film of the year," "a contemplative masterpiece of filmmaking, and a profound and subtle meditation on the fragile construction of masculinity." Moonlight went on to win Best Picture in the 89th annual Academy Awards.<br />
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In December 2018 I was in New York City, and Alfonso Cuarón's <i>Roma</i> was playing in two theaters. I knew little about the film except that it was made by the director of Gravity, and that it was about his childhood in Mexico City and was mostly about his nanny. What I knew most of all was, "YOU HAVE TO GO SEE IT ON THE BIG SCREEN!" I was told this several times by a friend who had a slightly wild look in her eyes when she said it, impressing upon me the urgency of making every possible effort to see it in the theater. And so, on our last night in New York City, I cajoled my husband into venturing out in the bitter cold to see <i>Roma</i> at the Independent Film Center in Greenwich Village. We left the theater feeling stunned by what we had just experienced, full of joy and sadness and awe. We walked through the quiet streets of downtown New York on a cold week night, talking for an hour and a half about the impressions the film had left upon us. <br />
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Last night I experienced <i>Roma</i> on the big screen for the second time, at Coral Gables Art Cinema in my hometown of Miami. I say "experienced" because 'watched' or 'saw' would be a poor way to describe what has transpired for me both times I've experienced <i>Roma</i>. <br />
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I have never felt more viscerally immersed into any film, as if I were physically pulled into the world depicted on the screen, transported through space and time to 1970s Mexico City. I became an invisible observer within the film itself, seeing every visual detail, hearing every sound near and far, I felt as if I could almost smell the scents in the air and feel the textures on my skin that were felt by the characters in the film. <br />
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I cannot imagine that this immersive, multi-sensorial experience happens for the majority of people who see <i>Roma</i> at home on Netflix. Last night's screening was in 70mm printed film format, with eight reels of film that were mounted and played in sequence by the theater's projectionist. Even the screening itself seemed to take me back in time, to an era in my own childhood when cinema was an analog experience, not a digital file download that could be projected by a computer at the touch of a button.<br />
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Among <i>Roma</i>'s many technical achievements, one of the most astonishing is that there is no musical soundtrack, no composed score to manipulate your emotions by heightening the narrative or foreshadowing events. Paradoxically, the absence of a score makes sound one of the film's most viscerally gripping aspects. The sounds you hear in <i>Roma</i> are the real sounds of life in Mexico City in the 1970s: children playing games and fighting with each other, dogs barking, birds singing, street vendors selling their wares, soldiers marching, students protesting, dishes clattering, car engines idling and horns honking, radios playing, jets flying overhead, the whistling call of the knife sharpener walking through the streets, passersby chattering in Spanish or in one of Mexico's 68 indigenous languages.<br />
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<i>Roma</i> intertwines emotional storytelling and social commentary on a vastly ambitious scale. The narrative centers on Cleo, a sweet-tempered if somewhat naive young indigenous woman from a rural village who now works as a maid and nanny for an upper-middle-class white family in the 'Roma' neighborhood of Mexico City. The family's troubled dramas unfold around her as Cleo undergoes her own troubles, having become pregnant by a man who leaves her. Circles within circles within circles, Cleo's story unfolds within the family drama that unfolds in the household in which she works, while outside the walls of the family's house, larger stories unfold about the troubles rocking Mexico City during that era — sometimes literally, as in the scene when an earthquake strikes while Cleo is peering through the glass at newborn babies in the maternity ward. The fragility of life, always at the mercy of the violence wrought by nature and by mankind, is one of the film's persistent, aching themes.<br />
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Critic Richard Morgan, writing in <i>The Washington Post</i>, attacked Cuarón as being heavy-handed with his own directorial voice and creating a world of shallow female characters who are not allowed to express their own opinions. "While it’s visually stunning, it’s emotionally stunted, with a script that allots very little space for her — or any of the characters — to express an opinion." Morgan stopped just short of calling Cuarón a mysoginist, but only just.<br />
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I can't help but wonder if Morgan and I watched different movies, because <i>Roma</i> is a profoundly feminist film. Men and boys pass in and out of the story, generally leaving in their wake a trail of personal chaos, violence, and destruction wherever they go. But the film itself is more concerned with the struggles and triumphs of its female protagonists. The voices of these women are muffled by social customs and the overbearing machismo of the society in which they live, but make no mistake: women are shown here as the real creators of life, the ones who lovingly (and sometimes through their own heartbreak and tears) nurture life and hold it together while the men around them seem hell-bent on doing their best to screw it up and tear it all apart. <br />
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There is a moral arc to the stories in <i>Roma</i>. From the start, the women in the film are beholden to the men in their lives, sycophantically dependent on them for approval and support. The men in their lives — a pack of buffoons, liars, cowards and assholes, one and all — keep betraying them, molesting them, impregnating them, lying to them, threatening them, and running away from them. But by the end of the film, the women who are central to the story have found some hard-won peace of mind through realizing their own strength and establishing their independence from these men.<br />
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Another critic, Richard Brody, in an utterly tiresome review in <i>The New Yorker</i>, attacked Cuarón for failing to turn <i>Roma</i> into an astute political discourse. One of the film's pivotal scenes unfolds on the day of the Corpus Christi Massacre of June 10, 1971, a terrifying day in Mexican history when longstanding tensions erupted between leftist student protesters and the U.S.-backed right-wing government and its CIA-trained paramilitaries. 120 people were killed, many of them hunted down by the paramilitaries and shot in their hiding places in stores and hospitals. We see this horror unfold through the eyes of Cleo and the family's grandmother, who have ventured out on the day of the protests to buy a crib for Cleo's soon-to-be-born baby. Brody harangues Cuarón for not providing viewers with enough of the political backstory to understand the subtleties of the United States' covert involvement in the massacre — but, to Brody's chagrin, <i>Roma</i> is a feature film, not a documentary. Cuarón's intent was not to provide a history lesson or expound upon the complexities of the political violence that unfolded on that day, but to place us right in the midst of the horror and let us experience it as people did in the moment — with complete bewilderment and fear — not as academics standing back and commenting upon the action and discussing the intersectionality of Mexican racial relations and economic disparities with geopolitical interference. When Cleo's water breaks and she has to be rushed to the hospital in the midst of this terror, it brings us rushing back to the innermost circle of the film's narratives, the one centered on Cleo's personal story. Brody seems disappointed that Cuarón didn't 'splain to us the meaning and political complexities of the violence and social chaos we witness — and on another day I'd be happy to watch the documentary that Brody seems to wish Cuarón had made — but Brody's misplaced expectations are wildly out of sync with the feature film Cuarón actually did make.<br />
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<i>Roma</i> is a breathtaking masterpiece of cinema, with an astonishing degree of attention to every visual and sonic detail, and a narrative that unfolds on multiple scales, both personal and epic. The film leaves an indelible impression on one's heart that lingers for weeks afterwards. It's also filled with small moments of magic, even mysticism, like the times when the youngest member of the family, Pepe (who seems to be a stand-in for Cuarón), recounts to Cleo memories of his previous lives, "when I was older." Cleo lovingly laughs off Pepe's stories as the fancies of a child's imagination, but this is the wisdom that can only be spoken by a child, by one who is innocent, one whose mind has not yet become complicated and fogged over by the brute ways of the world in which he is bound to grow up.<br />
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There are now two Alfonso Cuaróns: the one before <i>Roma</i>, and the one after. Before <i>Roma</i>, Cuarón had already established himself as a great, technical Hollywood filmmaker, taking Best Director for <i>Gravity</i>. That is also the Cuarón who made the sexy and scintillating <i>Y Tu Mama Tambien</i>, and the same one who brought us the apocalyptic, dystopian vision of our future in <i>Children of Men</i>, a film that now seems uncannily timeless and increasingly prescient with each passing year. But with <i>Roma</i>, Cuarón has quite simply transcended ordinary filmmaking, creating a bold and unapologetic work of art that will be remembered and reflected upon for decades to come. With one tremendous step forward, Cuarón has entered the hall of giants that is home to immortal filmmakers like Bergman and Fellini. <br />
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If <i>Roma</i> is playing on a big screen near you — in a darkened theater, in its full 21:9 aspect ratio, with surround sound — you must go see it. If it is not, you should perhaps consider getting on a plane and flying to a city where it is. Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-15845679463381350842018-09-23T15:11:00.000-03:002018-09-23T15:11:12.020-03:00The Body Electric, Part 2: Prana, Yin, Nidra, and SoundIn <a href="http://onehumanjourney.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-body-electric-part-1-energy-stress.html" target="_blank">Part 1 of this article</a> I looked at the human body's electrochemical activity, how it relates to the two branches of our autonomic nervous system (sympathetic and parasympathetic), and how the essential first step in becoming a more sane human being is learning to self-regulate the balance between these two. <br />
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Here in Part 2, I look at four specific teaching modalities I use with students to help them (and me!) restore balance to the nervous system's electrochemical activity, specifically engaging the parasympathetic nervous system and the relaxation response. <br />
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<b>PRANA</b><br />
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As yogis have known for thousands of years, the breath is closely intertwined with the electrical activity of the nervous system. I examined this relationship in detail in a previous article, <a href="http://onehumanjourney.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-psychobiology-of-breath.html" target="_blank">The Psychobiology of the Breath</a>. Because of this close relationship, breathing practices are among the most basic tools for self-regulating nervous activity and inducing the relaxation response.<br />
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In the eight limbs of yoga taught in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, held sacred by most contemporary schools of yoga, one of the eight limbs is devoted to "pranayama," the science of breath work, using different breathing techniques to move or hold or clear "prana" or energy from the body in various ways.<br />
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Among the the principles and practices from pranayama that I find most useful in working with meditation students is the practice of ratio breathing. This technique involves measuring the length of the inhalation and exhalation so the whole cycle of breath moves at a specific ratio and pace. It might mean breathing in for a count of five and breathing out for a count of five (a 1:1 ratio, also known as "coherent breathing") or breathing in for a count of five and breathing out for a count of nine or ten.<br />
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Slowing down the breath and using more of our natural lung capacity, in itself, has a naturally calming effect on the nervous system and its electrical activity that can be experienced almost immediately, sometimes in just one or two breaths. Specifically, extending the length of the exhalation stimulates the vagus nerve, the main pathway to engaging the parasympathetic nervous system and the relaxation response.<br />
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<b>YIN</b><br />
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Although I'm trained and certified as a yoga teacher, I don't really enjoy teaching the fast-paced, sweaty, flowing styles of movement and strenuous workouts that many people these days think of as "yoga." <br />
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The style of yoga I do enjoy teaching is one that's much more directly linked to relaxation and engaging the parasympathetic nervous system: Yin Yoga. Yin involves far less movement, and much more stillness. Less fire, more cooling. It's a unique approach to postural yoga that was designed to bring more elasticity into the connective tissues, specifically the great web of fascia that envelops the musculoskeletal system and all the organs of the body.<br />
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In Yin Yoga, we typically stay low to the ground, and we hold postures for extended periods of time -- sometimes up to a few minutes in a single pose. Rather than using our muscles to aggressively push or twist ourselves into a posture, we passively use the forces of gravity and time to slowly open the body and release tension within the tissues at a deeper level. Even the music I play in a Yin Yoga class has a slower pace, fewer beats-per-minute, to encourage the brain to stimulate the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system. The feeling coming out of a Yin Yoga practice can be a deep sense of relaxation within the body and mind.<br />
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<b>NIDRA</b><br />
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Yoga Nidra, sometimes called "the yogic science of sleep," is actually a system of techniques for guiding students into a profoundly deep state of relaxation bordering on sleep -- but ideally not crossing the line completely.<br />
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In a Yoga Nidra class, I use my voice and a progressive series of passive exercises (body scan, visualizations, etc.) to guide students into the hypnagogic state -- a precursor to actual sleep, the state between waking and sleeping. When students are able to hover in this liminal space, this border zone between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind, the sense of relaxation that can be experienced is very deep. And because awareness is suspended in that in-between space, various kinds of communication between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind can take place, creating a feeling of wholeness and integration unlike any other. <br />
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Needless to say, during the entire process of Yoga Nidra, we are engaging the parasympathetic nervous system and entraining our brains in producing the electrochemical activity that leads to the relaxation response. <br />
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<b>SOUND</b><br />
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There has been a revolution in my teaching activity during the past year. Up until a year ago, I had been aware of the growing trend of "sound bath" classes in yoga and meditation studios, but I regarded this trend with a skeptical eye. I come out of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and we always had Tibetan bowls in the meditation hall, but they were used primarily for one thing only: they were struck to signal the beginning and the end of a meditation session. In 15 years of study and practice within that venerable tradition, I never encountered a single teaching about making the bowls "sing," or using sound for healing purposes. So when I would see people playing the bowls that way, I dismissed it as a bunch of New Age nonsense.<br />
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Fast forward to last year, when I started teaching classes at a local studio and got curious about their sound classes, which seemed to be more popular than any other class on their schedule. One day I decided to try one, just to see what all the fuss was about. In that first sound bath class, I felt a sense of relaxation so deep that the only thing in my previous experience that I could compare it to was Yoga Nidra. In fact, in explaining sound meditation I often draw comparisons to Yoga Nidra, because a skillful sound bath can also guide students into the hypnagogic state.<br />
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I was immediately hooked, and I signed up for a training in sound healing with a teacher at that studio. A few months later, I did a second training with another teacher, and a set of crystal singing bowls found their way into my life. Quite suddenly, I found myself in the role of a teacher of sound meditation and practitioner of sound healing.<br />
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When done skillfully, a sound bath can not only guide students' minds into a state of profound relaxation; it can also have powerful healing effects on the body. The vibration of sound waves is not merely perceived by the ears and the mind; those same waves carry into the cells and tissues of the body, interacting with the electrochemical activity of the nervous system and helping to restore balance and homeostasis. After all, at a cellular level the body is roughly 74% water, and sound waves travel easily through water, so in a sound bath you are not only hearing sound; the pulsations and vibrations of sound waves are literally washing through you, inducing effects on the body that are beyond the mind's purview.<br />
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When I experience a good sound bath I leave feeling like a washcloth that has been wrung out. During the sound bath tension in the body melts away, the mind stops fighting with itself, and a whole range of metabolic changes take place: the heart rate and breathing slow down, body temperature drops, and electrochemical activity shifts very noticeably into the parasympathetic nervous system. I often have students in sound bath classes tell me they've never before experienced such a profound sense of relaxation.<br />
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That's good enough for me. I've gone from a sound bath skeptic to someone who teaches sound baths two to three times per week and attends them as frequently as I can. Along with breath work, sound healing is among the most powerful tools I've encountered for altering the electrochemical activity of the body and entraining the human brain and nervous system to relax.<br />
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With a relaxed body and open mind, the possibilities are almost limitless.Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-77264024170733971262018-09-22T19:23:00.000-03:002018-09-23T15:11:57.371-03:00The Body Electric, Part 1: Energy, Stress, and Relaxation<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SYyiDA6cqek/W6a-bB8WErI/AAAAAAAADrk/WRVv39MB32I5pYQTVMEZtTYlxbaAUfJ4QCLcBGAs/s320/12006194_10207769262619312_3503315701522741355_n.jpg" width="256" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Electrographics of a hand, Hermann Schnauss (1900)</td></tr>
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It's common to think of a human being as flesh and blood and bones and organs -- something made of matter. It's less common to think of a human being as an electrical system -- something made of energy. But we are both.<br />
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Your body is permeated by electricity and its interaction with the body's chemistry. The presence and movement of electricity throughout your body is part of what distinguishes you as a living being from an inert and lifeless piece of steak, which is made of the same flesh and blood. As with Frankenstein's monster, electrical activity is one of the things that separates a creature that's alive from one that isn't.<br />
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From the top of your head to the soles of your feet, electrochemical signals travel at up to 150 meters per second along the roughly 45 miles of pathways of the central and peripheral nervous system. This is our modern medical way of talking about the body's energetic network of highways, roads, and side streets, and the traffic of energy flowing along them. Ancient yogis described these channels as "nadis" and the energy as "prana," while traditional Chinese medicine speaks of "meridians" and the "qi" or life force that flows along the meridians. Like a large city glowing at night when seen from outer space, your entire being is lit up with an electrical field that may be invisible to your eyes, but can be measured with scientific instruments and seen by other kinds of creatures with different eyes. <br />
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Electrochemical signals mediate your experience of yourself and the world around you. They make possible your every perception, movement, word, and thought. In fact, our human cognitive ability and capacity for abstract thought and reasoning is one of the unique ways that humans have evolved to exploit our brain's powerful electrical activity. No other creature on earth can harness the electrical activity of its brain to do algebraic computations or read a book or send a rocket to the moon or build an artificial intelligence system or map out and follow a path to enlightenment. <br />
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Other animals have evolved different ways of using electricity. Sharks have unique electrical sensory faculties that allow them to see the electrical fields of other creatures in the water, which is part of what makes sharks such good predators. And electric eels can store and release electricity at a very high voltage, delivering a powerful shock of up to 600 volts for defensive or hunting purposes. <br />
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The central processing unit of the brain sits atop the vast network of electrochemical pathways in your body, receiving, interpreting, and sending signals that make it possible to sense and know what you're feeling and to interact with the world around you. When it's time to respond to a threat with a defensive measure of fighting or running, the brain orchestrates a burst of electrical signals into the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, triggering the release of adrenaline and epinephrine and other chemicals that enable a fast and powerful physical response to the perceived threat. The pupils dilate, digestive functions slow down or pause temporarily so that vital energetic resources can be diverted to the parts of the body needed for running or fighting. Glucose is released into the body, and there's a sudden increase in the heart rate and breathing rate. This rapid and intense cascade of physiological responses in the body happens because of the electrical signals received and processed by the brain.<br />
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And hopefully, when threats have been dealt with and it's time to chill out, digest your food, and go to sleep for the night, the CPU of the brain sends electrochemical signals into the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, bringing about an opposing response. The pupils and airways constrict, the heart rate and breathing slow down, the release of glucose is inhibited, the glands stop secreting that intense surge of activating hormones and neurochemicals, and energy is redirected back to the digestive functions and to cellular recovery. In a word, you relax.<br />
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Both of these powerful responses in the body happen without the interference of the conscious mind. That's why they are part of the autonomic nervous system, which basically means automatic. And they are both necessary for our survival and healthy adaptation to our world and our experiences.<br />
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One of the big problems with human beings today -- and it's something I observe in myself and in my meditation students -- is that our autonomic nervous systems are out of balance. There's too much electrical activity firing into the sympathetic branch, stimulating a chronic "fight or flight" response, a pattern of overstimulation that's very difficult to step out of. We commonly call this stress or anxiety. The habitual response and activity of our sympathetic nervous system is disproportionate to the actual threat level posed by anything in our environment. Biologically, we are bringing a physiological response that evolved to help us survive life-or-death situations, and we're applying it to everyday situations like relationships and jobs and emails and social media, things that don't objectively merit such an extreme physiological reaction. <br />
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So one of the first and most essential steps for us when we sit down to practice meditation is to recalibrate that balance and get more electrical activity firing into our parasympathetic nervous system in order to trigger the relaxation response. Forget about balancing chakras, cultivating bliss or higher states of consciousness, raising kundalini, or achieving enlightenment. What the majority of meditation students I work with need first and foremost, before starting to think about more lofty spiritual goals, is to simply slow their roll on a purely biological level. <br />
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If we can't first train ourselves to relax, there's not much point in talking about enlightenment or discovering the true nature of mind. As Step One, we need to learn and practice techniques that help us retrain the brain's electrical activity and the nervous system to be less chronically stuck in a sympathetic "fight or flight" response, and more skilled at shifting into the parasympathetic relaxation response. <br />
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You get good at what you practice. As you repeat certain thoughts and actions, the brain builds neural pathways -- electrochemical grooves -- that encourage signals to run along the same pathways more and more habitually. A pattern of responding to situations with stress or anger builds neural pathways that make it more likely that you'll respond with stress or anger to the next situation. <br />
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But the same is also true of more wholesome responses. With time and practice we can train our brains and rewire our neural pathways and our body's electrochemical activity to respond to stressful situations with more calmness and steadiness of temper, more empathy for others, more compassion and loving-kindness. Once we start building electrochemical patterns in the brain and body to sustain those kinds of wholesome feelings and responses, creating those sorts of neural pathways, and becoming more skilled pilots of our own nervous systems, then maybe we can start talking productively about cultivating mystical states of consciousness or investigating the true nature of mind. Let's keep the cart behind the horse.<br />
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For now, most of us just need to learn to relax. <br />
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Yes, there is a lot more to meditation than just relaxation. But relaxation is an absolute prerequisite for all other practices. And honestly, if we all simply learned to relax and nothing more, we would still become happier people, we would probably cause less trouble for ourselves and others, and the world would be a better place for it.<br />
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<i>In <a href="http://onehumanjourney.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-body-electric-part-2-prana-yin.html" target="_blank">Part 2 of this article</a>, I'll look at four teaching modalities I use with students to help them (and me!) restore balance to the nervous system's electrochemical activity, specifically engaging the parasympathetic nervous system and the relaxation response.</i>Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-90902472920138443992018-09-16T19:26:00.000-03:002018-09-16T19:34:53.702-03:00Confessions of an Anxious Meditation TeacherIn my role as a meditation teacher I often feel like people don't get a chance to know the real me. They see a curated persona who speaks with a calming tone of voice, someone who spent two years living in a Buddhist monastery and has written two books on meditation and spiritual life. I can imagine those things might give them certain misleading ideas about me. <br />
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Behind that persona, the truth is that I struggle a lot with anxiety. I don't mean regular garden-variety anxiety, I mean the kind that I see a doctor about, the kind that has a diagnostic code in the DSM-V. Anxiety is something I have experienced for most of my life, going back to childhood. It can flare up along with insomnia to affect my sleep, my relationships, and my work. Many people might never suspect this about me, because I'm good at keeping it under wraps and showing the outside world an exterior facade of calmness and serenity.<br />
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I've been practicing and teaching meditation for 16 years, and while I can say truthfully that meditation helps me regulate my anxiety and work with it more skillfully, I cannot truthfully tell you that meditation cures it. Meditation alone, practiced in solitude, doesn't address the underlying structural issues in my personal psychology. I stopped expecting the practice to do that for me quite a while ago.<br />
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I share this confession because in the world of yogis and meditators and people walking various kinds of modern spiritual paths, there's a pervasive misconception that anyone who's been practicing for a while — and especially anyone who has stepped up from practicing into the role of teaching -- is supposed to have it all together.<br />
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In my observation, and in my own personal experience, nothing could actually be further from the truth. And this misconception creates some really toxic dynamics between teachers and students.<br />
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One of the great ironies about people in the helping professions is that they are often among the ones who need the most help. I know a psychiatrist who has borderline personality disorder. A lot of therapists and social workers I know are depressed. The suicide rate among doctors in the U.S. is two or three times as high as the general population. There's a powerful stigma that prevents us from talking openly about how people whose job is to help others may themselves need help addressing their own mental health issues.<br />
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The world of yogis and meditators and spiritual teachers is no exception. But you wouldn't know that from looking at the marketing hype.<br />
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If you're that sort of teacher, it's often assumed that you've wrestled with your demons, and vanquished them. You've worked out the kinks and foibles in your human nature, so you stand a cut above the rest of us. Your inner light shines through at all times, unclouded by ordinary human neuroses. Traumas? Shadow material? You're beyond all that. This must be why you look so beatific and well composed in your Instagram photos.<br />
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My personal advice? Run as fast as you can in the other direction from any teacher who presents a highly manicured image of having it all together. Run from any teacher who looks down at the world from a superior perch and appears to have it all figured out, or who claims to have packed away all their emotional baggage. <br />
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In the past few years I've seen a lot of teachers who projected that sort of image fall from grace — exposing suddenly and almost violently their humanity, their struggles, and the demons with which were secretly wrestling. I've learned not to project too much of a sacred aura onto any of the cows roaming about in the contemporary spiritual pasture. If you spend much time around cows, sacred or not, you'll find most of them are full of something. I know I am.<br />
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My struggles with anxiety, among other things, are part of what initially drew me to the path of meditation, and they're still part of what keeps me practicing — and, perhaps just as importantly, part of what keeps me teaching. I may not always reveal to a room full of students what's roiling beneath the surface of my own psychological waters, because it's generally bad decorum to appear like a basket case when you're sitting in the teacher's seat. But within the inner sanctum of my own mind, where no one else goes, I'm never far-removed from a lifetime of roiling waters, or from the wellspring of shadow material that percolates just beneath the surface. <br />
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There's a famous quote from Richard Bach: "You teach best what you most need to learn." <br />
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The longer I teach, the more truth I find in that statement. When meditation students tell me how calming my voice and my presence are, or how much a certain practice or teaching I shared helped them reframe their perspective on a difficult situation, I know that sharing it with them probably helped me twice as much. I needed just as much as they did, if not more, to be reminded of the teaching by sharing it with them. <br />
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I think what I'm learning is that it's not in spite of my imperfections and human foibles, it's not in spite of my ongoing struggles with my own inner demons, but because of those things, that I have something genuine to offer as a teacher. <br />
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I'm coming clean here about my struggles with anxiety because I think coming clean is necessary. In the world of spiritual teachers and students, we need fewer sacred cows and more transparency and disclosure. Without an honest and open relationship to the more troublesome aspects of myself, I would be just another one of those slick Instagram gurus trying to sell you the path to happiness, as if I had it all figured out. <br />
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If you ever catch me doing that, feel free to slap me, and bring me back down to earth.Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-27351276934409277212018-08-12T17:35:00.000-03:002018-08-12T23:38:31.905-03:00Assessing Childhood Developmental TraumaThe ACE Quiz ("ACE" stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences) has become a standardized way for psychologists and those treating trauma to assess some of the major factors that might contribute to childhood developmental trauma. <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/02/387007941/take-the-ace-quiz-and-learn-what-it-does-and-doesnt-mean" target="_blank">You can take the ACE quiz here</a>. <br />
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The simple 10-question quiz gives you score on a scale of 0 to 10, with points being assigned for exposure to a number of commonly recognized sources of childhood trauma, from physical, emotional, or sexual abuse to physical or emotional neglect to various forms of household dysfunction such as parental divorce or having a parent or family member who is mentally ill, incarcerated, or addicted.<br />
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If you score high on the ACE quiz, it means you had numerous factors in your upbringing that might contribute to childhood developmental trauma. In turn, childhood developmental trauma is known to contribute to other problems later in life, including increased risks for stress and depression, substance abuse, heart disease, and more.<br />
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However, it's important to understand what your score on the ACE quiz means and what it doesn't. If you have a high score, it just means that a lot of those commonly recognized adverse childhood experiences were present in your early life. It doesn't take into account other factors that might have helped you build resilience and overcome these adverse childhood conditions, such as the love and support you received from a certain family member or outside figure.<br />
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Some people with high ACE scores show few signs of developmental trauma, while others with low ACE scores go on to develop major depression, addiction, and so forth. So your score is not, strictly speaking, predictive of any particular outcome as an adult.<br />
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By contrast, the opposite may also be true. The ACE quiz looks at commonly recognized adverse conditions for developmental trauma, but some possibly traumatizing adverse conditions are glaringly absent.<br />
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When I took the <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/02/387007941/take-the-ace-quiz-and-learn-what-it-does-and-doesnt-mean" target="_blank">ACE quiz</a>, I was at first surprised at how high my number was. The quiz helped me to frame and understand some of the root causes of my own childhood developmental trauma. But over time, I came to realize there were other traumatic adversities in my childhood, too, that the quiz didn't even touch upon, such as sexual orientation and religious upbringing. <br />
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What about the fact that I was and am gay, and that I struggled throughout childhood and adolescence to suppress the growing evidence of my own sexual orientation in a homophobic culture that harshly forbade me from being who I was? There's no checkbox on the ACE quiz for internalized homophobia. There should be, because it's a widespread and very damaging form of developmental trauma.<br />
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What about the fearful hellfire-and-brimstone sermons I was subjected to as a child in the Southern Baptist Church in Oklahoma, the intense atmosphere of homophobia in that church, and the religious delusions and existential terror I suffered as a result of my indoctrination in that religious culture? In retrospect, I consider what I was subjected to by the church to be a form of child abuse. But again, there's no checkbox on the ACE quiz for religious manipulation and brainwashing. And there should be.<br />
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What about complex factors like race and socioeconomic status, which can feed into so many other adverse childhood experiences? There are generational traumas, and traumas that you may be born into because the color of your skin isn't the one that's privileged by the society you live in. No ACE checkboxes for those either.<br />
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For now, <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/03/02/387007941/take-the-ace-quiz-and-learn-what-it-does-and-doesnt-mean" target="_blank">the ACE quiz</a> is a stepping stone that can help you begin to get a handle on some of the Big 10, as it were. Knowing where you come from in relation to these 10 factors can be helpful in assessing the roots of your own childhood developmental trauma. But you also need to put your ACE quiz results in perspective, and look at the larger picture of things the quiz never touches upon.<br />
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The causes and effects of childhood developmental trauma are highly complex, and no standardized test can really give you a complete or accurate reading on the origins or effects of your own childhood trauma. We need better ways of assessing a wider variety of adverse childhood experiences, as well as traumatic social conditions that extend both inward, deep into our hearts and psyches, and outward, beyond the walls of the houses we grew up in.Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-66343326193019411192018-08-01T19:30:00.000-03:002018-08-01T19:30:03.771-03:00"You Are Buddha" (The Audiobook)<br />
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<a href="https://www.audible.com/pd/B00YSX1SU6/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-036827&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_036827_rh_us" target="_blank"><img alt="https://www.audible.com/pd/B00YSX1SU6/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-036827&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_036827_rh_us" border="0" data-original-height="747" data-original-width="747" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ue7kdPKQwos/VXXfTGYR25I/AAAAAAAACwE/tGWMzsYmFI867ngFxYnImGSBUvIdXu--gCPcBGAYYCw/s320/10612709_10206978437449177_5478365078057063402_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Did you know that my first book <i>You Are Buddha</i> is available as an audiobook? You can download it for FREE with a trial subscription to Audible. That's 7.5 hours of meditation and reflections on spiritual awakening (written mostly during the two years when I lived as a Buddhist monk in Canada), read in my own voice.<br />
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From one listener's review: "Insightful meditations from a gentle voice. Modern American Buddhism can be heard in Hunter's personal stories and reflections."<br />
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Here are the links for those of you in the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany.<br />
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<a href="https://www.audible.com/pd/B00YSX1SU6/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-036827&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_036827_rh_us" target="_blank">United States</a><br />
<a href="https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/B00YSWFDE4/?source_code=AUKFrDlWS02231890H6-BK-ACX0-036827&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_036827_rh_uk" target="_blank">United Kingdom</a><br />
<a href="https://www.audible.fr/pd/B00YSVW9BK/?source_code=FRAORWS022318903B-BK-ACX0-036827&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_036827_rh_fr" target="_blank">France</a><br />
<a href="https://www.audible.de/pd/B00YSWSQHU/?source_code=EKAORWS0223189009-BK-ACX0-036827&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_036827_rh_de" target="_blank">Germany </a><br />
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We are all looking for greater meaning and wisdom in our lives. The problem is that we search for these things outside ourselves. The most profound teachings of the Buddha say that the wisdom we search for does not come from outside. It is already within us; it is our very nature. The spiritual path is simply a way of helping us uncover and manifest the wisdom we already have.<br /><br />Filled with personal stories, guided meditations, and more, <i>You Are Buddha</i> offers a practical guide to learning meditation, working with thoughts and emotions, becoming more deeply embodied, understanding the nature of mind, developing ethical conduct, and becoming an authentically mature, awakened human being. <br />
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Happy listening! And I would love to get your feedback on the audiobook.<br />
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Hunter Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-64433219558528138362017-12-13T11:41:00.000-04:002017-12-13T11:41:05.334-04:00Most Helpful Meditation Instruction Ever?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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One of the most helpful meditation instructions I've ever encountered was from Ken McLeod, in his book <i>Wake Up to Your Life</i>.<br />
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The essence of meditation, he wrote, is to "Return to what's already there, and rest." When I'm able to remember and apply this instruction, it clarifies a lot of potential confusion.<br />
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First, learning to distinguish between what's already there and my ten thousand ways of commenting on it, adding something to it, subtracting something from it, or just drifting away to somewhere else.<br />
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And then the constant practice of returning to that — surrendering freshly each time to what's already there without subjecting it to any of my agendas.<br />
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And finally resting in that simplicity — letting go of efforts to achieve something, settling into layers of stillness and silence that lie somewhere beneath conceptual mind's humming machinery.<br />
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Like a lot of great meditation advice, this line might sound simplistic when you first hear it, but when you begin to unpack it and apply it in your own experience, it's surprisingly profound.Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-45372594884533421202017-10-10T11:13:00.000-03:002017-10-10T11:13:39.697-03:00Get Out of Your Head (and Into Your Heart)<span style="font-size: large;">There is power in getting in touch with our hearts through meditation;
but we can never <i>think</i> our way into this connection. We have to humble
and quiet the arrogant brain and speak the heart’s language.</span><br />
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A lot of people come to meditation
with the notion that it’s a brain activity, something that we do with
our thinking, logical minds. We sit down to be still, and instead we
encounter the thinking mind’s untamed wildness. We spend a lot of our
time in meditation dealing with that part of our being that exists from
the neck up. And that alone seems like it could be a full-time job!<br />
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But
humans are not just disembodied heads, despite how much it might feel
that way sometimes. Below the neck is a whole other realm of embodied
experience unfolding in every moment, a vast world of sensations and
pulses and somatic messages coursing through our veins and our nervous
systems. Our gut often knows things instinctively, and instantly, in
ways the brain can’t quite comprehend. The enteric nervous system, which
rules the gut, has 100 million neurons, more than can be found in the
45 miles of nerve fibers running through the spinal cord and the
peripheral nervous system. The body has its own forms of knowledge and
even wisdom, whose workings often remain hidden from the conscious mind.
The body’s mysterious wisdom is experienced as sensation, feeling,
intuition, and emotion.<br />
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This is an excerpt from an article I published last month in <i>Yoga Journal</i>. <a href="https://www.yogajournal.com/meditation/meditation-get-out-of-disembodied-head-mode-surrender-to-heart" target="_blank">Read the full article here</a>. Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-29892835914214951392017-09-14T09:24:00.004-03:002017-09-14T09:24:57.980-03:00The Four Reminders: My New Book Is Available Now<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PP6zQDMJRqU/WbpzbFLd_jI/AAAAAAAADes/Crh9O1P2V34qIJvhtxKVY0LSUVdD0_fKgCLcBGAs/s1600/FullSizeRender%2B21.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PP6zQDMJRqU/WbpzbFLd_jI/AAAAAAAADes/Crh9O1P2V34qIJvhtxKVY0LSUVdD0_fKgCLcBGAs/s320/FullSizeRender%2B21.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
<style type="text/css"><!--td {border: 1px solid #ccc;}br {mso-data-placement:same-cell;}--></style><span data-sheets-userformat="{"2":897,"3":[null,0],"10":0,"11":4,"12":0}" data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"MAJOR NEWS! My new book \"The Four Reminders: A Simple Buddhist Guide to Living and Dying Without Regret\" is now available in paperback and Kindle formats. Order the book today at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. With this modern interpretation of classic wisdom teachings, I've brought an ancient and very traditional set of contemplations on awakening into a fresh new light, making them relatable for anyone -- regardless of your path or background. This small book packs a strong punch. It has been over a decade in the making, and I'm delighted that all those years of hard work have earned \"The Four Reminders\" ringing pre-publication endorsements from Ethan Nichtern, Yogarupa Rod Stryker, Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, Kino MacGregor, Kirkus Reviews, and more. I hope the book enlivens your own path of awakening. After you get the book, be sure to visit the web site www.thefourreminders.com and download the FREE Study & Discussion Guide, which will help you take your contemplation of the Four Reminders even deeper. Stay tuned for more news related to the book and upcoming events. \n\n“A smart, eminently readable Buddhist guide to achieving an inner awakening.” — Kirkus Reviews\n\n“With a great gift for updating the language and context of these invaluable lessons from the ancient world, Hunter reminds us that Buddhist wisdom was never meant to be mystical or exotic. Instead, these pages give you something much more important: practical advice for being human.” — Ethan Nichtern\n\n“Hunter has woven a profound journey, rendering key and authentic Buddhist wisdom in a way that anyone can understand and apply. It is an invitation to all and any one of us, not just those already walking the spiritual path, to courageously embrace the eternal truths that lead to lasting happiness and peace.” — Yogarupa Rod Stryker\n\n“A welcome addition to practicing what matters most. This book personally guides us through the practice so that we can reflect on our thoughts, words, and actions.” — Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison\n\n“This book presents the transformational teachings of Buddhist mindfulness in a powerful and provocative way. Hunter doesn't shy away from challenging the reader to address deep-seated personal and cultural assumptions on the road to happiness and freedom. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking a key to unlock the path to peace in their lives.” — Kino MacGregor"}" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal;">MAJOR NEWS! My new book <a href="http://amzn.to/2xkxNw7" target="_blank">The Four Reminders: A Simple Buddhist Guide to Living and Dying Without Regret</a> is now available in paperback and Kindle formats. Order the book today at <a href="http://amzn.to/2xkxNw7" target="_blank">Amazon</a> or <a href="http://bit.ly/2xZkwWP" target="_blank">Barnes & Noble</a>. With this modern interpretation of classic wisdom teachings, I've brought an ancient and very traditional set of contemplations on awakening into a fresh new light, making them relatable for anyone -- regardless of your path or background. </span><br />
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<span data-sheets-userformat="{"2":897,"3":[null,0],"10":0,"11":4,"12":0}" data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"MAJOR NEWS! My new book \"The Four Reminders: A Simple Buddhist Guide to Living and Dying Without Regret\" is now available in paperback and Kindle formats. Order the book today at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. With this modern interpretation of classic wisdom teachings, I've brought an ancient and very traditional set of contemplations on awakening into a fresh new light, making them relatable for anyone -- regardless of your path or background. This small book packs a strong punch. It has been over a decade in the making, and I'm delighted that all those years of hard work have earned \"The Four Reminders\" ringing pre-publication endorsements from Ethan Nichtern, Yogarupa Rod Stryker, Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, Kino MacGregor, Kirkus Reviews, and more. I hope the book enlivens your own path of awakening. After you get the book, be sure to visit the web site www.thefourreminders.com and download the FREE Study & Discussion Guide, which will help you take your contemplation of the Four Reminders even deeper. Stay tuned for more news related to the book and upcoming events. \n\n“A smart, eminently readable Buddhist guide to achieving an inner awakening.” — Kirkus Reviews\n\n“With a great gift for updating the language and context of these invaluable lessons from the ancient world, Hunter reminds us that Buddhist wisdom was never meant to be mystical or exotic. Instead, these pages give you something much more important: practical advice for being human.” — Ethan Nichtern\n\n“Hunter has woven a profound journey, rendering key and authentic Buddhist wisdom in a way that anyone can understand and apply. It is an invitation to all and any one of us, not just those already walking the spiritual path, to courageously embrace the eternal truths that lead to lasting happiness and peace.” — Yogarupa Rod Stryker\n\n“A welcome addition to practicing what matters most. This book personally guides us through the practice so that we can reflect on our thoughts, words, and actions.” — Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison\n\n“This book presents the transformational teachings of Buddhist mindfulness in a powerful and provocative way. Hunter doesn't shy away from challenging the reader to address deep-seated personal and cultural assumptions on the road to happiness and freedom. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking a key to unlock the path to peace in their lives.” — Kino MacGregor"}" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal;">This book has been over a decade in the making, and I'm delighted that all those years of hard work have earned <a href="http://amzn.to/2xkxNw7" target="_blank">The Four Reminders</a> strong pre-publication endorsements from Ethan Nichtern, Yogarupa Rod Stryker, Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, Kino MacGregor, Kirkus Reviews, and more. I sincerely hope the book enlivens your own path of awakening. </span><br />
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<span data-sheets-userformat="{"2":897,"3":[null,0],"10":0,"11":4,"12":0}" data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"MAJOR NEWS! My new book \"The Four Reminders: A Simple Buddhist Guide to Living and Dying Without Regret\" is now available in paperback and Kindle formats. Order the book today at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. With this modern interpretation of classic wisdom teachings, I've brought an ancient and very traditional set of contemplations on awakening into a fresh new light, making them relatable for anyone -- regardless of your path or background. This small book packs a strong punch. It has been over a decade in the making, and I'm delighted that all those years of hard work have earned \"The Four Reminders\" ringing pre-publication endorsements from Ethan Nichtern, Yogarupa Rod Stryker, Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, Kino MacGregor, Kirkus Reviews, and more. I hope the book enlivens your own path of awakening. After you get the book, be sure to visit the web site www.thefourreminders.com and download the FREE Study & Discussion Guide, which will help you take your contemplation of the Four Reminders even deeper. Stay tuned for more news related to the book and upcoming events. \n\n“A smart, eminently readable Buddhist guide to achieving an inner awakening.” — Kirkus Reviews\n\n“With a great gift for updating the language and context of these invaluable lessons from the ancient world, Hunter reminds us that Buddhist wisdom was never meant to be mystical or exotic. Instead, these pages give you something much more important: practical advice for being human.” — Ethan Nichtern\n\n“Hunter has woven a profound journey, rendering key and authentic Buddhist wisdom in a way that anyone can understand and apply. It is an invitation to all and any one of us, not just those already walking the spiritual path, to courageously embrace the eternal truths that lead to lasting happiness and peace.” — Yogarupa Rod Stryker\n\n“A welcome addition to practicing what matters most. This book personally guides us through the practice so that we can reflect on our thoughts, words, and actions.” — Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison\n\n“This book presents the transformational teachings of Buddhist mindfulness in a powerful and provocative way. Hunter doesn't shy away from challenging the reader to address deep-seated personal and cultural assumptions on the road to happiness and freedom. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking a key to unlock the path to peace in their lives.” — Kino MacGregor"}" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal;">After you get the book, be sure to visit the web site <a href="http://www.thefourreminders.com/">www.thefourreminders.com</a> and download the free Study & Discussion Guide, which will help you take your contemplation of the Four Reminders even deeper. Stay tuned for more news related to <a href="http://amzn.to/2xkxNw7" target="_blank">the book</a> and upcoming events. <br /><br />“<b>A smart, eminently readable Buddhist guide to achieving an inner awakening</b>.” — Kirkus Reviews<br /><br />“With a great gift for updating the language and context of these invaluable lessons from the ancient world, Hunter reminds us that Buddhist wisdom was never meant to be mystical or exotic. Instead, <b><a href="http://amzn.to/2xkxNw7" target="_blank">these pages</a> give you something much more important: practical advice for being human</b>.” — Ethan Nichtern<br /><br />“<b>Hunter has woven a profound journey, rendering key and authentic Buddhist wisdom in a way that anyone can understand and apply</b>. It is <a href="http://amzn.to/2xkxNw7" target="_blank">an invitation</a> to all and any one of us, not just those already walking the spiritual path, to courageously embrace the eternal truths that lead to lasting happiness and peace.” — Yogarupa Rod Stryker<br /><br />“<b>A welcome addition to practicing what matters most</b>. <a href="http://amzn.to/2xkxNw7" target="_blank">This book</a> personally guides us through the practice so that we can reflect on our thoughts, words, and actions.” — Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison<br /><br />“<a href="http://amzn.to/2xkxNw7" target="_blank">This book</a> presents the transformational teachings of Buddhist mindfulness in a powerful and provocative way. Hunter doesn't shy away from challenging the reader to address deep-seated personal and cultural assumptions on the road to happiness and freedom. <b>I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking a key to unlock the path to peace in their lives.</b>” — Kino MacGregor</span>Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-60241112019866786432017-06-28T11:26:00.000-03:002017-06-28T11:26:36.042-03:00Experiencing Divinity and the Failure of Language<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-E7ar4KT_C5Y/WVO6wb_AMfI/AAAAAAAADak/BqWi_EkXDWwjesQO0lcj4Q0B5tQH62GhgCLcBGAs/s1600/FullSizeRender%2B15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-E7ar4KT_C5Y/WVO6wb_AMfI/AAAAAAAADak/BqWi_EkXDWwjesQO0lcj4Q0B5tQH62GhgCLcBGAs/s320/FullSizeRender%2B15.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I want to say something about this photo. But I hardly know where to begin, or where to end. It was our first day in Rome, and both Adrian and I were overwhelmed by the city’s chaos, noise, dust, and busyness. I’m not sure what we expected from Rome, but what it revealed to us on that first day had put us both on edge. We snapped at each other whenever our patience wore thin, which was happening a lot that day. In the afternoon, I had arranged for a guided tour of the Vatican Museum and St. Peter’s Basilica. I think we were both relieved to get off the frenetic streets of Rome and into the storied walls of the Vatican.<br /><br />We began to relax a bit once we were inside. We enjoyed the many beautiful and ancient paintings, murals, frescos, and statuary on display inside the museum. We began to get a sense of the way Rome’s history had, for almost two millennia, been interwoven with the history of the Church. Italy didn’t exist until more recently, and back then the Church itself was a military power to be reckoned with. When Michelangelo at first refused the Pope’s request to return from his home city of Florence to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, the Pope threatened to lay military siege to Florence and compel him to return by force. <br /><br />I liked imagining the stormy relationship between those two mighty men, the world's most powerful religious leader and the world's most powerful artist. Michelangelo yielded to the Pope’s request to paint the Sistine Chapel, but it was a mark of his own status as the world’s most famous and powerful artist that he could get away with painting many nude scenes on the ceiling of the holiest chapel in Christianity, including one panel that shows God’s back side and His uncovered butt cheeks. What other artist would have dared to paint God’s back side, let alone His glutes, and survived with his head still attached to his body?<br /><br />Perhaps he survived because the Pope still needed more from him: designing and building St. Peter’s Basilica, the largest cathedral in all of Christianity, with its massive dome that dominates the Roman skyline. Because of its placement within the Vatican state and the square projection of the front portion of the cathedral which blocks the view of the dome from the square, Michelangelo’s work is best appreciated either from elsewhere in Rome, at a distance, or from inside the Basilica itself, where one stands directly beneath Michelangelo’s architectural work in all its majesty. (Is there anything this man could not do perfectly? Sculptor, painter, architect, and unrivaled master of every form? How is that humanly possible?)<br /><br />That brings me to this photo, and to the moment it depicts. The rest of our Vatican tour, including the Sistine Chapel, had been impressive and memorable, but relatively devoid of emotion. Which makes what I am feeling in this photo all the more difficult to explain. The moment our tour group rounded the corner and walked through the doorway into the interior space of St. Peter’s Basilica, a deep emotional current seized control of me, and held me in its grip for the next 20 minutes. My jaw gaped, and I was surprised to find a steady stream of tears rolling down my face. The words of our tour guide coming over the earphones faded into the background, along with the presence of hundreds of other tourists and pilgrims around me. I simply stared up at the dome and the ceiling of the cathedral with dumbstruck awe, overwhelmed by a flood of emotion I could not name or explain. A gravitational force pulled me towards the center of the cathedral, and I wandered away from our tour group, making my way towards the space beneath the dome. I must have looked a sight, this lone man slowly ambling forward, staring up with tears streaming down his face, seemingly lost in a trance. Adrian took this photo of me from behind, as he was watching me and sensed I was “having a moment.”<br /><br />I am at a loss to explain what it was that I felt in that moment, what prompted my tears to flow for 20 minutes and my mind to go as blank and silent as if I had been struck by a hammer. I am not a Catholic or a Christian, but if I were, perhaps I might call it something like being touched by the Holy Spirit or sensing the presence of God. As someone who looks at things from more of a Buddhist point of view, my thinking mind — when it eventually kicked in again — began to chatter about past lives: I’ve stood here before, I was a priest, yada yada yada. But that’s all just chatter, the mind’s feeble attempts to manufacture explanations for a powerful experience that is perhaps best left unexplained. And that’s just what the thinking mind does: it sullies the purity of experience with all its conceptual elaborations. Any attempt at explanation pales next to the experience, just as any logical explanation of musical technique fails to convey even one iota of the actual experience of listening to music.<br /><br />Among the hundreds of other tourists and pilgrims inside St. Peter’s Basilica that day, I didn’t see anyone else stumbling forward with tears streaming down their faces. I was the only one. Whatever it was that I experienced, it was uniquely directed to me in those moments. I didn’t expect this experience, or ask for it: dumbstruck, overwhelmed with shock and awe, and crying tears of gratitude. For 20 minutes, I glimpsed a form of sheer majesty that shattered the walls of my ego and left me utterly exposed and raw; and in that empty space, with my heart torn open and my chattering mind silenced, I had a wordless intuition of the presence on earth, expressed within the form of what man hath wrought, of something that I can only characterize, with respect to what I felt, as divine.<br />
Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-80840283568238663242017-04-14T20:57:00.000-03:002017-04-14T22:38:50.718-03:00The Power of Community in Times of Tragedy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7Q6oQVOI7y0/WPFgo0-OJnI/AAAAAAAADMY/K9xWEm17GecYkOy4bO9TZ6b9Z-kyis_CgCEw/s1600/nina-strehl-140734.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7Q6oQVOI7y0/WPFgo0-OJnI/AAAAAAAADMY/K9xWEm17GecYkOy4bO9TZ6b9Z-kyis_CgCEw/s320/nina-strehl-140734.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
I was recently affected by a tragic act of violence that took the lives of two people I knew. We seem to hear about these kinds of incidents so often these days in America. But it’s different when the tragedy strikes close to home, and deeply impacts your own community.<br />
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The aftermath of this event, and the many moments of individual and collective grieving I’ve experienced and shared with others, have made me think a lot about the meaning of community, and the role of community in providing safety and comfort and space for healing from grief and trauma.<br />
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As a writer, I always like to look at the etymology of words, their linguistic roots. Knowing the origins of a word sometimes helps me tease out hidden layers of meaning. The word “community” comes from the Latin <i>communitas</i>, and it’s related to our English word “common”—as in “the things we have in common,” the things we share, the things that collectively give us a sense of meaning. Things like family, and friendship. <br />
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Many people in my community are experiencing grief and trauma. Some feel intense sadness and grief over losing people who were dear to them. Others are not only grieving, but are also traumatized by the violence they witnessed. <br />
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There are no magic words that anyone can say to make this kind of pain go away. What I can say for sure, from my own experience, is that recovery from grief and trauma can’t be done alone; it takes community. And it can’t be rushed; it takes time, and patience with ourselves and with each other.<br />
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Life doesn’t come with any instruction manual for what to do when situations of intense grief or trauma arise. But I think this theme of community shows us the way to at least begin moving forward. None of us can go through these things alone. We need each other. These are the times when the power of family, friends, and community are perhaps felt most powerfully, as we provide space to hold each other’s grief, to honor each other’s pain.<br />
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The other element that’s essential for healing from grief and trauma is time. Grief hurts, so it’s natural to want quick resolution. But grief moves at its own glacial pace, and it ebbs and flows like the tides. There are days when it feels manageable, and then days when it feels overwhelming. One of the most difficult things about grief is that we have to let it unfold in its own time. Life will begin to return to some semblance of normal in its own time, as we do the work of healing. The pain of grief and trauma, which is so sharp at first, lessens with time. It may never completely go away; nobody can promise you that it will. But it gets better, with time. Only with time.<br />
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And during the long process of healing, we can support one another just through our presence and our friendship, through recognizing and honoring each other’s vulnerability. <br />
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The famous Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh was forced to flee from his home country of Vietnam during the conflicts there. He was nominated in 1967 for the Nobel Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for his noble efforts at peacemaking. On the experience of fleeing his country, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote:<br />
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“When the crowded Vietnamese refugee boats met with storms or pirates, if everyone panicked all would be lost. But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive.”</blockquote>
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I was reminded of that message again when I walked into Whole Foods recently and stumbled upon a greeting card with the following message:<br />
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“Peace: It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.”</blockquote>
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No one who experiences grief and trauma has asked for its noise and trouble. It came uninvited. And make no mistake, recovering from it is hard work. But it is possible, I believe, to be in the midst of grief and trauma and still be calm in your heart. And if you can share that calm heart with even one other person, then you strengthen the bonds of community and you help the community to heal.<br />
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If I could pull one lesson from the fire of tragedy and grief, it would be this: Be here now, fully. Live your life. Love everyone as much as you can, and set aside petty differences. Make your life meaningful, and don’t take even one moment of it for granted. In the next moment, you might be gone. Celebrate life while it is here, take good care of yourself, and honor each other.<br />
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The prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy said it best:<br />
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“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”</blockquote>
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If you are in NYC in July, I'll be teaching two workshops at The Interdependence Project on Saturday July 15th and Sunday July 16th: "<a href="http://theidproject.org/events/2017/07/15/breathing-20-day-1-2-guest-teacher-dennis-hunter" target="_blank">Breathing 2.0</a>" and "<a href="http://theidproject.org/events/2017/07/16/buddhism-and-yoga-day-2-2-guest-teacher-dennis-hunter" target="_blank">Buddhism and Yoga: Exploring the Mystery of Being</a>." Click on the links for workshop descriptions and registration.<br />
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My yoga + meditation retreat with Adrian Molina to Cartagena, Colombia on Labor Day Weekend is nearly sold out. Only two rooms remain open. <a href="http://www.warriorflowretreats.com/" target="_blank">Get more info and register here</a>.Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-44483607703283310782017-02-16T12:20:00.000-04:002017-02-16T12:20:20.345-04:00Audio: Standing MeditationWe typically think of meditation as sitting. But we can also meditate lying down, walking, or standing. In this 27-minute guided meditation, practice mindfulness of body and awareness of the present moment in a standing posture.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="450" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/308049606&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%"></iframe>Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4911194092037701909.post-69795624674416985152017-01-18T17:44:00.000-04:002017-01-18T17:44:23.588-04:00Tilopa's "Six Words of Advice"<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<a href="https://soundcloud.com/onehumanjourney/tilopas-six-words-of-advice" target="_blank">LISTEN TO AN AUDIO VERSION</a><br /><br />Tilopa’s “Six Words of Advice” is a timeless, evergreen meditation instruction that you can apply whether you’re a beginning meditator or you’ve been at your practice for decades. Deceptively simple on its surface, you could explore the profound depths of this instruction for the rest of your life and never really be done with it.<br /><br />Tilopa lived in India in the 11th century CE, and is regarded as one of the forefathers of the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, which survives today mainly in the form of Tibetan Buddhism. Tilopa’s best-known student was Naropa; Naropa’s best-known student was Marpa the Translator, who brought the Vajrayana Buddhist teachings from India to Tibet; and Marpa’s best-known student was Milarepa, one of Tibet’s most legendary yogi-saints.<br /><br />Tilopa’s “Six Words of Advice” were presumably written down in Sanskrit and translated to Tibetan at some point; but the Sanskrit source in India has been lost, and only the Tibetan text remains.<br /><br />The title for this instruction in Tibetan is “Six Nails of Key Points,” which hearkens to the English expression about “hitting the nail on the head” with a statement that goes right to the point. Literally only six words long in Tibetan, an English translation of the text requires a few more words to bring it to life.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.unfetteredmind.org/" target="_blank">Ken McLeod</a> has translated the text in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilopa#Six_Words_of_Advice" target="_blank">two ways</a>: a version that’s as concise and literal as possible, and a version that’s slightly more elaborate but does a better job of unpacking the meaning embedded in those six Tibetan words.<br /><br />First, the concise and literal version:<br /><br />Don’t recall.<br />Don’t imagine.<br />Don’t think.<br />Don’t examine.<br />Don’t control.<br />Rest.<br /><br />There's something wonderful about the no-nonsense quality of that translation, and yet, as a meditation instruction, it's something of a blunt instrument. So here is McLeod’s more elaborate translation:<br /><br />Let go of what has passed.<br />Let go of what may come.<br />Let go of what is happening now.<br />Don’t try to figure anything out.<br />Don’t try to make anything happen.<br />Relax, right now, and rest.<br /><br />The original “six words” have now swollen into a whole verse, but in doing so they become more relatable. The six lines of this verse deconstruct the fundamental patterns in the mind that block clear and open meditation. Let’s unpack the meaning of each line, one at a time.<br /><br /><span style="color: red;"><b>“Let go of what has passed.” </b></span><br />When you arrive on your meditation seat, you come dragging behind you all sorts of stuff from your past, a trail of mental debris and dirt that hovers around you like the cloud of stink that follows Pig Pen everywhere he goes. In meditation, you can observe in real time how this cloud of stuff from the past kicks up and obscures your view of the present moment. You sit down to meditate and before long you find yourself remembering your bedroom in your childhood home, or thinking about your ex-lover and what an angel or jerk he or she was or is, or replaying the entire videotape in your mind of that annoying meeting that happened at the office yesterday and thinking what you *should* have said to your coworker instead of what you actually did say. The past haunts your mind in a million different ways—and it haunts your body, too, in the form of restlessness, fidgeting, and various kinds of tension (chronic or acute) that you carry with you wherever you go, including your meditation. Being truly present requires you to acknowledge your particular ways and patterns of holding on to the past, and to practice letting them go—over and over and over.<br /><br /><b><span style="color: red;">“Let go of what may come.” </span></b><br />This is the flip side of the previous line. When you’re not rehashing or trying to hold on to something from the past, you find your mind drifting into the future—anticipating things that haven’t happened yet, cooking up hopeful and fearful scenarios about what may or may not come to pass, worrying and daydreaming and planning and scheming about what you could get or say or do in order to secure a certain desired outcome at some future moment. Or maybe it’s something as dull and monotonous as wondering how much time is left in your meditation session, anticipating the ring of the bell that will signal when it’s time to get up, and thinking about what’s for lunch. Again, when you notice your mind drifting into thoughts of the future, and when you notice your body tensing up in anticipation of things that haven’t happened yet, gently let it go and come back to being present.<br /><br /><b><span style="color: red;">“Let go of what is happening now.” </span></b><br />When you let go of the past and the future, you find yourself very simply abiding in the present. Perhaps the feeling of being present only lasts for a moment before your habits regain control and you drift away again. Or, perhaps without noticing it, you start to drift into some kind of mental commentary on the present moment, telling yourself, “Wait, my arm itches. Okay, that’s better. Now I’ve got it. Now I’m really present. I’m calm and relaxed. My mind is quiet.” Well, obviously, no it isn’t. You’re sitting there lost in judgments and talking to yourself about the present moment instead of just experiencing it. The short translation of this line is simply, “Don’t think.” But telling someone not to think is a tall order, and sometimes you end up thinking about how bad you are at not thinking. You can’t really will the mind to stop thinking, or silence it through brute force. Milarepa said, “The mind’s impulse to sudden thought cannot be stopped by hundreds with spears,” meaning that even if you were menaced by hundreds of warriors standing around you and threatening to jab you with their spears if you allowed your mind to think, you still couldn’t stop it. Thinking happens. <br /><br />As McLeod’s longer translation of this line suggests, it’s less about stopping thoughts and more about letting go of what’s happening now, including thoughts. The mind’s tendency is to try to take hold of what is happening now, grasp it tightly, to own it and say “This is what I’m experiencing” and make a big deal out of it. But clutching at the present moment is like clutching at water in your fist: the more tightly you grasp, the more the water escapes your grasp. The present moment is always unfolding, always flowing, always changing, and it can’t be pinned down because it’s not an object; it’s an infinitely unfolding process. Whatever arises within the space of the present moment, notice it, and let it come and go. The wave of the present moment is always cresting, rising up from the past and dissolving into the future, and you are balanced right there at the edge, surfing the wave. But you can’t hold on to a wave, or change it in any way. Ride it while you can, let it dissolve, and then ride the next one, and the next one. No big deal.<br /><br /><b><span style="color: red;">“Don’t try to figure anything out.” </span></b><br />As you sit there in meditation, notice the little voice in the back of your mind quietly analyzing and murmuring about your experience. “Am I doing this right? What is my breath supposed to feel like? Is my posture okay? When I’m in the present moment, how is it supposed to feel? Is this it? Aha, I think I had it there for a moment.” The short translation of this line is telling: “Don’t examine.” Look at your mind’s tendency to always be examining your experience, analyzing it, questioning it, doubting it. Now drop that, and see what your experience actually feels like without the additional responsibility of trying to figure anything out. Can you just be with it, and at the same time leave it alone?<br /><br /><b><span style="color: red;">“Don’t try to make anything happen.” </span></b><br />You might sit down to meditate with big ideas and plans about how it's supposed to go, what sort of blissful and enlightened state you’re supposed to attain. But your beautiful plans always seem to be falling apart, and you’re always scrambling to pick up the pieces and recreate the idea you have in your mind of what’s “supposed” to be happening. It’s a project-management mentality. The thing is, you can’t project-manage your way through meditation. You can’t force your mind into stillness and silence and presence, because those aren’t states that can be created through effort. Those are the natural qualities of awareness, which you settle into when you stop being a control freak and stop agitating yourself with your mind’s habitual patterns. Imagine a glass of water with some dirt in it; if you keep stirring the water, the dirt always obscures the water’s natural clarity. But if you just leave it alone for a while, the dirt settles to the bottom of the glass and the water’s natural clarity is revealed. The more you “try” to make the water clear, the muddier it will become. You can’t create clarity; but you can stop obscuring it, stop interfering with it. It’s a matter of getting out of your own way. Stop trying to make something happen. Let everything be.<br /><br /><b><span style="color: red;">“Relax, right now, and rest.” </span></b><br />This final line is Tilopa’s instruction in a nutshell, and sums up the other five lines. You’re letting go of the past and the future and fully arriving in the present moment; letting go of the mind’s tendency to think about the present moment, comment upon it, analyze it, project-manage it; letting go of any effort to control your experience or make it conform to some ideal you have in your mind of what should be happening. Okay, now what are you supposed to do? *Nothing.* Let go and relax in a state of non-doing, a state of just being: being aware, hovering right now and right now and right now on the edge of that ever-cresting wave of the present moment, and allowing your body and mind to rest. <br /><br />Rest is the simplest thing in the world, really. Yet human beings are so absurdly complicated that we have to re-learn to find a natural state of rest and settle into it because we have such strong habitual patterns of restlessness. Our minds and our nervous systems are chronically overstimulated, riddled with tension and hangups and things we’ve convinced ourselves we’re supposed to be doing. So most of us actually find it quite challenging to just come into a state of rest and stay there. <br /><br />Tilopa’s “Six Words of Advice” help us dismantle, one by one, the mind’s major patterns of restlessness, and arrive back at the original state of simple, clear awareness that became clouded over somewhere along the way.<br /><br />Enjoy your practice.<br />
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<a href="https://soundcloud.com/onehumanjourney/tilopas-six-words-of-advice" target="_blank">AUDIO VERSION</a>Dennis Hunterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15768594614249854053noreply@blogger.com0