Showing posts with label zen attitude. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zen attitude. Show all posts

Sunday, November 13, 2011

One More Violent Revolution?

Wisdom Quarterly (EDITORS)


A man sitting on his sofa was badgered by his wife to get rid of the dead weight around the house. "What dead weight?"

"Like your parents, for instance," she answered.

"But they're my parents!" he protested.

"They're nothing but dead weight," she argued. Finally, she convinced him to do away with them by pushing them over a cliff and into an abyss.

So one day he tossed them into an old wheelbarrow and trudged up the mountainside.

They were happy about the adventure, the great view, and the time spent with their son, not realizing their fate. He pushed on silently resigned to what he felt he had to do.

They finally reached the top where the view was grand in the dimming light. And they realized why they had been brought here.

They looked at their son, who was silent, and asked of him one final favor.

"What is it?" he moaned.

"Son, make sure that when you throw us over, nothing happens to this old barrow," they pleaded.

"Why!?" he demanded.

"Because, my boy, one day your son is going to need it."

They turned back with tears in their eyes and together and discussed how they might grow in peace, each playing a part, each expressing gratitude, each remembering how we are all part of one another.

Because we cannot thrive apart, we have to thrive together. A violent revolution never accomplished anything but more violence.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Teach Yourself Walking Meditation (video)

Carole Fogarty (thehealthylivinglounge.com) and Wisdom Quarterly
“Make the effort to let go of your worries” - Thay (Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, Walking Meditation DVD/CD-ROM).

Walking meditation is the perfect alternative if body and mind are too restless to sit and rest in stillness. Its also a lovely change from the usual, less active meditation practices. No great skill or understanding is required. Simply give attention to (just knowing, not evaluating or thinking about) the breath, foot steps, or the ground. Adjust to a slow, gentle pace. Wherever one can walk, one can meditate along the way.

Healing

  • Body and mind become one (united by breath).
  • Calm strong emotions by living in the present moment(rather than reflecting on the past or worrying about possible futures).
  • Focus on the internal world in the senses of the body rather than the outer.
  • Draw excess energy and emotions (stray thoughts upsetting the heart/mind) out of the head down into the body.

“Live your daily life in a way that you never lose yourself. When you are carried away with your worries, fears, cravings, anger, and desire, you run away from yourself and you lose yourself. The practice is always to go back to oneself.” - Thay

() Free weekly wisdom. From Walking Meditation: What if every step taken deepened our connection with all life and imprinted peace, joy, and serenity on Earth?

Deepen the practice with the highly recommend book Walking Meditation by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and his student Nguyen Anh-Huong. It is short, simple, and very easy to read with super clear instructions and an added bonus -- an instructional DVD and a CD that includes 5 walking meditations. Remember, there is no goal to walking meditation. The destination is here and now...one breath at a time.

“Walking meditation is meditation while walking.” - Thay

4 Key Steps

  1. Breathing - stay aware of what is happening now. What is happening? Breathing. Breathe using a gentle, full belly (not a full chest) to calm thoughts, relaxing the hips, elbows, muscles, legs, face, eyes, ears, and brain. Maybe place hands on the belly to feel the rise and fall (optional). Breath in “resting,” breath out “softening.”
  2. Walking - with soft eyes, moving slowly and gently. Feel the sensation of each foot as it presses down on the earth. Notice it as it lifts up, touches the ground, and is lifted up again. Follow every foot step with mind and breath.
  3. Counting - if staying focused on each step is a struggle, count the number of steps to each inhale and each exhale. This encourages attention (discourages distraction).
  4. Smiling - smiles, half smiles, upside down frowns, grins... It is said a smile brings lightness to the feet, inviting the body to relax, helping us settle more easily into walking meditation.

“Don’t bring anxiety and stress to the ground with your feet.” - Thay

(Ven. ) This is the third in a series of six videos on how to practice meditation without religious dogma or spiritual mumbo-jumbo.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Punk Rock made me a Buddhist (video)

P. MacPherson, D. Seven, A. Wells, CC Liu (Wisdom Quarterly)
A Japanese punk scene across the sea later created cyberpunk masterpieces that focused on punks and freaks of all kinds (cinemastrikesback.com).

LOS ANGELES - Punk rock made me a Buddhist. A few hot spots in America (Boston, NYC, SF) gave rise to the American version of "punk," now devolved into pop-punk and bubblegum rock.

But it was once a rebellious act -- something that would get you arrested, beaten in Hollywood by riot police (LAPD/OCPD Gone Wild with a license to assault, jail, beat, and even shoot).

OC police now engage in brutality as bad as that of their brothers in blue next door -- killing for sport. RIP Kelly Thomas of Fullerton (abclocal.go.com).

I always thought police hated punk rock. But it seems what they hate are kids, freedom, rebellion, youthful exuberance.

Police/paramilitary troops (many back from active duty in the military killing freely in Afghanistan and Iraq) stand stiffly wielding sticks, covering their badges, deploying all sorts of "toys" -- Tasers, concussion grenades, choke holds, mace, tear gas, non-metal projectiles (that cause serious injury and death while claiming to be nonlethal, but lethality completely depends on how they are used), horses, military assault rifles, shotguns, revolvers, mace, and secret stuff (using microwaves and infiltrating provocateurs).

What's it to do with Buddhism? Like the liberating Dharma itself, punk goes against the stream. I didn't join Noah Levine in his movement. I didn't wait for Keanu Reeves to make a movie about it. And I was no Brad Warner fan, nor even a student of "Zen," except as articulated by Alan Watts on KPFK, the city's only free speech radio outlet. Their were genius front men like Jello Biafra, the person with the most integrity, to be inspired by. There were the Buddha's own words to go by, particularly the Kalama Sutra.

Steven Blush has documented what the music was really like at the time:



American Hardcore: Steven Blush Interview
"Hardcore is a Complete, Legitimate California-born Music Form"
In his 2001 compendium, American Hardcore: A Tribal History, New York writer and former promoter Steven Blush all but dispensed with your dad's glamorized spit-scabs-and-safety-pin punk, instead focusing on hundreds of DIY, anarchic hardcore bands from the scene's peak between 1980 and 1986, proving that this was one genre of rock that wasn't fun and games, especially when the crowd is trying to light the singer on fire.

While Blush interviewed the music's usual suspects, including the Dead Kennedys, Misfits and Bad Brains, a substantial amount the book is not surprisingly dedicated to SoCal, from Hollywood to Orange County to the South Bay of Black Flag and SST.

Or, as Blush rightly identified, where "American hardcore was born..." (Bad Brains singer H.R.'s interview in the accompanying 2006 Sony Pictures Classics documentary took place at Griffith Park with a quinceanera in the background).


For the book's second edition, which includes more interviews, flyers, and a new chapter, Blush hosts a readings/discussion at Book Soup today, with Keith Morris (Black Flag, Circle Jerks), Tony Cadena (Adolescents), Lisa Fancher (Frontier Records), and photographer Edward Colver. Before he left the frigid cold for sunshine, we caught up with the author and talked local pride:

  • How did the book come about?

I started in the mid-'90s when the punk revival had happened with Green Day, Offspring, and Rancid. Everybody was talking about hardcore, but it had never really been documented. There was never any written lore other than fanzines, and some great ones, like Flipside in the L.A. area and Maximumrocknroll in San Francisco, notably. More

Friday, July 1, 2011

Against the Grain: Anarchy and Zen

David Kupfer (The Sun Magazine, June 2011)

Performers in New Delhi with innovative moves and the Buddha as backdrop (mayankpandey)

Actor Peter Coyote suggested we meet for this interview at his home north of San Francisco. Nicknamed “the Treehouse,” it has a striking view of Mount Tamalpais and is close to Golden Gate National Recreation Area and San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm. It is a long way from Hollywood, where Coyote has worked since 1980, appearing in more than ninety films and television programs. He says that he is “a Zen Buddhist student first, an actor second.” He will be ordained as a Zen priest in August.

Coyote has had an eclectic life, having done everything from farming to being a stockbroker. A self-described “socialist radical hippie anarchist environmentalist,” he’s seldom without an opinion on an issue and never one to hold back his views. Born Rachmil Pinchus Ben Mosha Cohon in New York City in 1941, Coyote took his stage name from an experience he had while taking peyote in the Southwest. He has been socially and politically engaged since the age of fourteen, when he volunteered for the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign in Englewood, New Jersey. Coyote’s passion for progressive reform continued at Grinnell College in Iowa, where, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, he helped organize a group of twelve students to travel to Washington, D.C., and protest nuclear testing. They fasted for three days outside the White House before President John F. Kennedy invited them in to talk with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.

After college Coyote joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a guerrilla street-theater group still in existence today. He and some of his fellows from the mime troupe went on to form the Diggers, an anarchist group that “acted out” its ideas of what culture should be, questioning the core values of capitalism and distributing free food to runaways in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, sometimes feeding hundreds of people a day. They also ran a Free Store, a Free Clinic, and even (briefly) a Free Bank. The Diggers evolved into the Free Family, a network of communes around the country pursuing an alternative economy and culture.

Coyote is the author of the memoir Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle, a portion of which won a Pushcart Prize. A new book, about what he calls the “present mass hypnosis afoot,” is currently in revision. More

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

The Child-Meditation Miracle

Gwynne Watkins (thedailybeast.com)


Can a 3-year-old really reach a Zen-like state -- or is it just a good way to shut him up? Growing ranks of parents and gurus say meditation calms crazy kids.

It could be said Amdo -- a sweet, calm, and curious boy who lives in Brooklyn with his mother Jae -- has been meditating since before he learned to walk.

As a toddler, he was fascinated by his mother’s meditation practice and began to crawl into her lap and sit with her when she meditated in the mornings. Jae, a book conservator who’s been practicing Soto Zen meditation as a discipline for four years, soon begun giving Amdo gentle guidance on the principles of meditation, which he’s already applying to his life.

“I tell him, 'Feel what it feels like to feel a tingle in your fingertips,'” says Jae. “It’s not a technique, but you have to be really still [to do it]. There was one time when I was really agitated, and spontaneously Amdo was like, ‘Mom, feel your fingertips!’”

One psychologist says that while “not all kids will be able to do meditation,” she’s found that “many kids” can “learn meditative breathing techniques that will help them regulate and not lose control.”

Merriam-Webster defines the act of meditating [which is simply a handy catchall Western translation for various Eastern words for different kinds of practices that cultivate good qualities: bhavana, jhaneti (developing tranquil-absorption, states called jhanas or zen), kammatthana (field of work), anussati (contemplation or recollection), sati (mindfulness) and sampajanna (clear comprehension)] as “to focus one’s thoughts on, reflect on, or ponder over.”

This means that the definition of the opposite of meditation might be: “to be a toddler.” But some parents are embracing the idea that meditation can calm their rambunctious young children. For holistically-minded moms and dads, it’s like a dose of spiritual Ritalin.

Not everyone buys it. Deepak Chopra, a household name in American gurus, writes on his website that “there’s no hard and fast rule” for meditation readiness. But he names “8 or 10 years of age” as the earliest conceivable moment.

[The Buddha said 7-years-old, which Christianity and Catholicism later latched onto as the age of accountability and reason. To validate this number, the Buddha ordained his 7-year-old son Rahula as the first child novice-monk and made a rule that no one any younger could be ordained.]

Youngsters have limited capacity for extreme concentration, body awareness, or understanding the abstract concepts (visualization, loving-kindness) associated with some meditation practices.

Parents apparently have a different visualization: serene, sedate children who learn to love... More