One of the long-term blocks for me against Buddhist thought has been that I was not interested in renouncing desire, which always seemed too much like renouncing one’s humanity. But that, as therapist Mark Epstein shows in Open to Desire: the Truth about what Buddha Taught, his latest rendering of the insights of Buddhist psychology for Western ( Read more... )

While reading Mark Epstein’s Open to Desire: the Truth about what Buddha Taught, I came across the following passage: If people have never felt loved or accepted by their parents, for example, they will be much more likely to find themselves in intimate relationships in which they continue to feel unloved. Then they try extra hard to make ( Read more... )

Finished This Side of Nirvana: Memoirs of a Spiritually Challenged Buddhist. It is a personal memoir about a Southern American woman’s experience with dharma.

The back cover has a nice quote from the author, Sara Jenkins: The path does not require that we approach it with noble intentions. What I brought to my spiritual seeking was the one thing ( Read more... )

Finished reading The Rainbow Palace by the late Tenzin Choedrak.

Much of it is a harrowing memoir of imprisonment and torture under the Chinese. As one reads the simply told story, the horror of the Chinese occupation of Tibet is set out yet again. ( horror and compassion )

I started getting panic attacks in my early twenties. The family GP wanted to put me on Valium™. I decided that night I wasn’t going to do that and looked at various alternative therapies, including a prolonged period of worrying about food sensitivities (which makes one neurotic about food). It was some years later when my Canberra GP, who had ( Read more... )

How many Zen monks does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two. One to change it and one not to change it. (p.178)

I came across a discounted copy of Bones of the Master: A Journey into Secret Mongolia by George Crane while bookshop trawling with monstah in Carnegie.

It is the story of the 1959-60 escape of Tsung Tsai, a Chinese-Mongolian Ch’an monk from ( Read more... )

I used to be very phobic about flying: flying for me was a matter of constant, intense, anxiety before and during the flight. I am still not comfortable about small aircraft, and if I am tired, I find twinges of the old anxiety resurface even in jets, but nowadays, I generally greatly enjoy flying in jets ( Read more... )

The other day, I was thinking about when was the happiest time in my life, and I realised the happiest time in my life was this time. A lot of things have led to this point, but an important help along the way has been reading (and re-reading) Going to Pieces without Falling Apart by Mark Epstein.

I have now also read Thoughts without a Thinker: ( Read more... )

My previous post on chemicals and cognition sparked a bit of a discussion of neuro-linguistic programming. I should clarify from that post that I think Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart is a fine book. One of the things I like about Epstein’s book, and related works on Buddhist notions of mindfulness, is how it makes one sceptical and aware ( Read more... )

During my Friday afternoon late lunch with Nikie, talked about depression and the issue of chemicals and cognition, including how I distinguish between the cases of depression which are mainly an imbalance in brain chemicals - the brain just works badly in a particular way - and those which are mainly a cognitive problem, an issue of the ‘ ( Read more... )