Some Thoughts on Dharma

Dharma has been translated in many different ways. Dharma can be thought of as duty, the right way of living, or proper conduct; to use a word from another spiritual context, perhaps as similar to righteousness.

Another source interprets dharma as meaning protection,in this case referring to protection from ignorance and the problems and suffering that go along with it. Like many words that try to give labels to our spiritual natures, dharma has a rich, multifaceted character. In literal translation, in can be thought of as “that which uphold and supports.”

I prefer to thing of the idea of dharma as The Way of the Higher Truths. It is a body of knowledge that is assumed to be a higher, ultimate truth, but I also think of it as in essence the process by which we live our life so as to have the opportunity to experience truth.

Soooo, I guess that means we can use Dharma to get to the Dharma.

The Purpose of the Dharma

…is to purify the minds so that this life, our journey through time, has as much meaning as possible. By practicing the dharma we improve the quality of our lives.

The dharma focuses on the development of inner peace and happiness, not on achievements in the external world or accumulation of material things. The practice of dharma is open to all, regardless of class or income; in fact, lack of class and lack of income may make it easier.

Be in Love with Yr Life

         * Jack Kerouac

Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.

         * The Fray

The Language of Dharma 

The language we use for dharma should tell you something about it…

For example, we study the dharma, or you may practice the dharma, but you’ll notice that you don’t sit on your ass and wait for it to show up the dharma. You also don’t think about it once in a while and then give up the dharma.

Dharma requires time as well as effort; it requireds deep introspection over an extended period; a commitment to a life of seeking.

Dharma Rocks!

Barry

When I think of the powerful concepts of Christian spirituality, I think of the idea of redemption. Redemption not only in the grand sense of being “saved,” but also the ways we can seek redemption in our day to day lives. The idea of redemption always seems to me to be the ultimate manifestation of hope, that there is no hole too deep to climb out of.

Today I’m thinking about the parallels between this idea of redemption and the Buddhist idea of negative karma and purification. Our negative actions accumulate seeds that will eventually sprout. It is possible to purify these accumulated negative imprints, and I’ll borrow from the writings of Thubten Chodron to summarize how this is done.

• Experience and express genuine regret;
• Develop a determination not to perform the action again;
• Take refuge and generate an altruistic attitude toward others;
• Engage in some meaningful remedial practice.

These four types of actions need to become part of our ongoing process of living, and not done as an isolated attempt to “make up” for something we’ve done in hopes of getting a “do over.”

My question to you today: In what ways do you see these concepts of karma and purification as paralleling the Christian expression of redemption?

To me there seem to be many similarities in the process. Both start by acknowledging our lack of perfection, whether that be through the idea that man has “fallen,” or the idea that until we reach enlightenment our minds are obscured by ignorance. When I look at the 4 actions that can help purify negative karma, I see reflections of confession, of loving our neighbors as ourselves, and of the direction to “go forth and sin no more.”

This article is not intended to “prove” anything, only to engage the mind and seek an understanding of the similar truths that underlie our different faith journeys.

I also wanted to start to talk about this issue of purification or redemption, because I think it has tremendous therapeutic power; that will be the topic of another post, another day.

Barry

Relax in the Dharma

Today I want to keep it simple, and for my benefit as well as yours, post the Bodhisattva Vow.

Let it guide all of us in our daily activities.

• Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to liberate them.
• Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to transcend them.
• Dharma teachings are boundless; I vow to master them.
• The Buddha’s enlightened way is unsurpassable; I vow to embody it.

For the ultimate benefit of all beings without exceptions, throughout this and all my lifetimes, I dedicate myself to the practice and realization of enlightenment until all together reach that goal.

We all have a tendency to make our lives more complicated than they need to be. We may read complicated works, or meditate on arcane concepts, but often the greatest dharma is found in attention to a very simple idea.

Write this vow on a note card. Read it once in the morning on awakening. Tape it to your computer screen, and read it once per hour with attention to your breathing. Read it once more with gratitude before going to bed. See if it makes a difference in your day.

Free Therapy!

Namaste

Barry

I had a very interesting comment the other day from someone who has their own blog. He was commenting on being on medication and also being in Christian Counseling, and that his counselor wanted him to try to get off his medication.

That got me thinking again about a topic that is of great interest to me; the divide between spiritually based therapy and what I’ll call secular psychotherapy for lack of a better word.

Spiritual Counseling Issues

I have had a lot of clients who have in the past been in some type of clergy-provided counseling. I have worked with people who had great experiences, and I had a couple colleagues in New Mexico who provided very balanced and professional care. I have noted some tendency for spiritual counselors to be focused almost exclusively on Biblical and prayer interventions, and at times even hostile toward the idea of medication or other treatments. I have gotten the sense (and even been told a time or two), that emotional problems are within the realm of God and not man, and that the only legitimate cure is through God. I’d think God would recommend a rationale use of all resources available, including medication in those cases where it’s really indicated. I wouldn’t want to inadvertently communicate that I believe that medication is the only, the best, usually necessary, etc., because that’s not the case.

“Secular” Therapy Issues

I don’t like this term all that much, because I don’t really believe there’s a place for psychotherapy that is truly “secular.” Even people who report themselves as atheists are best served by attention to the history and nature of their spiritual lives. So while I wanted to discuss the issue of Christian Counseling, the real heart of this post revolves around this question:

• Why don’t we want to let God into the therapy room?

There are probably a lot of different answers to that, but I think they include:

1. Therapists are uncomfortable with their own spirituality and prefer to keep it as something “private”
2. Psychology is considered a science, and therefore the science versus religion dichotomy applies
3. Therapists lack the breadth of training to be comfortable with a variety of different spiritual belief systems
4. Therapists are afraid of being perceived as either prying and/or judgmental (reference the old American warning to not “discuss religion or politics”)
5. There is an increasing emphasis on diagnosis and neat classification schemes, and spirituality does not lend it self to that language.

A Different Approach

I have become very comfortable discussing spirituality with my clients. We’re already often talking about sex, money and other personal topics. Why avoid one that is for many people an important source of support (as well as for many people, a source of conflict)? Rather than being resistant, most people are excited to have the chance to talk about their faith.

I have a lot of curiosity about matters of the spirit, so I’ve learned a lot. My own background is Protestant, while my current spiritual life involves more Eastern thought, including matters of Zen and the Dharma, but I’ve been privileged to learn a lot about Catholicism, Wicca, Judaism, Islam, and a variety of other systems of thought.

Are These Extremes Even Different

As opposed as these approaches may seem, they are exactly alike in a few important (and dysfunctional) ways:

• They lack an awareness and appreciation of the whole person;
• They lack an integration of the multiple levels of our existence;
• These defects stem from a great allegiance to their mode of thought that to the needs of the person they purport to serve.

Two Questions for You

Does this integrated approach make sense to you?

Would you be comfortable talking to a therapist about your spiritual life?

Do you think taking medication and praying for help with an emotional problem are inconsistent with each other?

Well, that’s three questions at the end of an already long post, so I’ll bid you a good evening.

Barry

There are all kinds of problems that can happen when we are living what I’ll call “false narratives.” These can include problems like:

• Chronic depression
• Low motivation
• Poor self-image
• Career dissatisfaction
• Compulsive behavior including drug and alcohol use, gambling, and compulsive sexual behavior
• Anxiety
• Feelings of emptiness and lack of meaning in life
• Involvement in abusive relationships

How can you tell if you’re living a false narrative? I’m not suggesting that there’s only one way to live, but there are stories that are inauthentic for you. If you look at your life story and feel you are mindfully choosing your path in general, then odds are that you are living a genuine and authentic life narrative. That doesn’t mean everything is going perfectly, but you are in some control of your path.

Too many of us are living life stories that have been dictated to us by someone else. We maybe living a narrative with the theme of “I’ll never have enough,” related to societal pressures. We may be living a narrative of “I’ll never be good enough,” dictated by an emotionally abusive parent. We may be living a life that says “My value derives from being a sexual object,” if we’ve been victims of sexual abuse. There are endless possible sources of false and forced narrative themes, but they often come from these primary sources.

Why do cultural pressures have so much impact on us? It may well be in part that we live in an age when there is tremendous pressure to do more and have more. There is so much information coming at us, and little time to assimilate it. We suffer from information overload and time insufficiency, a bad combination.

When we allow others to dictate our narratives, we create situations in which racism, sexism, and prejudice impact us in negative ways.

There is no simple path to an authetnic narrative, but I would suggest that as part of your attempt that you seek a life for yourself that is simple, but also deep and significant. This is in contrast to most of our lives, which tend to be compicated, but very shallow.

I strongly suggest looking  carefully at your life, asking yourself questions like ”What type of story am I living?,” and ”What is the theme of my life?” Compare the answers to those questions to themes that are of important and consistent with your underlying values. Ask yourself “What themes do I want to live; what’s important to me?” Allow the answers to these questions to guide you, and you will see an increase in your motivation and sense of yourself.

There are a number of themes that I believe are universally important to living healthy, productive and meaningful lives, and I’ll be discussing them in depth in future articles.

Here’s a closing thought from Joseph Campbell:

As Schopenhauer says, when you look back at your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect. So, I have a theory that if your are on your own path, things are going to come to you.

- In D.K. Osborn, Ed. A Joseph Campbell Companion

May you begin your journey on a peaceful path

Barry

Sometimes we try too hard.

• We try too hard to find fulfillment and happiness.
• We try to hard to feel better when our mood is down, or we’re worried about something.
• We even try to hard to have a good time.

Often the best thing we can do is stop trying to do and be all these things, and just do the simple work of the day. These are reflected in two quotations from the tradition of Zen:

Magical power, marvelous action! Chopping wood, carrying water…,

and

There are these two things: Zen, and to sweep the garden.

The idea of course, is that there is beauty and truth in the simplicity of our everyday activities. The actions themselves can take on great power if they are illuminated by mindful awareness of them.

It has been interesting for me to be spending a three day weekend revolving around American national spirit, and celebrate it in large part by doing pretty simple and concrete work. I did take a break for fireworks on the 4th of July. Other than that I have been spending the weekend:

• Cleaning then staining a deck
• Stripping wallpaper
• Buying groceries
• Vacuuming
• Pulling weeds

Each of these activities can have a great sense of satisfaction attached to it; a sense of completion, of simple physical labor, of doing things that have some attachment to the rhythm of the earth.

When we are troubled by depression or anxiety, it can help to do even the simplest tasks with a sense of mindfulness. In these states of mind, we can get very confused worrying about all the things that happened in the past and we fear might happen in the future, but we can clear our minds by focusing on accomplishing simple work today, and worrying about nothing beyond that.

Try it: empty your mind of your worries, concerns and ambitions of the moment. Pick up a broom, or a shovel, a vacuum cleaner, a paintbrush. Go and do your work; think about it, watch closely what you you’re doing, notice the feeling in your body as it moves, allow your self to be happy with what you’re doing, and whatever you accomplish.

Enjoy!

Barry

Hey Ho. Yesterday was a page day and not a post day. Take a look at the About The Dharma Shrink page, and to the right you’ll see a nested page titled What It’s All About.

This page talks a little more about how this blog can help you, and what my thoughts and goals are as I write it. I hope it makes sense. If that navigation makes it difficult to find that page, let me know; I can move it easily with the magic of WordPress.

Question of the Day – Do I Really Have a Narrative?

A lot of people might not think they have a “narrative,” since it’s a term you don’t usually apply to yourself. Here are some quotes that I think might help you see what the idea of narrative might mean for you.

The dharmashrink explains it

Your narrative is the story you have in your head (whether you realize it or not) that helps you create meaning and make sense of your life.

From White and Epston’s Book, Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends:

In striving to make sense of life, persons face the task of arranging their experiences of events in sequences across time in such a way as to arrive at a coherent account of themselves and the world around them… This account can be referred to as a story or self-narrative.

So yes-yes-yes, you do have a narrative; whether or not you’re conscious of it.

• It may be an abusive parent or spouse telling you your life will never amount to anything;
• You may just be letting society pull you along so you’re living the same story as everyone else;
• Your story may be dictated by compulsive behavior or addiction.

Whatever your narrative is, the first step to making it work for you is to believe in it’s existence, and turn it from unconscious to conscious.

“How do I do that?”, you ask.

By mindful awareness of your life, and a process called deconstruction (breaking down) of your narrative, a process we’ll talk a lot about.

The Benefits 

Thinking in terms of narrative will help you focus on how you can actively create meaning and make sense of your world.  I encourage you to explore your own life in this spirit, holistically, and with full consideration of the context of your past and present life, and with openness to your ability to create your future. By doing so you become the author of your future, rather than a victim of your past.

Namaste

Barry

In today’s article I want to toss out a few ideas about the limitations of psychology in answering the important questions life poses for us.

I have been a psychologist for over 25 years, so this is neither an apology for nor an attack on psychology. It is, however, an unflinching look at realistic limitations on what psychology and traditional psychotherapy can do to help those of us who have problems with depression, anxiety, anger or hopelessness.

1. Psychotherapy is a term so broad as to have lost its meaning. There is no uniform approach to psychotherapy. Many of the themes I talk about in this article and this blog COULD be approached in a psychotherapeutic relationship, although they are most usually not. I would classify the types of psychotherapy that would be most likely to address these issues as being narrative therapy or existential humanistic psychotherapy. Narrative therapy has to do with our lives understood as stories, and will inevitably begin to address questions that people feel are important at a profound level, questions that deal with “why.” As Nietzsche once said, “if we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how.” These same issues are at the core of an existential type of therapy that focuses on those things that give life meaning.

So what are some of those “why” questions:

• Why am I here?
• Why do people suffer?
• Why is the universe so vast?
• Is there a power greater than myself? 

2. Psychotherapy can often be a way of avoiding, rather than confronting, these important issues. In current practice, most mental health treatment is reductionistic in nature, focusing on diagnosis and structured treatment paradigms. It then becomes very possible to classify oneself as having an illness and getting treatment for your symptoms, all the while staying blissfully unaware of some of the core issues you’re struggling with. Historically, psychotherapy has not fully address the spiritual dimension of people’ lives, and that’s the area of our lives where many of these important “why” questions live.

3. Self-improvement on the narrative path does not require “professional” help, although there should certainly be no stigma to receiving it. It does require ways of looking at the whole of your life story and understanding how it impacts the way you feel about yourself, and the way you live your life on a day-to-day basis.

4. Fifty years ago, pioneering psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was already noticing the profound nature of the questions his patients posed, and wondering about how adequately they could be answered.

More and more a psychiatrist is approached today by patients who confront him with human problems rather than neurotic symptoms. Some of the people who nowadays call on a psychiatrist would have seen a pastor, priest or rabbi in former days. Now they often refuse to be handed over to a clergyman and instead confront the doctor with questions such as “What is the meaning of my life?”  (Man’s Search for Meaning, pg. 119-120)

 In this blog you’ll find lots of ideas on how to change the way you view your life in a way that will naturally result in fewer problems with depression, anxiety and worry. More importantly than reducing the “bad” things in our lives, these techniques provide ways to drastically increase those positive factors that enrich our lives and spirits.

From the easier said than done department. Most of us have heard the advice from spiritual leaders, particularly those from the Eastern tradition, that tells us to slow down.

What does it mean to slow down?

Well, it may mean to take on fewer activities, or to commit to fewer responsibilities that are not really important. To me however, the real core of this advice is to Slow Down Your Mind.

“Anxiety” and “depression” are two problems that are often related to excessive speed of thinking, or at an even more basic level, just too much thinking period.

While there are plenty of recent advocates for slowing down, here is a quote from a little different source, the “Beat” poet and novelist Charles Bukowski, quoted in the book Tough Guys Write Poetry, by Daniel Weizman.

This is very important – to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you’re gonna lose everything…

This is very, very important…just to do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That’s why they’re all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful.

Interesting advice. While Bukowski is focusing on issues of anger, we can also have a positive impact on anxiety and depression by learning to better manage our own thinking processes. Slow down your thoughts, whether via meditation, relaxation, or visualization; better yet, take a few minutes every day to clear your mind totally.

In our minds lie our only true power. We live in a society that is very concerned with the external. We mourn the events that happen to us: the high cost of gasoline, the man or woman we lost or gained, the house we can buy, what someone did to us. If we have a lot, we worry about losing it or resent not having more; it we have little, we feel slighted.

It takes a great effort and discipline to persistently work on what’s inside, to channel and focus our thoughts on things that give perspective and reflect the true nature of our existence.

For that purpose, I’m going to focus today on Kalu Rinpoche’s Four Mind Changers. On whatever day you may be reading this, I offer you the opportunity to do the same. Hold these thoughts in your mind. If you formally meditate, let your mind focus on one or more of them, and have a day of peace and appreciation of your life.

Four Mind Changers

• I have been blessed with a life in which I can do many things to further my own happiness and the happiness of those around me.
• Life is short. There is no time to waste.
• The journey through life isn’t supposed to be easy; it’s supposed to be real.
• Our karma is the one thing we carry with us always.

If you are troubled by depression or anxiety, don’t feed them by focusing your attention on them. Allow them to pass through you mind, and return to the four mind changers.

Namaste

Barry

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