Bringing awareness to our sorrows and fears

Just stumbled across an old link I'd marked some time ago, where Jack Kornfield talks about meditation, psychotherapy, and awakening; how the cycles of insight can re-open old wounds again and again, and how we need to bring our awareness and insights to the whole of our being and life and work, not just parts. I think it's worth a read. It's quite short:

mettarefuge.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/eve...-old-wounds-to-heal/

(Mods - I forgot to select the "recommended reading" category - feel free to move this post there.)

This is a wonderful article. Thanks for posting it, Ona.

along these lines, here's something new from Shinzen:

shinzenyoung.blogspot.com/2014/02/dealin...nxiety-part-i_5.html

An interesting counter-perspective, which takes up precisely this point of Kornfield's, particularly the bit about how Westerners can't do vipassana, is Patrick Kearney's "Still Crazy after all these Years: Why Meditation isn’t Psychotherapy." I think therapy does things meditation doesn't, and these days I guess I kinda agree with both of them, but I like Kearney's article too.

Oooh Kearney is a little caustic, I think. But he makes good points.

Ultimately, the tool box metaphore is probably most appropriate --- in our efforts to look deeply into our own resistances, we are going to use a variety of tools, some inherited, some learned, others forced upon us by the curiosities of our own path.

No one can say what tool you >need< to use, but there are some common threads... You need a tool to dissect the nature of experience, to immerse in felt emotional experience, to explore interpersonal experience, and get perspective on the nature of cultural/societal constructs for experience. That means probably some form of introspection, psychology, relationship, and community/sociology investigation. Ken Wilber was probably right about the different dimensions of experience and how working in one domain doesn't fix the other domains.

That said, I already find a lot of psychology and sociology already in meditation methods, so it's a false distinction to position one against the other.

I really like Shinzen's point: "So working with the fear family of emotions (fear, anxiety, nervousness, angst, worry, phobia, etc.) represents a tangible way to go about the enterprise of achieving nondual awareness." It does seem to be that by following resistance upstream we uncover what we need to uncover and we also are forced to face the limitations of whatever technique got us to the next level/flavor of resistance.

A gem from the Jeff Warren article that inspired Shinzen's blog post:

"For a journalist, it’s a slippery area to research, for everyone has a slightly different take on how to arrive at that underlying nondual reality, and what that reality actually entails. Different teachers emphasize their own way in, and usually disparage the other routes, which is why the elitist Tibetans roll their eyes at the gnomic Zennies, who smugly dismiss the striving Theravadans, who are enraged by the absolutist Vedantans, who make fun of the devotional theistics, who weep with joy and confusion and don’t actually care what the others say, because, like the famous “masts” of India, their engorged neural-circuits are sloshed on Divine love." [That last one would be you, Ona! .]

"weeping with joy and confusion"??? Been there done that.

ETA: That summary of stereotypes is so on-target I'm still laughing.