Social Anxiety: What is it, and how to deal with it
Social anxiety presents what I think is a perfect example of the intersection of anxiety and addictions. In my practice there is a story I hear repeated again and again: "I began drinking in my teens because I felt uncomfortable in my own skin, or couldn't talk to girls (or boys), and the moment I had a few drinks in me, I was able to cope and even to enjoy myself and perform quite well in those circumstances." In fact, the use of alcohol in social situations is not just tole
Aug 247 min read
The Two Truths, Part 2
It is good at this point to remember that in Buddhism, at least with respect to Tibetan Buddhism and Mayahana in general, there are two wings, wisdom and compassion. Wisdom I think of as getting to the truth of nonduality and non-self as a prescription for human suffering, and compassion is what flows naturally as we become more present and selfless. Indeed, with all the focus on the self in the earlier stages of the work, one can be forgiven for thinking that this is surely
Aug 116 min read
Nonduality and the Two Truths
What I've learned on my spiritual journey Some decades ago, when I first started meditating, the general atmosphere around what was and what wasn’t possible for a westerner (in particular) to achieve on a Buddhist or nondual path, seemed quite limited. Enlightenment was a distant, extremely exotic concept that was not seriously considered as a realistic option for most non-monk practitioners, and even then, it might take many lifetimes, especially in the Buddhist Theravada tr
Aug 115 min read
Meditation and the Brain's Default Mode: How to calm your nervous system
WHAT IS THE DEFAULT MODE? In recent decades, one of the most exciting areas of development for a new understanding of anxiety has been in the area of brain science, or neurology. Research has revealed the existence of two basic ways in which the self operates - when it is internally focused (the default mode), and when it is externally focused (task positive mode). Broadly speaking, when we are not doing anything in particular, and the mind takes over and does its own thing,
Jul 276 min read
Emptiness: deficient or liberating?
"And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you" ~ Nietzsche “People are scared to empty their minds fearing that they will be engulfed by the void. What they don’t realize is that their own mind is the void.” ~ Huang Po You may have heard that Buddhism, at least in some of its schools, stresses the "emptiness" of phenomena. This may not seem a very appetizing goal for the spiritual life, so I thought I'd explain this a bit. In one of my other blog posts, I
Jun 236 min read
Welcoming everything in our experience - a report from a recent retreat
Meditation Room, Serenity Ridge, Shipman Va Just back from a meditation retreat in the tradition of Tibetan Dzogchen Buddhism. It still amazes me that a spiritual tradition originating over 2500 years ago can still hold so much relevance to us today. Though Tibetan Buddhism is of course a religious tradition, this is not at all about being a Buddhist (or not), it is about the psychological ideas and practices that have survived for so long, with good reason. According to the
May 115 min read
Are you orienting towards Presence or the Amygdala?
The question in the title can be rephrased as: where do I usually, or often, put my attention in daily life: on the awareness and relative egolessness of being fully present, which we can come to after some meditative practice, or by our historical anxiety, i.e, the amygdala, the small walnut sized part of the brain, which is the seat of fear? This can be a very frustrating part of the meditative or spiritual journey; having practiced meditation for a while, we often experien
Mar 178 min read
