Whenever I think of July 4th, I think of freedom. When I got up this morning I read a bit from Mary Pipher’s excellent new book, “Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World”. I was powerfully moved by this sentence: “Religions are metaphorical systems that give us bigger containers in which to hold our lives.” Although I meditate and have read many books on Buddhism, I’m not officially a Buddhist. However, Buddhism has allowed me to explore the idea and the experience of freedom in a way that I hadn’t previously encountered.
True freedom for me is freedom from my obsessive self-castigating thoughts. My mind produces thousands of these thoughts each day. Mindfulness is the larger container that allows me to notice them and not become one with any single one of them. I’m not often successful in remaining unattached to individual thoughts. They are so inviting, with their magnetic pull toward a seemingly stable identity of me as an insufficient, narcissistic and selfish person. In those moments of ego identification with those thoughts I’m steadfastly not cognizant of any of my altruistic and generous thoughts or actions. I hate myself for not living up to my own ideals and even worse for hurting others by my own insistence on any thought or action that could relate to my own well being. Read the rest of this entry
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