Parinama

  def: a feeling or attitude of deep respect tinged with awe; veneration.   From the Latin vereri "to observe with awe, revere, respect, fear;" Greek ouros "a guard, watchman," horan "to see;" Hittite werite- "to see;" Old English weard "a guarding, protection; watchman, sentry, keeper."     In a recent yoga class, we were given the instruction to treat the breath and the body with reverence.   It made me aware of how rarely I feel this way towards my breath, my body, my self.   To stand in awe at my aliveness displaces the judging, grasping ego.   The ego part that clings to the belief that love for myself needs to be earned and comes from being good, succeeding according to the culture’s pre-ordained measures, getting the right people to pay a lot of attention.   The ego has no capacity for awe.   Awe comes from those moments of grace when we are stopped in our tracks at the amazing miracle of aliveness.   ...

Pain (re)members us. Gregory Boyle, The Whole Language: The Power of Exquisite Tenderness   The only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully…Then we begin, due to our own wisdom, to move toward letting go and fearlessness.   Due to our own wisdom, we gradually stop strengthening habits that only bring more pain to the world. Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap   Emotional pain brings our attention to the parts of ourselves we have orphaned, forgotten, marginalized.  Oftentimes these are parts of ourselves that were neglected or wounded when we were children.   We can spend a lot of time ignoring or numbing the emotional pain because it is hard to sit with the uneasiness, shame, and vulnerability.   At the root of addictions, is a longing to numb this pain with alcohol, food, sex, work, relationships, violence.   The spiritual traditions encourage us to try a different path, one of opening to the pain and eventually making the wounds belov...

    I love Gregory Boyle’s stories about the healing power and possibilities of kinship.   In his books, Tattoos on the Heart and Barking to the Choir , Boyle, a Jesuit priest, tells us about his 30 years of working with gang members in the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles.   Homeboy Industries, which Boyle founded, is “the largest rehabilitation reentry program for former gang members in the country” and which provides many services like tattoo removal, case management, education, and job training.   Most importantly, Homeboys is place where gang members can find the support they need to heal from the wounds of poverty, violence, neglect, and racism, which jumped them into gangs in the first place.     In the tradition of Dorothy Day founder of the Catholic Worker’s Movement, Boyle’s main message is (and I paraphrase here) that we need to stand with the poor and oppressed, the forgotten and marginalized, so that the margins whe...