The Brian Lehrer Show

Detachment easier said then done. I have used buddhist constructs my entire life, but when you have a kid and you see her two weekends a month good luck on detaching.

I think it is sad though when people stay in a marriage they are lonely and unhappy in because they are afraid of their spouse and that they will never let them see the children.

Hopefully this book can help someone overcome their anger and feel better.

Religion is dangerous when you are weak and hurt.

Well, this sounds more like Buddhism sans the mythology. I mean, if you take the mythology out of Buddhism, you essentially take the religion out of it, and you're just left with a philosophy.

mark epstein's books on buddhism and psychotherapy are topical - and very well written.

"going on Being" is one of them.

best

ian

Great discussion and it's absolutely true that the principles of Buddhism are not esoteric and inaccessible, but wholly practice. For a very real and meaningful experience of the ordinariness of Buddhism in NYC, see the Fire Lotus Temple schedule--http://www.mro.org/firelotus/. Most recent event this past weekend was on atonement and forgiveness from a Buddhist perspective.

I think detachment means looking at one's own side of a conflict, owning it and attending to it. Big job, not denial! Any time I am looking outside myself for an answer I am in trouble, something like that.

I'm a mediator who is really interested in the mediation and meditation retreat that was mentioned. If the caller checks this page, please post information on that event. Thanks!

I concur with the listener who only gets to see his/her child twice a month. My situation is similar (worse?) whereas my ex-wife has used our kids for years to punish me (and don't assume she had any rational justification to want to do that, other than her own innate hostility) and has continually tried to drive me out of their lives. This hurts the children terribly.

Try forgiving that.

On forgiveness:

Hannah Arendt had a great thought about forgiveness, tracing it back to Jesus Christ. She says something like this: Forgiveness is one of the few real gifts that a human being can give another, one of the few things that by its definition is NOT part of an exchange. As such true forgiveness is always unexpected, always a source of newness.

I'm not paraphrasing very well, but I wanted to call attention to that passage in her great book "The Human Condition", as well as point out that forgiveness is a fundamentally Christian thing too.

Another way to look at the type of forgiveness just mentioned is as giving up blame, and giving up the need to be right by making others wrong.

I found that Buddhism helped me very much in my divorce.It helped me to not be to angry for me ex, but to have compassion for him. It helps to keep your thoughts on your child and not on the ex. I also tell my daughter that when people are mean it means they have a sad heart. If you are willing to WORK , it helps

um, what about the book Thoughts without a Thinker? by Mark Epstein, subtitled a Buddhist approach to Psychotherapy, written many years ago??

For the Buddhist, forgiveness is based upon - and made easier by - an understanding that the forgiven has acted, spoken, and behaved solely out his/her own karmic pain.

An understanding of karma leads one to realize that forgiveness is natural and, almost, automatic.

I understand why Gabriel is divorced:

He is an arrogant non-listener.

or the difference between feeling anger and losing oneself to it

When my ex-wife made me move out I found myself feeling sorry for myself replaying the scripts in my head and hating my ex-wife. Shrinkage barely helped. I wouldn't take drugs. While I was in Strands one day, I came across a book on Zen Buddhism purely accidentally. More books later and then I taught myself how to sit. 30 minutes a day were enough to drive away the anger and to stop replaying scripts. I found the path to living in the present. I forgave my ex-wife and we divorced amicably a few years later. I'm grateful to Buddhism. I'm not in the least religious or very spiritual.

Question for you kind folk:

I have been studying Buddhism for two years now and am finding myself traveling further from that which my dear lady(fiancee) finds important, that which drives her which is often anger or comparison/judgement based. This is quite scary to me. I want to stay with her but find the chasm widening. any ideas?

Who was the Christian theologian whose work on forgiveness Cohen found helpful?

I practice Ch'an Buddhism at the USA Shaolin Temple where our meditation is active. Buddhism disguised as the martial arts. The training is so demanding physically that it presents the mind with a psychological challenge that I find overshadows the physical in the end. But I train to overcome my mind which is constantly attempting to tell me "this is too difficult." Every day that passes I become just a little better at simply acknowledging my mind's habit of asserting it's selfish wishes and not relenting to them. I am going through a divorce and this practice helps me keep the dangerous vortex of angry and sad thoughts in perspective.

Also, nasty people on the subway sometimes need to be called out, but one's does not need to be freaked out. Buddhists can and should express anger occasionally.

This sounds very similar to stoicism in the western philosophical tradition.

Also, Nietzsche would perhaps say that kindness is a form of strength. He would call reactive anger a kind of slave morality. I think that we don't necessarily have to go to religion to find a lot of these ideas.

to clarify: slave morality meaning: the person is enslaved to a narrow moral conception of the world and it in turn dictates their behavior as reaction towards others. They become enslaved to their anger.

#18 If you still love her, see a counselor that can help you. Loved ones are our soul mates, without them we will suffocate. Find a way to bridge the gap. you may want to pick up a copy of the Secret. I have some friends that it helped them to cross the chasm, it focuses on gratitude for what you have and appreciate about the person. Don't let go. If you married her and can't live without her, ask the universe to bring the answers to you and heal you and it will show the way.

Hang in there. I hope things will get better for you.

I'm hearing this idea of not expressing anger, and I'm finding this to be completely unhelpful. He might mean that it's never productive to lash out or respond aggressively, but it sounds more like he means that your irritation should be hidden. How is that in any way productive? All that does is allow other people to believe that their course of action is good or correct because no one has expressed resistance to it. If we don't stand up and tell people what we think, they will simply take advantage of our silence. That doesn't mean we have to respond violently or rudely, but have to let our objections be known!

Case in point: Those Buddhist monks in Burma got angry and took to the streets to try to bring about change rather than just trying to tune out the actions of their government. They were crushed, but not before greatly humiliating the Myanmar regime. And certainly their actions did more good than doing nothing at all.

You mentioned the affinity of Jews for Buddhism...There is LOTS in classical Jewish books about working on one's character and much of what the author found on dealing with anger can be found in Ethics of our Fathers (part of the Talmud), the writings of Maimonides and Luzzato, and other books of the Mussar movement.

Forgiveness is another aspect of letting go of what has passed - the relief & liberation that comes with embracing & living with the ONLY constant in one's experience - change. Learning to live utterly in the present, mindful of what IS NOW, not clinging to what has come & gone or being anxious about what may be coming. Such mindfulness is pretty much a universal in all of the world's religions - true spirituality brings one to the awakening to the wonderfulness of the present moment. Every religion has at it's heart the object of bringing us to the peace & transcendence that comes with letting the Divine into our lives here & now - and then living in the gratitude for the blessings of that presence.

In response to James' last comment on "living in the now", let me just note that the world's religions have no good answer to technological change, and that (to me) is one of the major ways they have failed. The fact of the matter is that if you truly live for the moment your actions routinely damage other people. One of the reasons to study history, to plan the future, and to spend a lot of time THINKING about the past and future, is to manage the changes you force on other people through your life's activites. Take global warming as a large and fuzzy but, in this case, exactly appropriate example. Basically, I guess I'd be curious to hear how Buddhism deals with the tragedy of the commons.

Thank you Brian and Gabriel for this segment and its reminders to me of a whole neglected dimension of living that is vital if not so practical, so unwestern, so non-linear, so opposite of workaday orientation and that's the trick. If they forward this email, Gabriel - you auctioned an old woodcut of mine at a friend's house in Bklyn some months ago - to save Boerum Hill from developers - I wish I had known this about you - I spent a summer at Naropa a hundred years ago, and it was amazing.

It's amazing this anger thing. Here we have a guy on the radio who is unrelated to us expressing his ideas and anger is present in some comments. It seems anger emerges when notions and concepts in our heads are triggered. The solution: change the notion or interpretation within and stop trying to correct the environment. In the phenomenal world there is no absolute reality just our individual one which is one of billions on earth.

I'm divorcing and every time I end up expressing my anger in an unfiltered, unmindful way I get into trouble. I've been reading Pema Chrodron's book "When Things Fall Apart" about dealing with and accepting the impermanence of life and being mindful of your feelings. The feelings are okay, but you have to be mindful of what is triggering them. You can have your feelings but you get to choose your reaction. You don't have to act upon them the same old way. For me, baby steps. It works when I practice it.

Yes, #30, true. Watch the unfiltered anger - and in divorce must of us (all of us?) need all the friendly communing from friends or skilled advisers (not your divorce attorney) to help us keep perspective so we don't really go out of control and (emotionally) hurt ourselves and others with uncontrolled anger.

It is a big "test" of Buddhism, to deal with this kind of crisis. But with deep meditation, it is indeed possible to go beyond the busy, angry mind. The anger is there, but it does not control the whole mind. For a while, anyway.

I am a divorce mediator (www.mediate2resolution.com), who thinks about all of this stuff every day. I don't think that the Buddhist principles mean repress or don't express your anger - but more that - if you don't feel that you have to act on/with it - you will instead have the opportunity to find out what is underneath your anger. Anger is a sign that somewhere/somehow your needs are not being met. It's identifying that need that is the challenge - and we Americans are taught to more easily show anger than many other emotions.