Healing Trauma

Healing Trauma 

Somatic Experiencing 

By Pablo Das (HHC,SEP) 

“The body keeps the score”.

“The issues are in the tissues”.

“Bottom up vs top down”

These are some of the ways that practitioners of Somatic Experiencing communicate about the centrality of the body in the resolution of trauma. It’s a frequent occurrence in my coaching practice, that I have a client talk about the limitations of just “telling the story” in talk therapy. Telling the story is, in fact, very important. I don’t dismiss this at all. I wrote about its importance just yesterday. But sometimes what’s held in the body and driving our (trauma) symptoms needs to be dealt with too. Sometimes, there’s no story to tell.  This is how we arrive at a distinction between top down (talk therapy) and body centered (bottom up) approaches to trauma resolution like the one I did my own healing in called “Somatic Experiencing”. 

In Somatic Experiencing we can use the story of a traumatic experience to access what is held in the body and then we set the story aside and work with what has been accessed somatically. 

[I am offering a discounted block of 4 sessions for $499 for first time clients until Jan 7th. Use Link-tree in profile or message me directly ] 

Sometimes what’s held in the body has no story attached to it. Especially if the trauma occurred early enough in life, that we have no explicit memory of the event or conditions that caused it. And even in adult life, humans have a profound capacity to erase the memory of overwhelming events. It’s not uncommon for someone with a trauma history to have periods of their past where there is no memory of what happened. So we need to access that content in a different way. We begin with the body. 

There’s something profound that happens in bringing awareness to the manifestations of trauma that are held in the body. The simple act of tracking a tightness in the chest can unlock memories, emotion, sensory experiences like smells or sounds and even the body’s behavioral impulses. Often we’ll find ourselves in a memory of an old surprising situation. Something that happened as a child. As we spread awareness to the body and it’s impulses we may ask, “what wants to happen?”. All of this organized around finding empowered self protective responses that we couldn’t access back then. These responses might show up in the body as an impulse to run, to fight, to push, to brace, or to protect. Bringing these unfinished self protective responses to completion is at the heart of the S.E. approach.

Sometimes this work is less dramatic than that. One of my favorite aspects of the work of somatic experiencing is the process of working to support a client’s nervous system to simply experience periods of deactivation. Often when we can support such deactivation and the person feels calm, there’s a part of them that’s saying “no, don’t do this! This isn’t safe”. This is a very predictable part of the work. People report that voice all the time. It’s as if the person’s  conditioning has taught them that if they let down their guard, something bad will happen. So we use awareness to acknowledge both the settling in the system and the impulse to override that settling out of fear that the “other shoe” might drop. We create distance between the hyper vigilant part of us and our capacity to soften anyway. That voice no longer runs the show. Over time, we train the system to understand in an experiential way that there are no consequences for softening the hyper vigilance and that it is ok to relax and feel calm. 

Ultimately, what we want is a system that has the capacity to activate when it needs to respond to threat, and deactivate when it’s appropriate. We want both. People who have been impacted by traumatic events are sort of stuck in activation or sensitized to activate over the slightest associations with or reminders of traumatic situations. 

In the context of the supportive relationship provided by the practitioner, the body can soften and we can develop a set of skills that can support safe renegotiation of trauma and free ourselves from being stuck in the past. 

Welcome back to now!

Heal on, trauma queens!  

————-

Pablo Das is trained as a Buddhist teacher and as a Holistic Wellness coach (HHC). He is a practitioner of Somatic Experiencing (SEP) and is an advocate for a trauma centered, Buddhist approach to recovery from Addiction Patterns. 

See professional links in Profile.

Gay Trauma

Gay Trauma.
By Pablo Das (HHC , SEP)

I think there are 3 kinds of trauma worth distinguishing. Shock trauma, Developmental trauma and the trauma associated with being a member of a marginalized community. Shock trauma is a single event kind of trauma (accidents, assaults, falls). Developmental trauma has to do with the way our brains and nervous systems develop in relationship to our primary caregivers and environment early in life. Being part of a marginalized community has its own distinct potential for trauma.

I grew up in a time where there was no media representation for gay people at all. There were no gay characters on TV, no gay songs, no “it gets better” campaign and no internet. I didn’t meet an out gay person until I met my boss at my first job when was 19 when I moved out of the Mojave desert to San Diego. Even then, it took me two years to come out to him. This sense of being on the outside receiving messages from all directions that society doesn’t celebrate your existence creates shame, a sense of isolation and other-ness.

[I am offering a discounted block of 4 sessions for $499 for first time clients until Jan 7th. Use Link-tree in profile or message me directly ]

I first realized I was gay when I was about 12. This felt like such a dangerous and unwelcome insight in my small military town, that I literally put it out of my mind for 8 or 9 years. I did not have that thought again until I was 21. Having to split off from a fundamental part of who you are for that many years has an impact. So many gay people go through that.

When I finally came out, it was in the middle of the AIDS crisis in a time that was much more hostile toward gay people. My father disowned me when I came out and over the next few years I would drop out of college and have ongoing conflict with some family members.

In my early 20’s, I spent a summer working at Glacier park in Montana. One morning I woke up in my dorm room and there was a note taped to my door that said “faggots like you die easy in these parts”. That was the same year Matthew Shepard, a gay college kid, was famously killed in the neighboring state of Wyoming.

All of this had a huge impact on my nervous system, relationship to the world, to authority, to other gay people, to religion and more. I drank heavily to numb anxiety and depression. I was a very angry person in my 20’s and 30’s. I felt like an outsider in my family and society. I’ll never forget watching the president of the United States (Bush 2) use his state of the union speech to pledge that same sex relationships would never be federally recognized. The Defense of Marriage Act followed.

Trauma is what happens when our nervous systems are sensitized to threat. The threat can come from a single event or an ongoing set of conditions. That threat doesn't have to be physical, as it has been for many gay people, the threat can be to the subjective experience of self. It can also come from an ongoing series of never ending slights against you.

Gay people first experience an internal realization, often conflicted, which you may have to hold in isolation for an extended period. In an important developmental period from ages 12 to 21, I was necessarily cut off from a fundamental part of myself. I would not have survived otherwise in my household.

In my experience, gay men who grow up in religious households can be particularly wounded. They have to grapple with being told that the very fact of their existence is an affront to God.

The generation that came before me had to navigate tremendous loss during the AIDS crisis. The generation before them lived with the threat of institutionalization, loss of job and home and public shaming in the paper, should they be found out.

How do we heal? Here are some things that have helped me...

Learn your history:

One of the most healing things that happened for me, was learning gay history. Our history was not taught to me in high school. I’ve taken college history classes in the last few years and we still don’t exist in history class. My college in Los Angeles, the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement has no LGBT history classes. (It does however have black, Mexican, Asian and women’s history classes.)

Reading Lillian Faderman’s book called the Gay Revolution was revelatory. It’s like I had been walking around with a bare scaffolding of gay identity and this book built a building around it. We are a bold, creative, smart and strong people. No one told me. It’s important to know your history.

Tell your story!

Many of my most healing moments were spent in back box theaters watching gay performance artists like Tim Miller who told his story in ways that I didn’t know were possible in my early 20’s. He often did so, naked. Reading Angels in America and the Normal Heart (and everything else by Larry Kramer) was profoundly affirming and healing. Hearing the Indigo Girls and seeing Rent on Broadway we’re profoundly healing. When we tell our story we help ourselves and we help others.

In my mid 20’s and early 30’s I started a gay two piece band called Testosterone Kills and sang the shit out of my anger. I continued as a solo artist singing my story all over the country and as an opening actor a friend in Europe. Making beautiful things with your pain and anger is transformational for everyone involved. It’s part of our Gay secret sauce.

Therapy :

The other thing that was helpful was years of therapy with a gay therapist. The fact that he was gay was critical. There’s a thing that happens when gay people gather together. There’s a certain freedom and recognition that doesn’t happen otherwise. We get each other. It’s important to connect.

Sobriety.

Gay people are particularly susceptible to addiction issues. Most of our spaces are bars. Crystal meth addiction is everywhere.wE have a lot to numb. But it’s not until you stop numbing that you are able to be present with your history, go deep and begin to walk through the trauma and woundings that all gay people carry.

Trauma work.

I say this in almost every article I write on trauma, but in my experience the trajectory of trauma healing is moving out of helplessness, victimhood and disempowerment and into a state of self-possession, agency and empowerment. For me there is a big difference between a healthy, good faith acknowledgment of what you have been through and a collapse into victimhood, cynicism, anger and addiction. Trauma work helps facilitate that movement and can be an important part of our healing.

Healing is mysterious.

It requires us to muck around and try different things. Some things we try don’t work. It takes time. Progress is measured. There is no one path that’s right for everyone. Nevertheless, it’s important to do our work. As I’ve said before. We are not our fault, but we are our responsibility. The work is hard, but necessary, and in time, you will be rewarded.

Heal on, trauma queens.

————-

Pablo Das is trained as a Buddhist teacher and as a Holistic Wellness coach (HHC). He is a practitioner of Somatic Experiencing (SEP) and is an advocate for a trauma centered, Buddhist approach to recovery from Addiction Patterns.

What Does it Mean to be "Mindful" of Trauma?

Healing Trauma

What does it mean to be “mindful” of trauma?

By Pablo Das (HHC,SEP)

In the most practical terms, mindfulness can be reduced to two important components; presence and responsiveness.

Presence.

Mindfulness is a specific type of presence. It’s objective in nature. It’s different than ordinary consciousness. It allows us to step back from our experience in real time and notice what’s happening. It’s the difference between “being angry” and being aware that anger is present in you. You’re not captured by experience. There’s a kind of pause built in to the nature of mindfulness which allows you to be responsive rather than unconsciously impulsive and reactive. Mindfulness allows for choice in how you respond.

[I am offering a discounted block of 4 sessions for $499 for first time clients until Jan 7th. Use Link-tree in profile or message me directly ]

Responsiveness:

To respond, rather than react, means to consciously consider what you do and the consequences of what you do under any specific set of circumstances. In a Buddhist context, being “responsive”means that what you do is filtered through an ethical structure which emphasizes kindness and minimizing harm done. Where trauma is concerned, I coach people to consider something else. What is the “empowered”response? I’ve said many times in my articles that the trajectory of healing trauma has to do with moving from helplessness, victimhood and disempowerment towards self possession and agency.

If you put this all together, the practice of being mindful of trauma means, noticing what’s happening, pausing and responding in an empowered way which moves you and those involved in the direction of more happiness and well-being.

Now we get to the trauma part. Trauma impacts people in various ways including compromising emotional regulation capacities, coloring your perception of the world and others, negative self regard and shame, hyper vigilance, addiction impulses, physical health issues and more.

To be “mindful” of trauma is to become objectively aware of the ways trauma manifests in you, tracking the patterns objectively and responding in empowered ways which support wellbeing.

Let’s say you’re a person who goes through periods of anxiety and or depressive states where it’s harder to function. I’ve developed the idea in my own life that there are “thrive days” and “survive days”. In thrive days, I am able to to all the things the normies do. I exercise, eat well, get my work done, go to the dmv, log into my health insurance site, schedule a doctor visit, get groceries, cook and hit a (fill in the blank) zoom meeting. On survive days, a lot of those things feel overwhelming. I have to scale back. I do what’s necessary to get by and what will fortify and support me to get out of the depression. Exercise is essential. Eating the best possible food is essential. Sleep is critical. Contact with the appropriate others and getting my work done. I do not go to the dmv or call AT&T on a survive day. I don’t have hard conversations with loved ones. I try to resist any non-generative numbing impulses (sugar) and I avoid challenging relationships.

Practicing mindfulness with trauma content is advanced work. It involves presence with hard content. It requires what is called “equanimity” or the ability to stay present with experiences that are unpleasant. Equanimity is something we develop in formal meditation practice when we don’t immediately adjust when our foot starts to fall asleep. Instead we get curious about and study discomfort. What’s it like? What impulses arise in relationship to pain? What is it made up of? And then, consciously, we may decide to move the leg.

To be mindful of trauma means that we lean into and accept discomfort, we get curious about what’s actually  happening, we understand it as impermanent, we hunker down and wait it out, we resist reactions that cause more suffering and we do what we can in response to give ourselves the resources we need to get through the day.

Here’s the deal…

The suffering in life is not equally distributed. Some of us are burdened with more to manage than others. That’s ok. If we navigate our challenges with dignity and a spirit of generosity and curiosity, we are rewarded. People who accept and take responsibility for what spiritual teacher Ram Dass called your particular “curriculum” for this life are potentially the most sensitive, attuned, compassionate and creative people. We have a particular kind of wisdom and resilience in difficult situations. We know, better than anyone, how to stay calm in crisis situations. Do your healing work with dignity and, over time, you become quite a valuable person to those around you and you develop a deep sense of unapologetic self respect.

Heal on trauma queens!

——

Pablo Das is trained as a Buddhist teacher and as a Holistic Wellness coach (HHC). He is a practitioner of Somatic Experiencing (SEP) and is an advocate for a trauma centered, Buddhist approach to recovery from Addiction Patterns.

See professional links in Profile.

What Wants to Happen?

“What wants to happen?”.  Renegotiating trauma.

By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)

Professional links in bio.

I did my own personal trauma resolution work for a number of years. The system that helped me is called Somatic Experiencing. It’s the same system I work in with my clients. One of the things that I found to be most transformational was the process of slowly walking through an experience and re-imaging its outcome. My teachers call this “renegotiation” of trauma. Traumatic events are usually overwhelming. They are too much for us to handle at the time. They move too quickly. They are disorienting. We don’t have an empowered or self protective response. An experience like that  can leave us stuck in time with a feeling of helplessness, a sense that injustice has been done or a transgression has been made without a response. We’re left managing any number os symptoms as a result.

Humans do not like this experience. We do not do well to have been transgressed against, overwhelmed or victimized.

[I am offering a discounted block of 4 sessions for $499 for first time clients until Jan 7th. Use Link-tree in profile or message me directly ]

When we renegotiate a traumatic experience, we slow things down. We start before the event and move slowly through in our minds. We stop to fill out the sensory details. We notice what there wasn’t time to notice before. And we keep all of this within threshold, careful not to overwhelm the system. We may even break up the exploration over weeks or months. Somatic experiencing is thorough and often slow paced.

One of my favorite questions in the process of renegotiation is “what wants to happen?” Here we pause and sense into the impulses we have now, that we missed before.  Sometimes we override our intuition. We continue when we should have changed course. We didn’t want to disappoint or insult someone else. We didn’t trust ourselves. What if we hadn’t overridden? What if we’d have said no? Or “stop” or just walked away? How would our nervous system have held those choices? We get to experience that in a renegotiation process.

Often, what comes with the process is a leaning into aggression. This can surprise people who expect me to show up as a Buddhist. Frequently, what our system requires to heal, is to aggressively push back against someone, sometimes with violence. Our Buddhist ideals of compassion and kindness are one thing, what our “wired for survival” bodies and minds need to heal is quite another. So we lean into aggression in this contained way. Sometimes we discover how uncomfortable we are with our own anger. There’s a lot revealed in the process. We also discover how these survival energies are shamed in our spiritual communities. My approach is to welcome these self protective energies, bring them on board and then insert the kindness, compassion and forgiveness (if it’s appropriate) on the back end.

I always say that one of the primary trajectories of healing from trauma is the move from conditioned states of helplessness, victimhood and disempowerment to states of agency, self possession and empowerment.

My favorite moments in these processes come when I ask people “if literally ANYTHING could happen, what wants to happen?” Sometimes the answer is ridiculous, absurdly violent, involving fictional or cartoon characters or members of rock bands. Sometimes we kick the person off the planet. Sometimes we imagine help where it wasn’t before. And in the new response there can be this reorganization within us, one we can feel physiologically. almost like a cellular reorganization. We get to make new stories, experience ourselves differently. And we may find the compassion and forgiveness that we long for along with a new sense of self respect. And all of it is shared and witnessed and processed in real time with your Practitioner. As trauma expert Bessel Van Der Kolk said, trauma almost always happens in relationship to others and only  heals in relationship with others. We can’t usually do this work alone.

What’s magic about renegotiation is that the new memory can feel more real than the thing we originally experienced. In that way, we become unstuck. Freed from the thing that once was too much, too fast and to which we were unable to respond to. In renegotiation, we find or develop what we couldn’t access back then.

——

Pablo Das is trained as a Buddhist teacher and as a Holistic Wellness coach (HHC). He is a practitioner of Somatic Experiencing (SEP) and is an advocate for a trauma centered, Buddhist approach to recovery from Addiction Patterns.

See professional links in Profile.

Attuning to the positive parts of life.

Healing trauma:

Attuning to the positive parts of life.

By Pablo Das (HHC,SEP)

It’s well documented that human beings have something called a negativity bias. Negativity bias is a psychological tendency in humans to more readily remember negative experiences over positive ones.

When I was teaching in a large Buddhist community, somebody had the idea to conduct and online survey of the entire community, which included direct feedback about the performance of its teachers. At some point I was handed a report which contained something like 85 comments that had been collected from people in the survey about how they felt about me. The vast majority of the comments were very favorable, but two were critical. I cannot tell you for sure what any of the positive comments said, but I can tell you word for word what the critical ones said (“I hate when he sings” and “I wish he’d can the jokes”).

[I am offering a discounted block of 4 sessions for $499 for first time clients until Jan 7th. Use Link-tree in profile or message me directly ]

This is how negativity bias works. It’s probably a survival instinct. It makes sense that we might evolve to be highly attuned to events that are threatening to us. This way we can recognize them and respond to or avoid them in the future.

When a traumatic event happens, a version of this negativity bias can happen in a pronounced and profound way. We become extremely sensitive (or hyper-vigilant) to any conditions that remind us of the event that it’s almost as if we’re stuck in it.

This is why people who have been to war have a easily trigger-able fear response to loud sounds. It’s why some people have come to my trauma and mindfulness workshops and discovered that they feel most comfortable facing the door. It’s why members of marginalized communities can have an almost censorious attunement to language or power dynamics.

Trauma can have a dark effect on our psyche leading us to see what’s wrong in the world, what’s shameful about ourselves and threatening about others. We can become highly attuned to the negative, project past experiences into the present and see threat where it isn’t.

It’s important to counter the negativity bias and hyper vigilance by consciously attuning to joy, beauty and the positive things in life and letting those things have a positive impact on our nervous systems.

In the training I received in trauma resolution (Somatic Experiencing), the first thing we did was work with the conscious direction of our attention by looking around the room and noticing what our eyes are most drawn to. Eventually we’re asked to land on something that feels stabilizing and notice the internal response. Usually this simple act has a grounding and calming effect, one we can allow to be integrated into our system.

We do so, in part, to train hyper-vigilant nervous systems that you can take in the good without anything bad happening. You can have the direct experience of settling and regulating and let go of the activation associated with always being on guard for the next threat.

In meditation practice one of the things you notice is that what gets your attention has a profound impact on how you feel. Cultivating the ability to consciously direct your attention to the breath, to a point of contact or to sounds all have different effects on you. More profoundly, the types of thoughts you allow to take over your awareness have deep impact on your wellbeing. If you think kind thoughts about yourself or others, that has a very different impact than when your mind is captured by stories of conflict and judgement with others.

Here the point: what gets our attention has an profound impact on how we experience the world, ourselves and others. It’s very important that we develop a capacity to orient to that which is positive, grounding and non-threatening as a way of countering the negativity bias, or hyper-vigilance. It’s important that we let good and positive things touch us. We can do that consciously.

There have been periods of my life when I’ve been very conscious about what I don’t allow my awareness to engage with. I spent two years off social media. I limit or highly curate my engagement with news media. I have limited my contact with negative people. I’ve reoriented my political engagement away from constant outrage, social media comment wars and virtue signaling to concrete meaningful acts.

Instead of social media and news, I go on hikes in nature, I’ve taken up photography, I listen to jazz records from front to back and practice gratitude which is simply a practice in orienting to what’s good about life.

What we give our attention to makes all the difference. Cultivating the capacity to navigate our minds and attention away from threat and the negative, is part of our healing.

——

Pablo Das is trained as a Buddhist teacher and as a Holistic Wellness coach (HHC). He is a practitioner of Somatic Experiencing (SEP) and is an advocate for a trauma centered, Buddhist approach to recovery from Addiction Patterns.

See professional links in Profile.

Trauma Healing Pt. 1. 

Self Regulatory Skills. 

By Pablo Das (SEP, HHC) 

Yesterday, I posted an article about the nature of the healing process. I acknowledged that what healing looks like depends on what it is we’re trying to heal. My way of thinking about healing means engaging the items on your list of issues working with them, through various healing modalities, until they are no longer a meaningful barrier to living a life you love. That’s healing! 

Today I wanna begin talking about healing trauma. Trauma is a complex matter and it impacts people in many ways. Probably the most meaningful way trauma impacts people is that it compromises one’s capacity to regulate your emotional life. 

When people talk about being “triggered”, what they mean is that something has activated their stress response system. The human stress response involves the brain, nervous system and physiology. It exists to provide a “response” when there is a perception of threat.  It is “sensitized” by overwhelming or threatening experiences in our past. 

People who have been “traumatized” have experienced a conditioning or sensitization of the stress response system. For example, people who have been in accidents involving red Priuses may be sensitized to watch out for red Priuses. They may feel anxious around them. May want to avoid them. They may have intrusive memories of the red Prius involved in the accident. This may trigger anxiety, panic, depressive states and/ or edginess. 

[I am offering a discounted block of 4 sessions for $499 for first time clients until Jan 7th. Use Link-tree in profile or message me directly ] 

There’s an important layer of complexity here, though. What I’m describing is a rather obvious cause and effect scenario. But it’s not that simple. Humans learn to regulate and soothe ourselves early in our lives and in relationship to our primary caregivers. If our parents are present, responsive, affirming etc…then we likely get a secure and high functioning nervous system and we’re probably more resilient when the accidents come along in adulthood.  But, if our parents are not present, not responsive, not affirming, unpredictable, violent, stressed or have their own issues regulating their emotions, then we likely get nervous systems that are more fragile and susceptible to experiencing the layer accidents as a “trauma”. 

Members of marginalized communities can also have their stress response systems sensitized to invisibility, dismissals, exclusion, threat and violence over time. 

Those of us who never quite developed a solid nervous system or whose stress response system has been sensitized by overwhelming experiences in our lives need to develop other ways of regulating. 

One way of engaging this issue and learning to regulate is to develop awareness based self regulatory strategies.

One thing I train my clients to do when they are stressed, is to get in the practice redirecting their attention outside themselves. This means looking and listening to the external visual and sonic experiences around them and resting their attention on them. There are a bunch of reasons this works, but if I ask a client to rate their stress on a scale of 1 to 10. Just directing their attention to connect with a tree outside the window or the sound of the traffic outside, it’s almost always worth about a 2 point reduction in activation. 

Another self regulatory strategy that I use frequently in sessions or meetings is to bring to mind the image of a regulating place or being.  I can do this as I talk to people. One of my favorite images is a stretch of coastline in San Diego, where I lived when I was a young kid. I could be having a stressful moment with a client, stay present with them, while also bringing that image to mind and getting some regulation as a result. 

Connection with others, working with the breath, anchoring attention at a point of physical contact (like the feet on the floor) and systematically tightening and then releasing muscle groups are all ways of regulating your mind, emotions and body. 

For people who have been impacted by trauma (and on the theme of my recent articles) people in recovery would do well to develop a set of self regulatory skills to help stabilize a sensitive nervous system. Acquiring a capacity to intentionally regulate means that the sensitivity of your system may be less of a barrier to living fully, thus, for me, that constitutes “healing”. 

It’s a matter of pleasure, pain, awareness and action. Buddhism and the addiction cycle.

By Pablo Das

Human beings like pleasure and dislike pain. If we look closely, this dynamic (preference for pleasure and aversion to pain) informs just about everything we do as humans. We drink water to resolve the discomfort of thirst. We adopt kittens because we want to feel the pleasure we feel when they do cute things. We listen to a song over and over because of how it makes us feel. We eat sugar out of both a desire to experience pleasure and a drive to numb pain. The human aversion to pain and preference for pleasure runs the show.

What we do (think, speak and act) in response to the pleasure/ pain dynamic conditions whether we suffer or experience wellbeing in our lives. Actions bring results and actions are driven by an aversion to pain and a preference for pleasure. This notion that actions condition results is called “karma”.

This pleasure/ pain dynamic is so important in Buddhism that all of its core teachings are organized around it. The four noble truths begins with an acknowledgement of the non-negotiable existence of suffering in life. The practice of mindfulness asks us to pay attention to the pleasant or unpleasant quality of our experiences. The 8 fold path dedicates an entire section (right effort) to the management of mind states of aversion and grasping which arise from the pleasure/pain dynamic.

The teaching which I regard as the foundation of all other dharma teachings has the pleasure/pain dynamic at its core. But it does something else. It describes the addiction process.

This is the teaching on conditionality.

Part of the teaching describes the human condition as a series of cause and effect steps that are unfolding in us constantly. In their extreme expression, they describe the addiction process.

The teaching begins by acknowledging that as human beings we are a physical form imbued with awareness. And because our physical form has sensory reception capacities (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, sensations etc), we make contact with the world.

Each moment of contact with the world through our senses is experienced as pleasant or unpleasant (or we’re indifferent). Once we experience something as pleasant or unpleasant, the mind has a reaction. Human beings have a fairly predictable response to pain which is aversion. We also predictably grasp at pleasure.

Let’s review! Humans are little awarenesses in physical forms making sensory contact with the world and experiencing mind-states of aversion and grasping in response to the pleasant and unpleasant quality of whatever is going on. Ok? Good!

These mind states of aversion and grasping double as motivation. They give way to intention. Usually, to get rid of pain and experience and maintain pleasure. That intention soon gets specific. Drink water. Get revenge. Go on a hike. Get laid. Get the ice cream. Smoke the weed. Eat the donuts etc. Mind states of aversion and grasping condition Intention which conditions action.

Action brings results. This is key. What we think, say and do brings results. (Ie: more happiness or more suffering). We are now at the end of the chain of cause and effect. Results! If you eat a balanced meal, you feel grounded, energetic and mentally clear. If you sleep with your neighbors partner, you feel shame, regret, paranoia and fear that your own relationship will be lost. Actions have consequences. Those consequences are experienced as a life of more happiness or wellbeing or a life of more suffering and harm.

We'd do well to get a handle on our thoughts speech and action if we want to live happy lives.

Stay with me...

Let’s work backwards now. Results (happiness or unhappiness) come from actions. Actions are an expression of intention. Intentions are driven by mind-states of liking and disliking things. Liking and disliking is conditioned by the sense of pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain is a function of awareness in a body making sensory contact with the world. This is a conditional cycle of one thing giving rise to the next. It’s an unfolding of cause and effect.

The interesting thing is that whatever results we’re experiencing in any given moment are experienced as pleasant or unpleasant in that moment begin the whole cycle all over again.

But this is also the good news. You can begin right now, with conscious awareness to influence the outcomes. What’s required is upending the entire unconscious process of impulsively following the prompts of liking and disliking things. At any point in the process I’ve described here, you can insert mindfulness. You can become aware, in an objective sense, of where you are in this cycle, noticing what gets your attention, notice your impulses, intentions and thoughts. Take responsibility for them. Rather than being unconscious and reactive you can pause and choose a response (a way of thinking, speaking and acting) that will support more happiness and well-being.

Let’s say you’re going through a breakup and you struggle with sugar addiction. When the loneliness, sadness and desperation comes you have this impulse to go get a pint of ice cream. You can see the package in your head. The little caramel chunks taunt you. They call your name. By the map on your iPhone, they’re only .5 miles away at Target. You could also get the double stuff Oreos while you’re at it.

You are aware that, like most addiction patterns, the sugar will numb the pain but the trade off is that you’ll feel run down and more depressed tomorrow. You will have had short term relief but ultimately compounded your suffering. That’s the nature of addiction. Nevertheless, you put on a jacket and walk to the car. You get in, start the car and drive. Then you remember mindfulness. You ask yourself “what’s happening”? You notice loneliness and fear. You ask, “How can I respond to this in a way that supports my well-being?” An answer comes. Call my best friend and go home and cook a meal that’ll make me feel better. You turn your little car around and you call your friend. At that point you’ve Interrupted the otherwise unconscious cycle and made conscious choices on how to respond to what’s happening. You call the friend, you feel less lonely. You cook the meal and feel pretty good. You go to bed and get up without a sugar hangover. You feel good about yourself. You go hiking and have a decent day.

Actions bring results. We can insert mindfulness at any point in the cycle and choose to respond in ways that support wellbeing. By inserting mindfulness, we break the cycle of unconsciously following the impulses associated with liking and disliking things.

We can influence the pleasure pain dynamic through conscious responsive action and influence the results we’re sitting with in any present moment. This is how we create conscious, relatively happy lives.

None of us do this perfectly. I don’t. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I eat the (gluten free) Oreos. But I know that in any moment, I can wake up and begin again. That’s all we can ask of ourselves.

Just be nice and keep beginning again

I am 18 years sober today.

Today, I am celebrating 18 years of sobriety in a non-theistic, trauma centered and Buddhist model of my own design. Addiction is complex and personal. I don’t believe there is one “right” way to be sober. I honor all paths. I do have my own viewpoint.

Here’s how my journey looks:

I have never fabricated a belief in god as part of my sobriety. It’s totally possible for some of us to be sober and reject any notion of higher power as a necessary component.

I totally reject (for myself) the notion of "powerlessness". I believe in the precise opposite, taking full responsibility for your behavior. It takes time and may never be perfect, but taking responsibility is the only chance you have.

I do not believe addiction is a “disease”. In my case,I understand it as a symptom of trauma. As a person who has worked in rehabs and coached many people struggling with addiction, I believe this is true of most people who struggle with addiction patterns.

I do not identify as an “addict”. I understand myself as a person who has been impacted by trauma. Addiction behaviors are often a response to dysregulation associated with trauma.

I do not believe I have character “defects”. I believe my nervous system and brain simply adapted to hard conditions growing up, being a gay person in a different era and to shock traumas in early adulthood. "not my fault, buy I am my responsibility".

I still struggle with bouts of sugar addiction. which is to say, I am not completely free of addiction patterns. I used to have 5 ways to get numb, now I have one. I spend about half my life without sugar. That's progress but not, as they say, perfection.

---------

Here are some things that have been central to 18 years of sobriety. I think anyone who is attempting to recover from addiction could benefit from:

Containment and structure. You need places to be, things to do and people to do it with. Especially early in the process. Whether that’s rehab, meetings, therapy, a job or college or in my case, New York City open mics and meditation groups. Purpose. Meaning. Goals. Connection! This is a must! “I need my friends like I did back then”

Self regulatory practices. We must develop ways to calm and regulate ourselves in the absence of our “addiction” behaviors. These are awareness based skills you can develop. Also an absolute must!

An understanding of how trauma functions (often centrally) in addiction and relapse. Particularly in compromising regulation capacities. This awareness changes everything. Most people have a limited understanding of what trauma is and how it functions.

Trauma integration and resolution practices with a trained helping professional.

Holistic wellness practices. What we eat, moving our bodies, sleep, relationships, work you love, financial consciousness etc..have tremendous impact on our resilience and general wellbeing.

Mindfulness training. To cultivate an ability to objectively study yourself and be measured in your responses to whatever is happening, rather than unconscious, impulsive and reactive.

Build something! Sobriety itself is not enough. Build a life you don’t want to escape from on the foundation of sobriety. Sobriety is the foundation not the end goal.

For more reasons than I can list, getting sober is one of the best choices I’ve ever made. Generally speaking,(yes, I have perfectly responsible drinkers and smokers in my life) I think it’s better to be sober. I think sober people are, by and large, more present, responsive, grounded, stable, dependable, more emotionally intelligent and safer.

I’m grateful to the people who inspired me both in the Buddhist world and in my musician circles. To my teachers, friends and colleagues. Thank you.

You know who you are.

Trauma and Addiction

Trauma and addiction.

This week I am 18 years sober and reflecting out loud about what I’ve learned on my journey. In a follow up to yesterday’s post I wanted to talk more about trauma and addiction.

Trauma occurs when an event or set of conditions sensitizes your stress response system. The “stress response” system, made up of your brain and nervous system, regulates the flight, fight, freeze response to a perception of threat. An activated stress response system can feel like anxiety, depression, panic, numbness, dissociation, detachment, edginess, dread, fear, paranoia and more. These feelings are extremely uncomfortable and very compelling. They exist to mobilize a response to threat. They compel you to safety. They are designed by nature not to be ignored. The problem with trauma is that the threat is often in the past. In a person who has been impacted by trauma, the dysregulation described above can be more frequent, more intense, last longer and can be very hard to resolve. In some cases, people have lived with such constant dysregulation that they don’t know what it’s like to live without. I’m one of those people. I have had thousands of anxiety and panic attacks in my life. It puts a huge demand on you and sometimes makes it hard to function. I like to say that I have “thrive” days and “survive” days. Too many “survive” days in a row can wear you out. We do anything we can to cope, and are especially vulnerable to addiction behaviors. 

Trauma effects people in many ways. It can effect your experience of yourself (Shame and negative self regard). It impacts your relational capacities (Poor boundaries, deference to others). It impacts your perception of the world and other people. (Hyper-vigilance, distrust, catastrophizing) It effects your physical health. All of these, in turn, leads to more dysregulation. 

Many people who have been impacted by trauma cannot emotionally regulate themselves.  Given the compelling nature of trauma dysregulation, it follows that those whose inborn capacities for emotional regulation have been compromised, or are under-developed will need to find other ways of addressing the discomfort. This is where substances and behaviors that help you feel relief come in. 

I started drinking when I was 21. I had survived 19 years in a home with a sometimes violent authoritarian father. My mother had just died from cancer. I was coming out of the closet in the middle of the AIDS crisis in an era much more hostile towards gay people than today is. I had seen two kids get shot and killed at a party. My father disowned me when I came out. I felt disconnected from my family. I was sad, angry and having massive panic attacks on a regular basis. When I discovered drinking, I found the one thing that I knew could help numb the trauma chemicals constantly pumping through my body. I drank about 6 days a week for 13 years. I drank through my first breakup. I drank though a job I hated, through bad relationships and through September 11th (which I watched with my own eyes in NYC.) 

The problem, of course, with addictive numbing behaviors, is that they ultimately compound your suffering. By the end of my 13 year drinking run, I would get severely hung over on just one or two beers. My body was no longer able to do it. The cost benefit analysis had swung into mostly cost and minimal benefit. 

By the time I was ready to quit drinking, I had been meditating and reading Buddhist books for over a decade. I had some skills under my belt and critically, I had found a Buddhist community and a teacher. My teacher, Noah Levine, helped me get sober by coaching me on how to relate differently to anxiety. “Invite it to come kill you” he said. He wanted me to call anxiety’s bluff to prove that it would not, in fact, kill me. He was right. I started to track anxiety in my body. I started to see it just as a collection of sensations. I’d watch it rise, do it’s scary dance and be replaced by something else. I started to understand it’s predictable impermanence. This was the beginning of my sobriety. 

I would not understand that the anxiety was related to trauma for another 10 years. It would take longer to identify the underlying depression that was also constantly there underneath anxiety. 

When I got “sober” drinking was replaced by sex. Sex would be replaced by numbing with food and sugar. Food would be replaced by buying expensive rare records. I started to understand that alcohol was just one way I got a fix. It had nothing to do with the substance or behavior. The real issue was trauma. Addiction was secondary. Addiction, manifesting in endless ways, was a symptom of trauma. 

In 2011, I was on a silent retreat when I started having panic attacks. I was lucky enough to have a teacher who was able to identify that the panic attacks were related to trauma. 

A couple months later, I was starting what would become a 4 year training in a trauma resolution system called somatic experiencing. The training was revelatory. In that world everyone understood that addiction was one of the ways traumatized people cope. We understand that addiction and trauma so obviously go hand in hand. It re-framed the way I understood addiction was and also what “recovery” meant.

I’m not willing to pronounce that everyone who experiences addiction has underlying trauma.  I don’t really know. But having worked in rehabs and in private coaching practice. I’ve heard peoples life stories. I’ve coached them through relapses into stable recovery. I’ve seen their paperwork. I believe trauma is very commonly central to the experience of addiction. I think it remains an overlooked dimension of the experience of addiction. Even in the Buddhist recovery world it’s treated as marginalized variable. 

Buddhism was so helpful in giving me management skills. Mindfulness is a wonderful tool to help you relate and respond to to whatever is happening more skillfully. Mindfulness and community kept me sober. That was huge. But the insight Buddhism offered into the real nature of what was going on for me was ultimately limited. Buddhism shapes my life, but it isn’t a trauma resolution system. You only get so far watching the arising and passing of activation and deactivation cycles over an over again. Only when I understood trauma, it’s nature and how it functions was I able to begin to really begin to heal. It was like finding a missing map. 

I am 18 years sober.  I don’t identify as an addict. I don’t believe in the “disease”of alcoholism. I don’t believe in powerlessness. I understand myself as a person who has been impacted by trauma, who drank to numb the chronic anxiety, panic and grinding depression associated with developmental, shock and social trauma. I’ve managed a lot in this life. But I reject victimhood. I believe that one of the arches of healing is the move from helplessness and victimhood to self possession, personal responsibility and a sense of empowerment. I want to orient to joy and beauty and all that’s good about the world. That’s what recovery looks like to me. That and a-lot of compassion for when I have those “survive” days, eat too much sugar and buy a 12th copy of KISS Alive 2 (a red splatter repress, which I received in the mail yesterday). 

The Art of Setting Boundaries.

The Art of setting Boundaries.

By Pablo Das

The practice of setting boundaries is a way of establishing and enforcing limits on other people’s unacceptable treatment or behavior. Boundaries can also protect the use of one’s time, energy, and attention. Self-protective in nature, boundary setting is an empowerment practice. They protect us from physical, emotional, and psychological harm and overwhelm.

They are necessary for wellbeing.

Here are 7 things to consider in the practice of establishing and maintaining boundaries.

1.     Attune to and honor your own internal experience.

This may seem obvious, but the process of establishing and maintaining boundaries begins when you direct your awareness inward and attune to your own internal experience. Pay particular attention to the sense of liking or disliking things. Boundaries are built on attunement to this internal sense of “yes” and “no”.  For people who have poor boundaries, I encourage them to practice honoring that sense. Allow that sense of liking and disliking to inform how you navigate your relationships, how you use your time and what you expose your body, heart and psyche to.  

2.     Boundaries can be expressed or unexpressed.

Boundaries are yours. They are established internally when you decide to honor your internal experience. You have a choice as to whether you communicate them or not, depending on the situation.

If you are in a relationship with someone who is reflective, open to feedback and emotionally conscious, then communicating boundaries could be an opportunity for the relationship to grow. In some cases, you may ultimately feel closer and safer as a result.   When you feel that someone is responsive to your needs, that’s an obvious sign of a healthy relationship. It’s even possible that if you don’t communicate your needs, you robbing people of the opportunity for them to give you what you need.

With defensive people who aren’t open to processing things, who aren’t responsive when you communicate your experience, it may not be useful to communicate boundaries. You can simply establish them within yourself and begin to live from them. With people like this, you might want to keep them at a certain distance. Sure, they can come over for dinner, but you’re probably not going to Vegas for a week with them. You get to decide.

When we’re dealing with legitimately abusive people, it might be dangerous to communicate boundaries. You may just want to get the hell out. Poor boundaries move in both directions, while there are some people who have poor boundaries, there are also those who aren’t in the habit of honoring boundaries and seem to need to cross them as a kind of test. People with poor boundaries and people who habitually transgress against boundaries are a relationship made in hell.

3.     Boundaries are not inherently punitive, they are simply consequences. There is a meaningful difference between punishing someone and allowing people to experience the appropriate consequences of their actions. When we punish, we are trying to hurt them back. When we impose compassionate boundaries, we are restraining ourselves from firing back but acting to protect ourselves (and possibly them) from harm. The difference between punishment and allowing someone to experience the consequences of their action is compassion. Compassion is an acknowledgement of pain. It is frequently the case that people transgress against us because they are suffering. Compassionate boundaries acknowledge their suffering while simultaneously refusing to enable them to continue causing harm.

4.     Their suffering is their work. One of my organizing principles in my life is a phrase I’ve heard many times in spiritual circles. “We are not our fault, but we are our responsibility”. For me, if a suffering person is doing their awareness or healing work, then I can probably work with them with minimal boundaries. If they aren’t actively engaged in their own work, then I’m likely to have super strong boundaries with them or to disconnect altogether. This sounds firm, and it is. The position I have taken is that suffering is not a justification for causing harm. It’s not an excuse to neglect your responsibilities in a relationship. This is the fairly hard line I’ve drawn in my life. But even then, I don’t punish. I do, however, refuse to shield people from consequences. Even if it’s me who’s imposing them.   

5.     Boundaries without enforcement (consequences) are useless. If someone transgresses against you repeatedly without consequence, you are enabling them. Setting a boundary is one thing, following through on maintaining your boundary is where the rubber hits the road. This is the hard part! Often, we must set boundaries with people we really love and wish we could have in our lives. That puts an emotional demand on us. But in the same way we hold transgressors responsible for working with the suffering that’s behind their behavior, the fear and sadness and mental and emotional processing we experience in setting the boundaries is OUR work. If a person you have boundaries with continues to cross them, you must be push back through further boundaries or you may have to cut them out entirely. Which brings me to…

6.     Do not care-take the other person. If a hard boundary is set, it is not wise or appropriate for you to be the one to support them. It’s not good for either of you and it opens the door to manipulation. This can be hard because people who have poor boundaries re often the highly empathetic ones who are busy helping and saving people all the time. You must restrain the impulse to fix, save and caretake.

7.     Over time, allow the growth in this part of your life to make you more forgiving. Once you become a person with good boundaries you may find that you have less of a need to impose them. One truth that seems to be built into the experience of being a person who has poor boundaries is that there can be a sense of a lack of control, helplessness, and victimhood. This experience of self makes the transgression seem like more than a transgression. It confirms a narrative. It’s further evidence of a story. It’s an added layer of suffering and it heightens the pain involved. Once you really know in your bones that those self-protective capacities are there, and that you have a little more ontrol over your life and relationships, the extra layer of suffering lifts. You become more grounded and stable. You become a little more willing to let people be where they are in their process.

Life is messy, people are imperfect. We all have angels and demons within us. We are all capable of terrible things. Take a second to reflect on the time it was you who caused harm, and how badly you want not to be defined by your worst moments. When appropriate, try to be as forgiving as your nervous system allows you to be. The world doesn’t need another morally superior person, waiting to punish people and calling everyone out all the time. Don’t become rigid and punitive. Be judicious with your boundaries. If you can’t forgive anyone and if no one can pass your endless purity tests, you may find yourself righteous and alone.

Lions Roar: 6 Buddhist Leaders Reflect on the US Midterms and What Comes Next

Bridging Dharma and Political Action

Pablo Das

As the midterms come to an end and we turn to the 2020 presidential election cycle, I encounter a familiar internal tension between dharma practice and what it means to engage with representative democracy. Three dharma concepts frame my political engagement. They are: the first noble truth, responsiveness, and peace. I try to hold them my mind simultaneously.

1. The first noble truth asserts that life, including politics, does not do what we want. I can mitigate my suffering by expecting not to get my way. The suffering we seek to end in Buddhist practice is that which we self-generate out of resistance to life on its own terms.

2. Dharma practice is not passive, it’s responsive. It’s a path of wise communication, compassionate action, and principled engagement with the marketplace. Some feel politics should be left out of dharma. For me, political engagement, because it is so consequential, is an obvious extension of Buddhist ethics. I’m not so interested in a dharma that can’t respond to attacks on transgender people, the mainstreaming of white supremacy, and the pervasive trauma of sexual assault.

3. Refusing to dehumanize those who are different from me. As a gay man who feels threatened in the Trump era, this is really hard. I fail all the time. But we are at war with each other in this country. I fear it could get much worse. Someone has to take a stand for peace. If not Buddhists, then who?

See full post here

YOU ARE THE AUTHORITY

You are the Authority

When I was studying at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in 2006, they had a sort of mantra which was “One person’s food is another person’s poison”. What that mantra pointed to is an often overlooked truth that where food is concerned, there is no one right way that works universally for all. There isn’t even one right way for a single individual over the course of their life. What a person needs when they’re 20 isn’t what they need when they’re 45 or 65. What they need in the summer isn’t what they need in the winter. Etc...

Similarly, in the process of getting sober and navigating the dogmatic world of recovery, I had a similar revelation. 12 steps work for some people. Therapy works for others. For me, 12 step was a totally unintelligible system but a combination of practical dharma and trauma work has kept me sober for many years. There is no one right way to get sober.

It’s taken me much longer to realize that the same is true for spirituality and religion. There is no one system that works for everyone. Not Buddhism, not theism, not yoga, not atheism. 

There is no one right way!

These days, I keep some distance from those who think their teachings are “perfect” and above honest critical analysis. I stay away from those who think their path is the “right” one for everyone.

While engagement with wisdom holders is a necessary part of the process of spiritual growth and healing, be careful not to put them on a pedestal. I know many of them. Trust me, they’re just humans a little further along (sometimes) than you are. Don’t live in deference to your religion, your particular tradition or your teachers. Ultimately, you have to arrive at an understanding that YOU are the only authority for what supports your own deepest wellbeing! That authority is established by paying attention to the results of your engagement with your practices in the laboratory of your own body, heart and mind. Claim your authority! Take what works and let go of the rest. Make your path fully yours. Make yourself “independent of others” in your dharma!

One person’s food is another person’s poison.
One person’s recovery is another person’s dogma.
One person’s dharma is another person’s prison.

Thanks for listening.

Pablo Das

Three types of trauma

By Pablo Das

I define trauma as that which arises when an event or a set of ongoing conditions overwhelms one's capacity for presence and an empowered response. Trauma leaves feeling victimized and unable to respond. It overwhelms. If it doesn't overwhelm, it's probably not trauma. Trauma leaves us with a vast array of possible symptoms which effect us on many levels. Trauma effects self regulatory abilities, the way we view ourselves and our relational capacities. 

In my work, I recognize three general categories of trauma. 

1.  Single event or "shock" trauma.

2.  Developmental trauma.

3. The trauma of social oppression.

Shock trauma occurs when an event like a sexual assault, an attack or an accident overwhelms or leaves us feeling disempowered or victimized. One interesting thing about single event trauma is that different people will have different experiences with the same event. For example, two people can be in an accident but only one of them may experience trauma symptoms. This means trauma isn't just about the event. It's about an individual person's experience with an event which might be determined by the state of their particular nervous system.

This brings us to the type of trauma that's related to our development and early childhood. Our brains and nervous systems develop in relationship to our environment growing up. Especially in relationship to our primary caregivers. What happens in our childhood environment has a big impact on our capacity to meet adverse experiences later in life. As adults, those of us with nervous systems that have been impacted by developmental trauma, may have less resilience or capacity than others and be more vulnerable to potentially traumatizing experiences. 

Social marginalization and oppression is potentially very traumatizing. Social oppression like racism, homophobia and transphobia are pervasive and ever present.  This kind of trauma might precipitate symptoms that look a lot like both developmental and single event trauma, but it's worthy of a distinction because it's a much more personal kind of trauma. The ever present threat is connected to who you are or who you might be perceived to be. Also social trauma is an ongoing experience. While single event trauma, like an accident, is contained within a definable period of time, oppression isn't. It creates a threat that endures on many levels and operates in subtle and profound ways every day throughout the duration of one's life. Furthermore, a person who is a member of an oppressed social group may experience intergenerational trauma which manifests as traumatic symptoms that are connected to a legacy of oppression from earlier generations. This type of trauma is transmitted at the genetic level. 

Many people in our society have all three of these types of trauma occurring at once. 

The management and resolution of trauma can be a complex matter. It's usually long term work. Some level of mindful presence is required for the resolution of trauma. But mindfulness can also become counterproductive if not integrated in a trauma informed way. Traumatic content is very powerful and the traumatized psychology can be very sensitive. Traditional mindfulness practice needs to be balanced with an understanding of how trauma operates. In my view, mindfulness itself is not a path to healing trauma, but people with a background in mindfulness practice are well positioned to do the work of trauma management and resolution.

Holistic wellness principles are also helpful because they create a context in which one can be conscious of how they build capacity and resilience. Sometimes when clients get dysregulated or experience what some of my clients call being "in the trauma vortex" It's helpful to have a map for restoring resilience. And coming back from the vortex. This is where being conscious of a more holistic approach to wellness can be very useful. They allow us to identify variables we can engage to support self regulation and resilience in the system. 

Somatic experiencing is my preferred method for mapping the trauma healing process and supporting management and ultimate resolution. In somatic experiencing we think of trauma symptoms as manifestations of incomplete self protective responses. We work with the system to support a process of moving towards resolution of those symptoms by bringing them to completion in a safe and turreted way, without overwhelming the system again.The work happens in phases. At first the client may find themselves in a chaotic place where there's no real agency and a sense of being out of control. Building capacity and learning certain skill sets, including mindfulness and self regulatory practices, brings us into a sense of more control over our experience. In the begin from we cultivate more presence and a capacity for self regulation. It is in the context of that second phase of capacity and skill building that we can finally move to completion of incomplete self protective responses. All of this influences and requires a reframing of how we view ourselves and helps to shift relational patterns as well replacing deference to others anddisempowerment with more boundaries, a sense of self respect and an ability to defend oneself physically and emotionally. 

Don't they know who we are?

By Pablo Das

Yesterday Donald Trump joined, rather predictably, with the other republican presidents of my lifetime in using the queer community as a wedge for his own political gain. Just like Reagan who had a top down mandate in his administration not to address the AIDS crisis, or anything else concerning the wellbeing of gay people, for that matter.

I will forever resist any historical revision that frames Reagan as anything other than one of the cruelest men in American history...and not just to queer people. 

Just like Bush Jr, who used his state of the union address to propose a constitutional amendment (take that in) to insure that queer relationships would never be validated and protected by marriage equality. 

And who lied to the American people to propagate a war with Iraq which killed hundreds of thousands of people. 

And now here we are again, back on that old chestnut of using the military (yawn!) to try to deny us our dignity and to destroy lives. Doesn't he know that we have been fighting that battle since Frank Kameny took on the military in 1958? Doesn't he know we win these battles over and over?

I guess he thought that if he singled out our trans friends that he could get away with it? Doesn't he know he's picking on the bravest most resilient people on the fucking planet? These people endure even when the L,G and B don't have their back. 

And dignity? Mine doesn't come from some association with or affirmation from the military. It comes from knowing the history of my people. Once you know who you are, nothing that they can throw at you can disrupt the sense of dignity one has when they discover the history that was erased. The history they didn't teach you. 

Let's get something "straight" about our history. If you want to understand bravery you need to look to queer people! We have always flourished in the face of great danger. Every one of us cooked in the fire of a rite of passage that requires us to dig down deep inside, find out who we are, stand in our truth and "come out" despite the danger to our bodies and psyches. We endure the losses. We create our own families when ours have rejected us and then somehow still create the most beautiful things on earth. Think Hockney. Think Ginsberg. Think Tchaikovsky! Think Sondheim. Don't they know who we are?

We are the ones who walked through our public schools alone being beat up, spit on and harassed and often with no allies, sometimes with the authority figures joining in! And fuck it! Many of us flourished anyway!

We are the ones who rose up against the armed insurgent police at the battles of Gene Compton's cafe, Coopers, the Black Cat and Stonewall. We are Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P and Alexei Romanov! 

We persevered against the threat of state mental hospitals where by the thousands, we were castrated, lobotomized and electro-shocked. Where we faced great state sanctioned cruelty. We came out anyway! 

We came out while they blackmailed us, published our names in the paper, evicted us and disowned us!

Don't they know who we are? 

We are the ones who walked through the war of the AIDS epidemic even as we were betrayed by our own governments and families. We stood among our dead. We stood up to the president. We stood up to the pharmaceutical industry. We took on Wall Street. We took on the church! And we got the life saving medications. Against all odds. No one did that for us! WE did that. We saved ourselves! We are Larry Kramer and Cleve Jones and Ken Jones and Cecilia Chung. 

You want to understand what bravery is? Look at the legacy of trans people. For whom any day can be a stroll through a virtual war zone which we call American society. Especially in the trump era. And yet, we as a people, continue to challenge gender norms and present ourselves any way we fucking feel like presenting ourselves! 

Donald Trump and now, Jeff Sessions with his claim that we are not worthy of protection as "homosexuals" (we know you chose that word carefully, to reduce us to sex acts!) are picking on people who thrived when we had nothing going for us. But guess what? Now, we have real power. We have the hearts of the majority of the American people, not given to us by politicians, but gained at great personal risk by our brave and resilient queer pioneers and in coalition with the other great movements for civil rights and our straight allies. We are not going to give an inch of it away. Not an inch.

In the name of Harvey Milk, Bayard Rustin, Harry Hay, Phylis Lyon, Del Martin, Christine Jorgensen, Larry Kramer, Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P Johnson, Luke Sissyfag, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Kameny, Barbara Giddings, Act-up, Queer Nation, the GAA, STAR, Lesbian Avengers, Stonewall, Compton's, Black Cat, the GLA. And in the name of the women's liberation movement, and the black civil rights movement, the anti war movement and the labor movement! In the name of the countless members of our community that didn't make it. Especially the kids. 

We will not stop fighting until we have achieved full equality and protection under the law for all people. ALL people! 

Thanks for listening.

Bye Felicia!

For more: www.causesofwellbeing.com

Actions Bring Results

By Pablo Das

What we think, what we pay attention to, what we say and what we do all have an impact on our sense of wellbeing both personally and interpersonally. This is a simple way of understanding Karma. Karma is a word that basically means action. In the dharma, one simple way of understanding karma is to acknowledge that our actions bring results. In this case "action" means anything you do. Thinking, paying attention, speaking, acting and otherwise engaging with the world all brings results. Those results can either condition a sense of wellbeing in life or something like suffering or harm. 

If you were to bring to mind the most beautiful place you've ever been, that would have one kind of impact on your experience. If you were to bring to mind something that concerns you, that would have another kind of impact. Something as simple as what we pay attention to brings results. (You might notice the impact on your nervous system of whatever you pay attention to next in your Facebook feed) This is just an insight into the way things are. Really integrating this knowing into your moment to moment life can have a major impact on you and those around you. 

The opening lines of a popular collection of Buddhist teachings called the Dhammapada contains a useful image. "Speak or act with a corrupted mind and suffering will follow like the cart follows the ox that pulls it. Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow like a never departing shadow." 

At first glance, what is illustrated here is a clear relationship between what we do and what we experience as a result of what we do. In this case either happiness or suffering. (Actions bring results). But there's something else going on here. 

Along with actions and results were asked to pay attention to another variable. The quality of mind that precedes and informs the action. We could think of this as intention or motivation. The dharma places a lot of attention on the cultivation of certain types of intentions, namely kindness and compassion. We end up with the following equation. 

Intention (motivation) + action = results.

This is not hard to understand in the real world. If you speak and act from hatred or with an intention to to do harm, you will get a certain kind of result. If you speak or act from kindness and compassion, you will get another kind of result. This is clear.

Results = wellbeing or suffering. 

The core underlying principle in all of this is cause and effect. There's a chain of events unfolding in every moment which we can all wake up to. What we wake up to is that we are constantly playing a role in the creation of the next set of conditions in our lives and that in every moment we can make our thoughts, what we tend to with awareness, our speech and actions as well as our intentions, conscious. This awareness can be the difference between a life of wellbeing and one of suffering and harm. 

Compassion, Pain and Joy.

by Pablo Das

One of my earliest spiritual insights was that the development of compassion had something to do with a willingness to be present for pain. Over the years, I've picked up some good lines from my teachers on the subject. One teacher would say "compassion is what kindness morphs into when it encounters suffering". Another said "compassion is the appropriate response to pain". That same teacher would point out that compassion was only necessary when pain was present. It only made sense in relationship to pain. The message was that compassion and pain are intertwined. They are connected. One conditions the need for (or development of) the other. 

A human being can have lots of responses to pain. We can deny it, choose not to deal with it, we can numb it, we can rage against it or channel it into violence. Pain can harden us. We can construct narratives about ourselves, others and the world in response to it. We can, in a sense, become it. It can make us bitter, addicted and dangerous to others.

Or... we can do something totally different with it.

The dharma has what I believe to be a unique and perhaps defining relationship to pain. Often one of the first teachings we hear in dharma circles is an acknowledgement that pain is a non negotiable fact of life. We hear right away that pain and suffering are of primary concern in the dharma. We hear that to live with more freedom requires more  presence for pain. 

When I was younger, I found this to be so helpful. I first encountered the dharma when I was 19 after the deaths of my mother and a family friend. I was struggling with coming out as a gay man in the middle of the AIDS crisis and had experienced a couple significant traumatic episodes connected to random gun violence as a young person. I was in a lot of pain. 

Hearing that pain was a normal part of life was very affirming. It made me feel less alone and gave me hope that through something called "practice", I could find a balanced relationship to my pain. So I started meditating. 

Around that same time, I also started drinking. Years later, when the cost benefit analysis of the drinking swung too much in the direction of "cost", I stopped. When I did, I was amazed to see that I had somehow, through "practice", developed a new skill set that allowed me to relate to my pain differently. Good thing, because, despite my attempts at running from the pain with alcohol, it was all waiting for me on the other end of my run. But I was prepared this time in a way that I hadn't been earlier in my life. I could stay more present and more importantly, meet the pain with kindness, patience, acceptance and, yes, compassion. This was how I was trained in the dharma.

The possibility of a compassionate life begins with the acknowledgement of pain in ourselves and others and a willingness to turn towards it and be present with it. To be compassionate means to acknowledge pain with acceptance, as just a part of what it means to be alive. If you're a human you're going to experience pain. Your body will hurt, you will experience loss and disappointment. Life will not always do what you want.  Perhaps you'll even experience trauma. When we start to be present with it, we get a sense of a whole new way of living opening up. A more responsive way. When we aren't so afraid of pain and discomfort we can begin to find new ways of being with ourselves and with others and we can think, speak and act in ways that support wellbeing and minimize harm.

It's important to remember, especially in these times, that pain is not the whole story. Life is always some balance of pleasure and pain. Sometimes we get so caught up in what's difficult that we forget to orient to the beauty and joy that's right in front of us. 

One of my teaching colleagues once said "no matter what your heart and mind get contracted around there's always something else that's true". Life is never just pain. If it were, none of us would make it. We all have resources that keep us resilient. We could benefit from making them conscious. 

Staying connected to the joy and beauty in this life makes acknowledgement of that which is not preferable to us possible. It makes the work of presence with pain manageable. Life is never all pleasure and no pain. It is also never all pain and no pleasure. Our practice is a call to orient to both. Our practice is to cultivate more presence for the full range of human experience. In this way you become whole. In this way you begin to heal.

What is the point of dharma practice?

by Pablo Das

This Thursday night in Los Angeles, I begin teaching a 4 week class series called “Living the Four Noble Truths” which is really a course about a style of engagement with the world. As you may or may not know, the fourth of the 4 truths is about cultivation of a way of living. Central to this path is the idea of karma. One simple way of talking about Karma is to say that what we do brings results. By “do” I mean thinking, speaking and acting. There’s a rather simple equation at the heart of the concept of karma which is this: Intention (motivation) + action = results.  This I believe is why we see that 4 of the “8 folds” of the path are concerned with intention and conduct. What I’ve learned through dharma study and practice, is that what precedes our speech and action is more important than the conduct itself. It’s very clear that when we speak and act with an intention to be kind and compassionate, that we get a different result than when we speak or act just from anger or frustration. I’m not one to pathologize anger. Anger is fine. It’s even useful sometimes. But we can be angry and still try to respond to a situation in a way that doesn’t cause more harm, that makes space for more insight and creates or restores interpersonal harmony. How do we do that? That’s what the other three truths are all about.

The first truth asks us to wake up to the fact that life will always be some balance of pleasant and unpleasant conditions. The second truth tells us that we are wired to react to pleasant and unpleasant experience in rather predictable ways. We want to get rid of pain and maintain pleasure. The third truth reminds us that if we have an objective relationship with reactivity, we can experience it’s impermanent nature which opens the possibility of a totally different way of responding. This brings us back to the cultivation of the 8 fold way of living. This way of living is organized around very practical matters. Speaking, acting and particpating in the marketplace in a way that embodies kindness and compassion. This for me, is the point of practice.

I hope you’ll consider joining me Thursday night for this series.

You are the authority on your own wellbeing.

by Pablo Das.

You are the ultimate authority on your own wellbeing. That might seem like a strange thing for a teacher and a wellness coach to say, but it's true.

Years ago, I was training in a holistic health program where I learned about all the major dietary theories. The school I went to did something interesting. They encouraged us to have the direct experience of trying out the various diets instead of just accepting them uncritically, even though our faculty was full of experts who each "wrote the book" on their respective dietary systems. So for the time between our monthly sessions we tried everything from macrobiotics to raw vegan diets to Atkins. We tried diets meant to cleanse, diets designed to support the immune system and diets rooted in ethical conviction.

Every presenter compellingly sold us on why their diet was the most heath supportive, disease reversing and longevity producing diet ever conceived. After a few months, confusion began to set in as each new "expert" contradicted what seemed like sacred dogmas of the one before. Turns out this was an intentional part of the program. Every new doctor, researcher and nutritional scientist presented their way as "THE" way.  But because we each were having direct experiences trying out the diets, and communicating with each other, we started to see that there actually was no universally “right” way of eating that supported the health and well-being of all people uniformly. I remember, for example, trying the raw foods diet and feeling terrible while another person in my cohort suddenly found the energy to run marathons. I started that training as an ethical (but wildly imbalanced) vegetarian and finished the training as a person who understood, experientially not theoretically, that animal based fat and protein sources were what were right for my body. I've said many times to clients that where food is concerned, that any conflicts between a theory and what the body actually needs must always be decided in favor of the body.

The recurring mantra of the training program was "one person's food is another person's poison". What I learned is that while it's important to have the guidance of teachers and wisdom holders, nobody would have all the answers for me. They actually couldn't. We're all so different. Even within the course of our own lives we can see what we need at one point in life is not what we need at another. What works in the summer doesn't work in the winter.

What I discovered was that the authority was me. That authority was established through trial and error and by paying attention to the results of what I consumed in the laboratory of my own body, heart and mind. It meant I had to be present and it meant that I had to take responsibility for my life. 

What I didn’t realize then is that this truth would be affirmed for me in different ways, over and over throughout my life. As a gay man, raised in an atheist household, I would not get sober in the traditional way, like everyone else. As a person whose nervous system has been impacted by trauma, I would not practice mindfulness like everyone else. As a person with sugar and wheat sensitivities, I would not eat like everyone else. So many times, I’ve had to critically analyze, test and sometimes reject the dietary, spiritual, healing and recovery authorities and find my own path. I'm not saying we can do it all alone. You need help and your teachers have so much to offer you. But ultimately, as your practices mature, there will be times when you must find the strength to reject dogma and reclaim the authority to walk your own path to a fulfilling, healthy and authentic life.

As a teacher and coach, I seek to support my clients in reclaiming that sense of agency and authority in their own wellness and healing practices. I seek to be a "guide on the side" not an authoritarian expert. 

May you find within yourself the capacity to trust your own heart and your own inner knowing and walk your own path with wisdom and without apology.  You don't need permission.

For more information on my coaching practice please visit my coaching page. 

Please see this page for a special offer on coaching.

What Does it Mean to “Awaken” in the Dharma?

By Pablo Das.

We talk a lot in dharma circles about awakening. But what does that mean? There are probably as many answers to this question as there are practitioners and teachers. For me, as a person who’s always been drawn to the more pragmatic expressions of dharma, the teaching on the four noble truths offers one possible answer.

The four noble truths could be understood as an attempt at articulating what it is that constitutes awakening. The text, in this case assumed to represent the voice of the Buddha as he teaches, reads “If I had not had insight into these four truths, I would not have claimed to have had an awakening”. So what then are we awakening to? 

First, that life is a balance of pleasure and pain and that it can never be just pleasure and no pain. Life is full of experiences that are not preferable to us. Pain and difficulty are part of the package. The beauty, joy and pleasure of life are balanced with pain, disappointment and loss. Human connection, community and love is contrasted with hetero-supremacy, transphobia, misogyny, racism and more. In small and profound ways, we don’t always get what we’d prefer in this life. It is possible to wake up to this and change our relationship to life on its own terms in a way that supports wellbeing and minimizes unnecessary suffering and harm.

Second, that our minds are wired to react to the balance of pleasant and unpleasant experience. This is key! The mind wants to get rid of what's unpleasant and obtain or maintain that which we prefer. I prefer to call this habit of mind “reactivity”. Sometimes it's appropriate to consciously heed that sense of liking or disliking things and take a stand against injustice or get to safety when there's a threat. But it's usually not wise to follow the prompts of reactivity uncritically. Sometimes trying to get rid of what's unpleasant only compounds suffering. Addiction is a good example of this. Waking up to reactivity of mind means cultivating equal presence for pleasant and unpleasant experience without being unconsciously compelled by reactivity all the time. This reactivity is identified in the teachings as a hinderance to the cultivation of a wise way of living in the world.

Third, when we leave reactivity alone we can experience its impermanent nature. As a result of what we might call “non-reactive presence” we free ourselves from the suffering that often arises from blindly following the reactivity of mind.

Finally, in that space of non-reactive presence, we awaken to the possibility of a very different way of living. When we free ourselves from the cycles of reactivity, we open up a space of conscious choice. We can respond in an empowered way to whatever is going on whether it’s personal or political. The dharma teaches us how to cultivate a way of being in the world that is informed by the cultivation of kindness and compassion and rooted in the wisdom of knowing how life really is.

For me, non reactivity is not an end in and of itself. There is an argument to be made that the four truths suggest that the real objective is the cultivation of a style of engagement with the world through speech, action and participation in the marketplace. One rooted in wisdom and empowerment. What non reactive presence does is awakens us to the possibility of responding in kind, compassionate and empowered ways. I see “the path” as one of engagement with the world not just one of personal growth. One that considers the health, wellbeing, safety and protection of all people. Especially the most vulnerable. 

Awakening, therefore, is about accepting the inevitable balance of preferable and not so preferable experiences in life and freeing oneself from the prompts of reactivity so that one can cultivate a life which is responsive instead of reactive.  

Join me for a 4 week series in Los Angeles beginning next week called "Living the Four Noble Truths". Beginning July 13th. Register here.

We Must Not Accept Crumbs by Pablo Das

We Must Not Accept Crumbs

Looking back on the Dalai Lama’s historic 1997 meeting with the LGBTQ community and why a secular approach to the dharma might be the wisest and safest approach for queer and marginalized people.

by Pablo Das

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This pride month marks the 20th anniversary of a historic meeting the Dalai Lama had with members of the LGBTQ+ community regarding his comments on gay male sexuality as sexual misconduct. In looking back on what his comments meant to me, I see the way it conditioned how I approach the dharma as a gay man. This piece was inspired by and is in some ways, a response to an article by Jose Cabezon’s piece "Revisiting the Traditional Buddhist Views on Sex and Sexuality” published by Lions Roar earlier this month and references guidelines on sexual conduct outlined there. Mostly, I offer my own experience with the Dalai Lama's comments then and now.

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"We are not crumbs, we must not accept crumbs" - Larry Kramer, 2007

 

I remember when the Dalai Lama made his infamous comment that sex between men would be considered "sexual misconduct" in his tradition. It was published widely enough in the Buddhist press that year (1996) that I had seen it written up several times even without the internet. I remember the impact that comment had on me. It touched the part of me that, as a young gay man, was always primed to be rejected or put out of the tribe. It touched the part of me that avoided relationships with religious people in my own life, usually Christians, in whom I often perceived a barely papered over tension between their disapproval and their "tolerance" for gay people. I wasn't willing to subject myself to either.

I had initially gravitated towards Buddhism at age 19 in the existential crisis that followed the deaths of my mother to cancer and a younger family friend who was killed in a bus accident. These deaths disturbed me. They were the first significant deaths of my life. Having been raised in an atheist household, I had none of the consolatory beliefs that might have come with a religious upbringing. I needed some framework in which I could come to terms with a life where my beloved ones (whether 60 years old or 16) could be alive one day and gone the next. These are the kinds of experiences that inspire people to turn to religion but I harbored a profound distrust towards the dominant theistic traditions of my own culture. Christianity was undeniably a primary source of the cruelty I had seen towards the gay community as I came of age during the AIDS crisis of the early 90's. I never once considered seeking "refuge" there. Instead, I looked to the east and eventually found Buddhism. I resonated very deeply with the myth of the Buddha's life story and the existential issues that motivated his quest. I shared what I understood to be his urgency to find peace with birth, aging, sickness and death. 

While I had entered into my exploration cautiously, my earliest encounters with Buddhism felt very safe. Buddhism seemed to present itself at very least, as non dogmatic, and at best (for my constitution) as not a religion at all. I had heard many times in those early years that "the Buddha wasn't a Buddhist" and I found safety in the notion that The Dharma wasn't originally presented as a religion. When I read the Dalai Lama's comments, however, my experience shifted to one of "the other shoe dropping" confirmation that despite my hope that Buddhism would be different, it could in fact, manifest as a dogmatic "religion" with some of the same oppressive messages found in Christianity. For me, his comments were clarifying. They were (along with all of the Gods and demons stuff I also found off putting in Tibetan Buddhism) a signal that his particular tradition was not a fit for me and I was drawn towards the more pragmatic sensibilities of the modern insight tradition.

There is an age old debate within the queer movement about whether we are just like everyone else or whether we are inherently or by virtue of our particular distinct experience in the world, not like everyone else. I'm mostly in the "not like everyone else" camp. This is obvious to me in so many ways, including the role sexuality plays between gay men, the roles we assume within it and the types of intimate relationships we form. My queerness is the most important and impactful identity I hold in terms of how it conditions the way I experience and navigate the world. This is meaningful when interfacing with spiritual, religious or healing traditions.

To be fair, the Buddhist world at large, at least as I experience it, remains a relatively safe place. I have rarely encountered explicit homophobia. But even the modern insight tradition is not free from more subtle forms of oppression, suppression, and marginalization. Blind spots within the tradition and biases of it’s teachers are plenty. Heteronormative presentations of sexuality are standard and there are still highly regarded and powerful senior teachers who present themselves as having transcended their queer sexuality (not a goal of mine) or who are unwilling or unable to integrate the truth of their queerness into their public dharma. I left a spiritual community I had been a longtime member of, in part, because of dismissive and marginalizing views on queer sexuality expressed by one its senior teachers. I can see now that all of this has conditioned and reinforced in me a healthy and necessary “arms length" relationship with Buddhism. 

I know I’m talking about something that happened 20 years ago, but in my opinion, if reports about the meeting are true, The Dalai Lama was engaging in the worst kind of deference to tradition. He was, on one hand, acknowledging quite clearly that there were no negative consequences for a society that embraced gay male sexuality and yet he was unable or unwilling to break with his tradition, choosing instead to affirm the party line view that it was a moral evil "for Buddhists" no matter the cost for its queer practitioners. This strikes me as odd, considering the famous statement the Dalai Lama made about Buddhism and science saying "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."

All of this might have been ok if one could simply dismiss the guidelines as consistent within the cultural context of the time. But here, in our own time, we had the most powerful and visible figurehead in all of Buddhism affirming these guidelines. This is precisely the problem with religion. It is so often unmovable in the face of new information and the evolution of our understanding as a culture. This runs so counter to what I feel to be the true adaptive spirit of the dharma. This rigidity has consequences.

What this does for a gay practitioner is creates a dynamic where the power and authority of the establishment was in a sense, leveraged against the psyche of anyone unwilling to suppress a fundamental part of their queer nature, lest you be in poor standing with the tradition. This, for me, is a non-starter. This dynamic of having to suppress our nature to be accepted into the tribe is our core collective trauma as a people. Many of us have had to do this to avoid physical or emotional violence or being thrown out of our families. Furthermore, most of us are already managing an internalized sense that something is wrong with us, which for many, was originally installed by religion.

One of my queer heroes, Larry Kramer, the founder of Act up and award winning playwright and author of the Normal Heart, wrote an article published in 2007 by the LA times about the failure of the democratic presidential candidates to publicly affirm and assert our right to marry (which they believed was not politically expedient at the time). He urged gay people not to vote for any candidate that did not affirm our relationships. The article began with the words "We are not crumbs. We must not accept crumbs." Larry, in a way unlike any other voice in the gay movement, asserts an uncompromising hardline expectation that we should achieve full equality and be allowed to live with total dignity. Anything short of that is unacceptable for him. For me, his "we must not accept crumbs" philosophy became a kind of guiding principle in my life. While I have some space and patience for the growth of people around me (I certainly have benefitted from the patience afforded me by transgender friends, women and people of color  around my own bias and blindness) I don't stay long in circles where there isn't a ground level positive affirmation of queerness or where I cannot be received fully and without shame. My own psychological safety as a gay man is a prerequisite for engaging with just about anything, particularly spiritual or healing communities which require periods of such profound vulnerability.

Years ago I realized something about the relationship I needed to have with Buddhism. I began to locate myself somewhere outside of Buddhism in a space free from obligation to accept any teaching uncritically or hold the party line views of my tradition. In some sense, I traded my Buddhist identity for a freestanding relationship with the Dharma that allowed me to vett the teachings in the laboratory of my own body, heart and mind and through the filter of my distinct experience as a gay person. Later, I'd understand that affirmations for such an approach were central to the original teachings of the Buddha with his teaching to the Kalamas and his encouragements to find oneself "independent of others in the dharma". 

At some point it occurred to me that there is an argument to be made that the wisest approach to the dharma for queer people (and perhaps members of other marginalized communities) is actually not to give our hearts and minds wholesale over to traditions or institutions that don't affirm us, but rather to approach the dharma in a way consistent with what has come to be known as a "secular" approach.

Proponents of a secular approach to dharma (and here I join them) argue for an approach that is free of the dogma and baggage of the "religion" of Buddhism. We want a dharma to be informed by and cleanly interface with the particular world view and cultural norms of our own time and place. We want a dharma free from a bias for metaphysics and instead, pragmatic and useful in daily life. And most importantly to me, as a gay man, we want a dharma that is free from blind deference to authority.

At the end of the day, I am only interested in engaging with Buddhist tradition in so much as I am spared having to entertain things like a "dialogue" with ancient monastic men about what I can do with my dick. I've been around the Buddhist block enough to see the folly and danger of projecting too much onto our Buddhist authorities. As dedicated, wise and lovely as they are, they are often simply human beings every bit as fucked up and wounded as I am. I have to be honest, though I have great respect for monastics, it's hard for me to see these particular guidelines on sexuality as anything more than the product of straight (albeit ancient) authoritarian male bias. I can't have sex with my boyfriend, but they can have prostitutes? 

As I have spoken about this with gay friends, more than one of them responded with a comment like "are we really expected to believe that all of these hot young guys who've chosen to lives in colonies of wise and sensitive men were never ever having sex with one another?" Indeed. My mind goes to the many stories of anti-gay republicans or Christian pastors who advocate or legislate against gay sexuality but who are found later sucking off their staffers or alter boys in men’s bathrooms. This “do as I say, while I blow the pool boy” thing is such a known phenomenon in politics and religion (We forget the Dalai Lama is both a politician and a religious leader) that the human rights campaign took out an ad on Grindr (the gay male hookup app) during last year's conservative political action conference which said "you can't be with us in the hotel room and against us in the CPAC ballroom".

For better or worse (and while I acknowledge the potential wisdom of "baby with the bath water" counter arguments) I'm clear with myself that I'm willing to forego whatever benefits I may derive from engagement with any particular non-affirming tradition, community or teacher to preserve my psychological wellbeing and retain a basic sense of human dignity. Moreover, in this particular case, I don't feel it is necessary for me to wade (for years, perhaps) through the swamp of "cultural context" and "dominant paradigms" of ancient texts from a tradition that I determined long ago wasn't a fit for me, only to arrive at a very simple ethical standard; that our actions should support wellbeing and not cause harm. This, after all, is what's at the heart of all Buddhist ethical teachings.

For me, a secular approach to Dharma is one that frees me to engage with the teachings without submitting to unhealthy psychological spaces or with a non-critical deference to the wisdom of non queer people. It gives me back an agency to determine what teachings are worth my consideration and which are not without an authoritarian overlay of tradition and religion. This journey from deference to unhealthy authoritarian cultural paradigms into trusting and honoring oneself  IS the movement of liberation for queer people throughout time. As a people we have always had to innovate and make things our own. We have had to refuse and resist what doesn't support our particular "not like everyone else" wellbeing. It should be no different in our spiritual pursuits.

Recently, I've been mulling over a very striking statement that one of my most beloved teachers made to me recently when he said "The dharma is too Important to leave in the hands of Buddhists". As I look back on the Dalai Lama's comments 20 years ago, I see the wisdom of that statement.