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The Hobo Code (for Spiritual Pilgrims)

Right behind the Sounds True office backyard, just a hop over tangled barbed wire, run these local railroad tracks:

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The other day I was watching television’s most underrated exploration of the Jungian “shadow principle”—Mad Men—and it reminded me of these tracks. In the episode called “The Hobo Code,” we get a glimpse into the protagonist Don Draper’s childhood during the Great Depression. And we learn about a secret vocabulary that was chalked and carved on fence posts and telephone poles across America.

As it turns out, the hobo code was real. It varied from region to region and across the years. Countless souls used it to help each other find food and shelter and to avoid the perils of the day.

Here are some of those hobo signs (scraped from cyberspace) that still feel relevant to me, if only metaphorically:

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I spotted one of my first “hobo marks” decades ago. It came as a crackling transmission of Roy Tuckman’s legendary Pacifica Radio show “Something’s Happening.” I was homeless, hopeless, and definitely “hobo” at the time, couchsurfing in a friend’s farmhouse in Carmel, California.

The clock radio clicked to 2:00am and, drifting in and out of the night static, was the voice of Alan Watts. He was chuckling at the folly of “trying to catch an ocean wave in a bucket.” Which is exactly what I was doing with my life at that time—trying to rack up achievements and experiences that would assure my permanent, foolproof success.

Um, yeah, right.

Alan’s “hobo mark” pointed me onto the boxcar of radical self-inquiry, though I didn’t realize it until years later. And ever since, I’ve shared his humor and wisdom whenever it’s felt right to.

In fact, I had the privilege of working with Alan Watts’ son, Mark, to hand-pick the sessions for the audio set Out of Your Mind. Alan’s “catching waves in a bucket” allegory is in there.

Is the spiritual path so different from those rolling train tracks? Maybe the markers we find on our own journey—a haiku by Ikkyu, a meaningful photograph, the advice of a friend—reflect the same pilgrim’s spirit that says “we’re all in this together brothers and sisters.”

If I ever go back to visit Victoria’s family farm, I think I’m gonna chalk this symbol on their fencepost:

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So, what was your first metaphorical “hobo sign” on your life’s journey?

 

It’s okay to be broken

It is okay to be broken, to allow yourself to fall apart
You need not hold it together any longer for you were never together to begin with
Fall apart and resist the temptation to put yourself back together again
See what is forever untouched by the concepts “together” and “apart”
It is okay to be broken, for it is through the cracks in you that light can pour through

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Sera Beak: Red Hot and Holy, Part 2

Tami Simon speaks with Sera Beak, a Harvard-trained scholar of comparative world religions and a dynamic new voice in modern spirituality. Sera spent years traveling the world to study with Sufi dervishes, Tibetan monks, Indian yogis, mystics, shamans, and more. She is the author of The Red Book, and with Sounds True her new book is Red Hot and Holy: A Heretic’s Love Story. In the second part of a two-part interview, Tami speaks with Sera about her experiences with sacred touch, shadow work, the power of “cosmic family therapy” to heal the wounds of someone in a different lifetime, and the revelation of knowing deep in our being that we are beloved. (61 minutes)

A love we never outgrow

Let us hold all fathers in our hearts today, in gratitude for the gift of life they have given. Some of us are close with dad, some are not; some have very fond memories, some do not; some of us never really got to know that person we called “dad” and what really moved him, inspired him; what he really wanted and what his unique relationship was with the movement of love; or why he came here to this sacred human place. But the one thing we do know is that, just like us, dad only ever wanted to be happy, to be free from suffering, and was only able to use the tools he had been given to take the journey that was his. We may never understand the nature of dad’s journey, the unique pattern that unfolded as his life, somehow orchestrated in the stars, to unveil to him the mysteries of love.

Whether dad is still on this earth or the beloved has sent him elsewhere, it is possible for you to fully connect with him right here, right now, for he is alive inside every cell of your heart; no matter what has happened in the past, he has given you something important for your journey. May we honor dad on this day in all of his guises, in all of his forms – personal and transpersonal – and may we be guided by his wisdom qualities down that pathway that he and all beings have laid out for us.

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Sera Beak: Red Hot and Holy, Part 1

Tami Simon speaks with Sera Beak, a Harvard-trained scholar of comparative world religions and a dynamic new voice in modern spirituality. Sera spent years traveling the world to study with Sufi dervishes, Tibetan monks, Indian yogis, mystics, shamans, and more. She is the author of The Red Book, and her new book with Sounds True is Red Hot and Holy: A Heretic’s Love Story. In the first part of a two-part interview, Tami speaks with Sera about what she sees as the difference between spirit and soul, and what she learned during her own “red night of the soul.” She also speaks about the phenomenon of spiritual bypassing, and why she always sees the divine in shades of red. (60 minutes)

Self-care and selflessness: a contradiction?

In the research for the dissertation I’m writing on the ways in which spiritual belief and practice can serve a defensive function, I’ve come across the writings of Miles Neale, a Buddhist-oriented psychologist in New York City (who I ended up interviewing as part of the study). Miles recently sent me an article he just published which covers an important area in the ongoing dialogue between psychological/ therapeutic and contemplative approaches to health and well-being. One of the hot topics in contemporary psychospiritual inquiry has to do with the understanding of the “self,” i.e. its ontological status, what it is, how if at all it might be worked with, and how practitioners might be able to reconcile self-development/ self-love/ self-acceptance/ self-care with the contemplative discoveries of no-self, selflessness, shunyata, and so forth.

During our free video series on the Self-Acceptance Project, more than one participant asked, “So what is this ‘self’ that we’re accepting, anyway?” Or, in other words, how can we accept a self that isn’t actually there upon investigation? All fair questions, of course.

I’ll leave you with the first part of Miles’ paper below. If you find it interesting, you can head over to his website to download the entire piece, which I quite enjoyed. Or just go straight to Miles’ website and read the entire article.

Self-care and Selflessness: A Contradiction?

The nearly half century dialogue between Buddhism and Western psychology has created a potential forum for a mutually enriching exchange. It has also raised productive questions about the points of overlap and dissonance between the two traditions. One of the most apparent differences is in the way these disciplines relate to the self.  Psychotherapy emphasizes genuine care for the self and its feelings, needs and wounds, helps to restore a continuity in the sense of self when it begins to fragment and investigates how self-denial creates profound psychic disturbance and dysfunction in relationships.  Buddhist meditation establishes attentional equipoise, facilitates direct observation of the impermanent, insubstantial nature of the self and culminates in an intuitive insight of emptiness that ends the habits of self-reification and self-grasping at the root of suffering.

Is there a contradiction between the goals of self-care and selflessness, and what does each tradition stand to learn from the other’s approach?

“Spiritual bypassing”: spiritual practice as pain-avoidance 

Psychotherapy encourages meditators to take a more care-ful approach to their traumatic wounds rather than circumventing them.  I’ve frequently observed meditators devaluing their own personal traumas in pursuit of more exalted and seductive spiritual virtues like the bodhisattva ideal of saving others from suffering. Likewise, some yogis aim for mystical heights of ecstatic bliss hoping to transcend their ordinary human fragility, only to come crashing down to their painful reality once practice is over. This phenomenon of using spiritual tools and teachings to avoid psychological issues, traumatic wounds, and unmet developmental tasks occurs so frequently, that in the early 1980’s Dr. John Welwood coined the term “spiritual bypassing” to characterize this tendency. Frequent scandals involving so-called spiritual masters who have had inappropriate relations with their students as well as students who see little psychological progress after years of spiritual practice stand as testaments to the deleterious effects of neglecting basic human needs. Indeed it may be possible to have profound spiritual insights, and at the same time neglect other areas of our complex being – including emotional, psychological, interpersonal or somatic dimensions. If we don’t take all of these dimensions seriously and incorporate them into “the work” of human development – then the shadow-side of our split identity can reemerge outside of conscious awareness, when we least expect it and with painful consequences.

Common forms of spiritual bypassing

Spiritual bypassing occurs when we unconsciously attempt to avoid pain, shame and the unpleasant side of our humanity and can manifests in a myriad of ways. The most common forms I have observed in myself as well as in my clinical work with yogis and meditators include: when fear of rejection, fear of burdening others or conflict-avoidance masquerade as being easygoing, patient and accommodating; when co-dependency poses as care-giving and compassion; when guru-devotion leads to subservience and conceals unresolved childhood dynamics such as over-idealization or fear of reprisal; when the spiritual virtue of detachment is misunderstood as disinterest and one attempts to avoid pain by disconnecting from feelings and relationships; when spiritual success and accomplishment end up reinforcing narcissism and the very inflated self-images they were designed to see through; when ultimate truths such as selflessness and emptiness are misunderstood and privileged over relative truths and one consequently falls into the nihilistic extreme of self-denial or apathy. All of these examples share one thing in common; they are unconscious adaptations of pain-avoidance concealed in the fabric of spiritual practice.  Without a skilled objective observer such as a therapist or teacher to alert us, we can miss our unconscious attempts at bypassing, just as we do the blindspot in a rearview mirror.

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