The Yoga of Christ

This has  been a long overdue post. My apologies.  This is part two to Philip G. McLemore’s previous article titled Mormon Mantras: A Journey of Spiritual Transformation from Sunstone Magazine.

Like the last one, this is a long read, about 16 pages, but again, well worth it. In this one he goes more in depth about how the teachings of Christ really are like Yoga, and how you can use Yoga to live the teachings of Christ and to commune with God through them.

As his tagline reads:  “Is it possible that the teachings of Jesus are so comprehensive they encompass the core spiritual principles of both East and West?”

Click the link below to download a PDF copy of the article:

The Yoga of Christ

The Dharma of Each Other

As a Buddhist teacher, author and founder of the Upaya Zen Centre, Roshi Joan Halifax has dedicated her life to service.  Christopher Mccann listens to her stories.

Photo by: Meridel Rubenstein

I am sitting with Roshi Joan Halifax. She is propped up on pillows, her eyes steady and deep despite the pain in her body. She has slipped on a wet bathroom floor and broken her hip in four different places. She emerged from surgery with a certain equanimity, coming back to do her work in the world with the new addition of a steel plate and screws in her hip.

It’s been close to two years since we’ve seen each other, and we are happy and easy in each other’s presence. I have brought her a picture of her dog, Dominga, which she raised to her forehead like a picture of a saint before placing it on the table beside her. After spending thirty hours strapped to a gurney in an emergency room, she was moved to a private room, where we are sitting when she tells me this story:

“Imagine you’re flying in an airplane, with the wide, shimmering expanse of the sea below you. You rest comfortably in your seat, watching sunlight glint off the waves.

“Out the window you see a smaller plane come into view, flying parallel to yours and just below. There is a moment’s pause, and then the smaller plane begins to throttle back and forth, dipping and diving. And then suddenly, from the side of the plane hidden from your view, a man falls out and starts hurtling, end over end, toward the sea.

“You gasp, pressing your face closer to the glass, feeling a flash of fear course through your body. Entering into the man’s fall with him, you feel it from his body, see the ocean rushing toward you through his terrified eyes. Then with a violent splash the man plunges headfirst into the water.

“And you are still strapped in your seat, hundreds of feet above him, hardly able to breathe.”

I lean forward in my chair toward her. Where is this story going? It’s shocking and strange to me to imagine a man falling to his death, but then Roshi Joan reveals one vital detail.

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Mormon Mantras: A Journey of Spiritual Transformation

Sattva brought to my attention a wonderful article that was written for Sunstone magazine titled “Mormon Mantras: A Journey of Spiritual Transformation” by Philip G. McLemore. She wanted me to share it with you all here as she felt that in this article he eloquently explained the differences between spirituality and Mormonism. I would have to agree with her. It was a wonderful read and very well written indeed.

It’s not a short article by any means (12 pages in magazine form) but well worth the read. Although I won’t post the entire article contents here due to it’s length, I will provide a link for you to download it directly from Sunstone. So please take the time, when you can, to give it a read and post your thoughts! Enjoy!

Click the link below to download a PDF copy of the article:

Mormon Mantras: A Journey of Spiritual Transformation

Nothing Holy: A Zen Primer

Nothing Holy: A Zen Primer
By Norman Fischer

Most of us associate Zen with black robes and rock gardens, but do we really know what it is? Norman Fischer takes us through the principles and practices of the major schools of Zen.

1. A Zen Wave

Like ocean waters, intellectual currents are always in motion. They churn up organic matter from below, creating and extending powerful nutritional mixtures. When groups of people at a particular historical moment begin to experience the world in a particular way, naturally they meet and talk, ponder, read and write. They are open to diverse influences. Eventually the energy of their discourse crests and breaks like a sudden wave, and soon people around them find themselves affected. So cultures mix, dissolve and change.

In this way, a Zen wave broke on North American shores in the middle of the twentieth century. It probably didn’t begin as a Zen wave at all, but rather as a reflex to the unprecedented violence the first part of the century had seen. After two devastating world wars, small groups of people here and there in the West were beginning to realize, as if coming out of a daze, that the modernist culture they had depended on to humanize and liberalize the planet wasn’t doing that at all. Instead it was bringing large-scale suffering and dehumanization. What was the alternative?

In the early 1950’s, D.T. Suzuki, the great Japanese Zen scholar and practitioner, arrived at Columbia University in New York to teach some classes on Zen. Suzuki was a magnet for the yearning that was at that time still underground. The people who met him, attended his classes or were otherwise influenced by his visit constitute a Who’s Who of American cultural innovation at that period. Alan Watts, whose popular books on Zen were hugely influential, was there. So was John Cage, who from then on wrote music based on chance operations, on the theory that being open to the present moment, without conscious control, was the essence of Suzuki’s—and Zen’s—message.

Cage influenced Merce Cunningham, the dancer-choreographer, who in turn influenced many others in the performance art field. The Zen-derived notion of spontaneous improvisation became the essence of bebop, the post-war jazz movement. For Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and the other Beat-generation poets, Zen was a primary source, a sharp tool for prying the lid off literary culture as they knew it.

Within ten years, lively Japanese Zen masters who, from their side of the Pacific, had also been dreaming a Zen wave, were coming to America to settle. With the 1960’s and the coming of age of a new generation radicalized by the Vietnam war and psychotropic drugs, what had been churning underneath for decades broke out in a glorious and exhilarating spray. The first Zen centers in America were bursting with students willing to make serious commitments right away. It was an exciting and confusing time, perhaps unprecedented in the history of world religions.

I was part of this Zen wave. The cultural undercurrents I have been describing took place during my formative years. A student of literature and religion, I was sensitive enough to feel the brokenness that lay under the placid social veneer of the American culture I was raised in. So when I discovered Zen in the writings of D.T. Suzuki in the late 1960’s, I was dumbstruck. Here was exactly what I needed, a completely new way of experiencing the world. The compromising, experiential and immediate search for meaning that Zen proposed, without need of doctrine or belief, struck a chord in me. Like so many, I wasn’t looking for a new religion: I wanted a way to blast through the options that seemed available to me. I wanted real freedom. Zen promised this.

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