I’ve received much mail about Chip Brown’s recent New York Times article, Enlightenment Therapy. In it we learn of a Zen Master who loses himself and then can not reconnect to his life. It’s a great piece and a reminder of what attaching to non-attachment can do. It also shows us what happens when our practice is about escaping the life we are given instead of becoming truly, and fearlessly, intimate with what’s really going on.

What I got from my life in Zen is not what most people get or want from Zen. Most Zen students are samadhi junkies. They like the buzz. There’s a suppression of anger in Zen which is another kind of alienation. Sometimes it makes me sad. Teachers should point this out — how risky samadhi is from a psychological point of view.

He’s right here. Teachers that don’t point these pitfalls out risk misleading their students. I was fortunate. My teachers, one in particular, was very clear about how one avoids what he calls “Zen sickness.”

“Don’t attach to any experience or you’ll defile its teaching,” he’d say. “Don’t push any thing away. Don’t avoid. Don’t do anything except meet your life, right now.”

Bows, teach.

Louis Nordstrom, the subject of this piece had this to say of his experinece of reconnection to the world and his life:

“This abandoned life of mine is like the abandoned boy, and I am the mother I never had who returns to claim that life and embrace it. It is a source of great pathos to reflect that without the therapy experience I might have died without having been reunited with my life! And in that sense, without having truly lived.” He was not sad, he said. Nor in any way disenchanted with the way of Zen. What could be more Zen than to restore the relish of the particular life? What he felt was joy. Not the unbordered joy of enlightenment, but the vernal joy that comes after the wintry work of mourning: the joy of a man with a life of his own.

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