This is an inspiring piece at the NY Times Magazine. 

“I felt saved by Zen,” he told me. “The Humpty Dumpty image is corny, but it’s right. Meditation put me back together. It helped me overcome the split between the body and the mind. The question that remained was what to do with emotions and the self.”

The story of a man confronting his buddhism in conjunction with his emotional baggage despite being a Zen master.

If he hadn’t been so distraught, he might have laughed at the absurdity of it: a Zen master in the waiting room of a psychoanalyst. He was a connoisseur of contradictions, an unsentimental man with a “Zen noir” temperament and an un-self-sparing wit. “Anywhere I hang myself is home,” he liked to say.

via Enlightenment Therapy – NYTimes.com.

My wife is going through tremendous physical discomfort right now as she is 6 months pregnant and has nausea throughout. She has a tendency to experience a great deal of illness and pain when not pregnant as well and it has in the past aggravated me to a great extent. She has also had bouts with depression as many people do in this world.

Today she had what we would call a hissy fit – twice. She took out on me her hypersensitivity and tendency to get overly stressed about any issue. Her attachment to emotions is very strong and it comes out in a very emotionally violent manner.

When I can see what is happening, I want to engage her. First I want to defend my ego by fighting back against her. Then, I have begun to be able to stay calm and not react to her and I can see her ego rise into an even greater frenzy and getting angrier. I try not to show emotion or reaction in my non-reaction, but I never fail to be amazed at how rapidly she is capable of exploding into venomous anger. My silence accelerates that. If I try to just speak calmly to her at the moment, then that too explodes the situation. I have to allow her to ride it out. but it is I can tell you exceedingly difficult to do.

Buddhist Temple Built from Beer Bottles : TreeHugger

Fifty years ago the Heineken Beer company looked at reshaping its beer bottle to be useful as a building block. It never happened, so Buddhist monks from Thailand’s Sisaket province took matters into their own hands and collected a million bottles to build the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple.

Its no secret that I am an avid follower of politics and am a very biased Democrat in terms of my political leanings. The more I practice, though, the more I find myself chilling out the fierceness in my points of view. That is not to say that I do not still get angry or scared or just emotional about politics, but I am realizing more and more the true import of my views versus reality. Its easier to see, I guess.

As I interact with those with whom I would previously have been angrily conversing, I realize that they live in an entirely different reality than that in which I live. When I hear them put forth a point of view, I am amazed and almost fearful that they can see things the way they do and that they don’t naturally see things the way I do through my lenses. It’s a simple intelligent analysis after all. How could they think anything else?

The more I see my attitudes and opinions for what they are – the ego grasping at straws for relevance – the more I can see the insanity of our existence, belief systems, and delusional behavior. Certainly I am not rid of my own, but I can see mine now whereas before I would plunge my existence into hateful rhetoric.

What becomes crystal clear is the amazing power of the ego to transcend our true reality.