I’ve often felt an affinity for the marginalized. It comes from an early place in my life of feeling marginalized myself — powerless or less important or unable to assert my own needs, because they were less valuable than those of others. And so when I encounter or come to understand some way others are […]
Continue reading →I spent a year teaching high school math at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison some 20 miles north of New York City. I was a graduate student in an M.Div. program, focusing in psychology and theology. Before graduate school, I had taught high school math for several years. I chose to teach math […]
Continue reading →When I first began studying depth psychology, I couldn’t stop thinking about my years of experience teaching math to high school students. It seemed to me then that there were overlaps between the methods and end goals of both teachers and therapists, and that teachers in particular could take a page or two out of the therapists’ playbook. On […]
Continue reading →On the meaning of the teaching of Origen of Alexandria, from his Of Tents and Wells. And so, contemplating in the Spirit these progressions, he calls them the “tents of Israel.” And true it is, when we make some progress in knowledge and gain some experience in such things, we know that when we have come to […]
Continue reading →As the story goes, Shakyamuni Buddha was a prince in northern India. Before his birth, it was prophesied that he was destined to become one of two things: a great political and military leader, or a great religious leader. His parents, the king and queen, hoped for their kindgon’s sake that it would be the former, and from […]
Continue reading →In my last post, I ended with Darlene Cohen on the benefits of facing our pain, rather than distracting from it or trying to push it away: …you begin to feel generous toward your own human tendency to be caught in the cycle of wanting what you can’t have and averting from what terrifies you: bitterness, […]
Continue reading →This year I am participating in a yearlong workshop at the Village Zendo called The Path of Awakening, focusing on Zen responses to the Others we create according to race, gender, sexual orientation, and able-bodiedness. We were assigned a reading by Zen teacher Darlene Cohen called “Mindfulness and Pain” and asked to consider an experience of pain. Mindful that […]
Continue reading →It’s snowing, a lot, everywhere, so this morning I was reading Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century German mystic (obviously). In the first installment of his Talks of Instruction, titled, “On True Obedience” he says this: True and perfect obedience is a virtue above all virtues, and there is no work however great it may be, that can […]
Continue reading →And we’re back. When I first started this blog in September I had pretty grand designs for what and how I was going to write here. Looking back, I think more often than not I was responding to some idea of what I should write. Because my work is teaching math in a progressive setting, […]
Continue reading →So I woke up thinking about the New World, because it’s Columbus Day. The big irony is that his New World was nothing new, that he didn’t discover anything because there were people there already. But because he saw it as New, and therefore open for the taking, the consequence he wrought for those people […]
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