A Path With Heart: The Classic Guide Through The Perils And Promises Of Spiritual Life

In general these problems arise when spirituality ignores or denies our own humanity.

Insight Meditation and similar Buddhist practices can lead to quietude, to withdrawal from and fear of the world. The emptiness taught in Zen and nondualist Vedanta can lead to a related problem, to being disconnected and ungrounded. Any form of idealistic, otherworldly teaching that sees life on earth as a dream or focuses on higher realms can lea

When Soto Zen founder Dogen said, “A Zen master’s life is one continuous mistake,” he was pointing out how mistakes and openhearted learning from them are central to spiritual life.

After ten years of focusing on emotional work and the development of the heart, I realized I had neglected my body. Like my emotions, my body had been included in my early spiritual practice in only a superficial way. I learned to be quite aware of my breathing and work with the pains and sensations in my body, but mostly I had used my body as an a

These were the imitative and self-absorbed qualities that Chogyam Trungpa called “spiritual materialism.”

idealistic and romantic. People tried to use spirituality to “get high” and to experience extraordinary states of consciousness.

the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. Here around us always is the mystery.

A fourth quality of spiritual maturity is immediacy. Spiritual awakening is found in our own life here and now. In the Zen tradition they say, “After the ecstasy, the laundry.” Spiritual maturity manifests itself in the immanent as well as the transcendent. It seeks to allow the divine to shine through our every action. Altered states, extraordinar

Buddhism enlightenment is called the unconditioned, that which shines naturally when the heart is not entangled in the forces of grasping, hatred, and ignorance. When the heart is free of these forces, true intimacy and love exist.