A Path With Heart

Confusion of selflessness with inner poverty can be especially difficult for women. In our male-dominated culture, a woman can grow up feeling that she doesn’t really count, that she will not amount to much in this man’s world, that a woman’s fate and work is not of value. This powerful conditioning can lead to an identity riddled with depression,

Understanding, freedom, and joy are the treasures that naming the demon of desire brings us. We discover that underneath unskillful desire is a deep spiritual longing for beauty, for abundance and completeness. Naming desire can lead us to discover this truest desire.

The Tibetan teacher Kalu Rinpoche puts it this way: You live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality, but you do not know this. When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing, and being nothing you are everything. That is all. Healing comes in touching this realm of nonseparation.

We must see that spirituality is a continual movement away from compartmentalization and separation and toward embracing all of life. We must especially learn the art of directing mindfulness into the closed areas of our life. When we do, we will face the patterns from personal history, the conditioning that shields us from the pains of the past. T

When we study Buddhist psychology, we discover that desire is divided into many categories. Most fundamentally these desires are then separated into painful desire and skillful desire, both aspects stemming from a neutral energy called the Will to Do. Painful desire involves greed, grasping, inadequacy, and longing. Skillful desire is born of this

the Buddha discovered what he called the Middle Way, a way not based on an aversion to the world, nor on attachment, but a way based on inclusion and compassion. The Middle Way rests at the center of all things, the one great seat in the center of the world. On this seat the Buddha opened his eyes to see clearly and opened his heart to embrace all.

He realized that awakening is never the product of force but arises through a resting of the heart and an opening of the mind.