Seeing inside

This is an excerpt from Krista Tippett's wonderful interview & Q & A session with Joan Halifax on On Being, first broadcast on Jan. 10, 2013.

"[W]ith this massive secularization that we're experiencing now and skepticism, it has separated us from our own spirituality. And I'm not a very sectarian anything, if you know what I'm saying. OK, I do Buddhist practices and so on and so forth, but I'm not a sectarian Buddhist. What I am, though, is someone who wants to help people see inside and there are many paths to that.

Our churches provide a path, our synagogues provide a path, our great literature and art provides a path, but mostly I believe that we've turned our vision to being so superficial and outward. There's a potential for a new kind of enlightenment in our time and that is, I think, a yearning that many of us experience as we see the world distancing itself from its own heart. So I don't feel hopeless or futile. I'm very interested. I'm so glad I lived this long because my superficial study of enlightenment, for example, in the Western world leads me to believe that we have tremendous potential to realize in these coming decades.

I just don't want to say it's a downhill slope, in other words [laugh], if you know what I mean. No, I just think, if you look at complex dynamical systems, we're on a fascinating breakdown and what we know about complex dynamical systems is that living systems — and we're in this robust living system and we've seen eras. You know, we can look back through history.

We're in an era of great breakdown, environmentally and socially and psychologically. And when systems break down, the ones who have the resilience to actually repair themselves, they move to a higher order of organization. And I think that this is characterized by something the complexity theorists call robustness, that we can anticipate both a time of great robustness, which we're in, with tremendous potential to wake up and take responsibility. And, at the same time, we're in a lot of difficulties and we need resilience to make our way through this change.

. . .

So you can have a five-minute [meditation] and it can really produce a nice effect. But we also know that dose makes a difference, so try the five, then go to 10 and then 20, then you might find an hour and then you might want to actually sort of take the plunge. But also, be very mindful of what is appropriate for you. Respect your boundaries, be sure you're with a qualified person because, I tell you, to stop in this world is to create the conditions where a lot of unusual experiences can rise up."

Links to the podcast & transcript are here. There's also a wonderful guided meditation, what Ms. Halifax prefers to call an intervention.

I love the idea "Let the breath sweep your mind."