We say “Mother Earth,” acknowledging “the feminine” energy of our planet which gives birth to all life, as a mother gives birth to her children. This mother earth is now being rapidly degraded and destroyed by a crisis of climate caused by human-created runaway technologies. While it may be obsolete to assign certain aspects of nature or the world to either masculine or feminine energies, that is how the mythological viewpoint of the ancient world saw it. If earth is the mother, the feminine, then could the forces destroying it be, in a mythological sense, attributed to the masculine? The … Read More
Author: lewrich
Buddhist Approach to Disagreement
It was the summer of 1971. I was living at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center—the first Zen monastery in America. Its founder and resident teacher, Shunryu Suzuki, was a Zen master or Roshi from Japan who had come to America to teach meditation to Americans, mostly young. One of those young Americans was Richard, well-known among us as a non-stop talker and a fervent proselytizer of brown rice as the perfect spiritual food.
One afternoon I came across Suzuki Roshi and Richard in the courtyard, and Richard was, as usual, talking animatedly. “Wouldn’t you agree, Suzuki Roshi, that brown … Read More
Buddha: From Warrior to Peaceful Monk
When most people think of Buddhism, their first associations are probably of meditation or peacefulness. These associations are not incorrect, but they are not the whole story. Siddhartha Gautama, a clan prince of 5th century B.C. India, was indeed a world-renowned spiritual leader known as the Buddha, but what is less well known is that according to scriptural accounts of his life, he was born into a ruling warrior caste and as a young man lived a privileged existence “wholly given over to pleasure.” He was also a warrior, “surpassing the prowess of the most expert archers of the … Read More
Deconstructing Language of Maleness
My focus today is on one phrase from the conventional language of maleness: “Be a man.” I don’t remember if anyone ever explicitly said this to me. I don’t remember my father saying it, or my teachers or P.E. coaches. But I’ve heard it all my life; It’s in the very air I breathe–part of the landscape of male language. And it is loaded with coded, subterranean meaning, beyond the explicit meaning of the words. It doesn’t just mean “be a person of male gender.” That’s the least of it. The phrase reverberates with patriarchy and privilege. From that perspective … Read More
The Final Mountain–My New Book on Aging for Men
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog on this website—several months, in fact. During that time I’ve been hard at work on my new book, whose working title is now The Final Mountain: Aging with Honor and Dignity: A Guide for Men. One mission of this book is to strengthen intuition and emotion in aging men, and help them redefine what it means to be a man in the last third of life.
This new book follows on my 2012 book Aging as a Spiritual Practice. That book was … Read More
The Decades of Aging
The process of aging is not a smooth, continuous trajectory from youth to old age. It happens in several distinct, identifiable steps or stages. These stages are actually demarcated by significant life events—the last child leaving home, a promotion, retirement—but colloquially and emotionally we tend to think of aging’s stages as decades: our fifties, the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, and beyond. A birthday with a zero—my God, I’m fifty!—is a major, often bittersweet, signpost. While everyone’s path of aging is unique, each decade has characteristics common to most people in them.
In my book-in-process Men Aging Well, I have … Read More
Who Am I As a Man?
My upcoming book MEN AGING WELL springs from two premises: first, that men and women experience aging differently, and second, that to understand men’s aging we need to ask the question, “What does it mean to be a man?” Men aging today—those fifty and over—were raised at a time when boys were socialized according to traditional gender roles. There were certain catch phrases—taunts even—that boys heard constantly. I certainly did.
“Boys don’t cry.”
“Don’t be a sissy.”
“Man up.”
One of the salient dramas in today’s society is a questioning and re-envisioning of gender roles, at the same time that … Read More
A Contemplative Inquiry About Aging
In connection with my upcoming book MEN AGING WELL I have created a contemplative inquiry which I call Every Breath, New Chances as a way for men (or women) to move beneath the surface of thinking about aging to the “subterranean river” of emotion and intuition where the deeper changes and transformations of growing older actually happen. The name of the inquiry, “Every Breath, New Chances” points out that while we may imagine that our waking self is a fixed, static entity, in reality we are changing all the time. Every breath is a chance to re-invent ourselves anew. This … Read More
AGING FOR MEN: Every Breath, New Chances
My previous book on aging, AGING AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, was published 6 years ago and approached aging as the spiritual culmination of our whole life’s journey. The book addressed aging from a Buddhist point of view, and each of its chapters concluded with a “contemplative exercise” drawn from my experience as a Buddhist meditation teacher. Some of these exercises are available on MY WEBSITE as audio or video teachings, and in these blogs I will sometimes refer to them.
EVERY BREATH, NEW CHANCES, my new book on aging, is focused on men’s aging issues. Its approach is … Read More
New Book on Aging is Coming!
I am most pleased to announce that my new book on Men and Aging, tentatively titled Every Breath, New Chances: A Guide to Aging for Men will be published in 2020 by North Atlantic Books. This book follows on my award-winning title Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser, published six years ago. That book was a first-of-genre approach to aging from a spiritual perspective, drawing on my many years as a Buddhist meditation teacher. In researching Aging as a Spiritual Practice, I discovered that men and women tend to experience aging differently, and … Read More