About the Soulfull Buddhist

Years ago, during a week-long arts and science appreciation event at my university, one of my gracious faculty members invited a Buddhist nun to speak as one representative for the World Religions course we offered. As I sat in the auditorium, listening to her words of wisdom and insight, something both visceral and cerebral overcame me. I felt like she knew the struggles I was facing after experiencing some medical trauma that had led to my experience with depression at that time. Moreover, she mentioned something about seeing beyond conventional reality, which surprisingly resonated with the critical skills I was trying to teach my students. As a result of that transformative presentation on Buddhism, I began looking closely at why I was suffering from depression and how I was using "things" to alleviate said depression. I tried to use retail therapy to make myself feel better, only to realize all the luxuries in the world would not put an end to my depression. In fact, I felt worse because I was spending money on stuff that had no real meaning. At some point, I decided to become a minimalist and referred to Zen Buddhism as a gateway into my early practice of letting go of things I didn't need. I also started "meditating" using, of all things, the Wii Plus gaming console. If you can find it, there was a neat yoga meditation game that one could play to help one relax. I learned many years later, when I practiced with a BIPOC Insight Meditation Society sangha, that the Wii game actually taught me how to do a body scan during meditation. My mind was blown! Nevertheless, around 2012, I began fully embracing Zen minimalism and reading Thich Nhat Hanh to understand the practice of Buddhism.  

However, it was 2015-2016 when I fully began to embrace Theravada Buddhism. I had just lost my only brother, my mother, and my father; I was devastated. What I now call the "catastrophe" of losing my three loved ones in a span of a year left me deeply hurt, aggrieved, and suffering from PTSD. All three losses were deeply felt, but the loss of my mother was genuinely traumatic. As I dealt with my grief, I had to find a way to deal with what my therapist would eventually diagnose as PTSD. During that time, I adopted walking meditation to help me get out of the house. It was a long, hard road for a while because PTSD doesn't just go away. Trauma alters your brain, and, believe me, my mind was altered in ways I never knew it would be. Everything and everybody could trigger me, so I started isolating myself, which meant unintentionally deepening my depression. Fortunately, though, during those extended moments of isolation, I picked up The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. His book helped me see that I was alive before, but was not living. As a matter of fact, I wasn't who I thought I was at all. I thought I was a woman making decisions on my own, navigating the world with intelligence, and negotiating life with complete awareness.

Singer's work prompted me to delve deeper into understanding how the mind can be quite deceiving if one is unaware. Yet, I didn't understand how to gain control of my thoughts because I thought I was already in control of them. As an intellectual by trade, I spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about my thinking. Yet, as we all do, I was suppressing things I didn't realize I was suppressing. Fortunately, I soon picked up Thich Nhat Hanh's The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation and read it in under three days while teaching a 4-4 load! I recognized the importance of the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, mindfulness, and meditation, but what I did not fully appreciate were the depths of insight (Vipassana) meditation. It was after reading S.N. Goenka's Meditation Now: Inner Peace Through Inner Wisdom that I began to realize things I hadn't before, which deepened my focus on insight meditation, causes and conditions, and awakening.

Consequently, after much more research and reading, my practice is now rooted in Theravada Buddhism. After exploring and closely examining the various lineages of Buddhism, I find that Theravada Buddhism, also known as the "Teachings of the Elders," resonates with how I experience life and, thus, live in the world. You will also find that I have a deep appreciation of Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism. While I believe in "one dharma," I am more committed to practicing insight meditation in the Theravada tradition as a philosophical approach to living and dying.

With love for all and malice toward none,

Teresa