Shambhala Publications published Down to Earth Dharma: Insight Meditation to Awaken the Heart by Rebecca Bradshaw in November 2024.
Written in an inclusive fashion and interspersed with Bradshaw’s personal stories and experiences, Down to Earth Dharma takes us on a journey of engaging the typically “yang”-based Buddhist practices with a “yin” approach. Within each section of this journey, we are offered a few self-reflective questions, all delivered as if we are in friendly counsel with a teacher giving her class. This is no short read, however the book is divided into four parts, each subdivided into what I am going to call “lessons”—although this is far from a workshop manual—and subdivided again until we have bite-sized reflections. Each “lesson,” just like a class, can be walked away from to reflect and practice, before returning for the next lesson.
As an American, Bradshaw makes the pretty important point that this book has the inevitable leaning into Western convert communities that began with the spiritual seekers of the 1960s and 1970s who returned from their Eastern explorations and established centers in the United States. I could feel this leaning, especially toward the end of the book. However I felt it more as a woman. I wasn’t sure where Bradshaw was going to go with this book, even though I knew it was aiming to reframe masculinized Buddhism in some capacity.
For some, this book will feel obvious. For others, it will feel like permission. For many, it will indeed be a reframing of “escaping” to “embodying” practices of Buddhism that won’t have been considered before.
Generations have taught us that we need to escape the body, that the body is flawed somehow, and that the mind is dominant and the gateway to liberation. What has been implied and ingrained is that the feeling body, the yin-ness of experience, is wrong and that the yang-ness is correct. We have had the feminine demonized out of significance, out of relevance. A bifurcated reality in which one is to be conquered.
It has been more than 2,500 years since the Buddha’s time and yet we are still in the quagmire of imbalance; of the subjugation and, at times, brutal hands on the population who birth life; of anyone who doesn’t adhere to the cultural expectations of the day.
So Bradshaw has taken Buddhism 101 and offered a way for us to drop into our heart-mind.
Bradshaw’s “lessons” help us move out of intellectualization and into the feeling body; into the intimacy of relating with the information-field around us, as words can only take us so far. As an obvious question, I ask you: what is love? Again, words will only go so far. You only really know when you feel it. And to feel the feeling is one way to move out of the conceptual mind, where our daily expectations remove us from direct experience.
In trying to structure our lives and fill every moment constructively, we lose the magic of sinking and melting into the timelessness of each moment. This is what our author is pointing out. And I agree, however, “wasting time” is also a privilege in an industrialized society where the concept of “time is money” applies. Patriarchal paradigm as this may be, those who can sky-gaze and daydream is a privilege for those members of society free to do so—oftentimes children who are then berated for not focusing. Of course, in reality, we all have a few minutes in our day when we can take a few moments, even if it’s in the bathroom, yet many of us have become so indoctrinated with the idea that idle time equates to being lazy, that it can be difficult to step outside of that mental prison. It’s the prison that tells us that we must achieve something, that attainment is the only function of our precious time. And while it’s true that our time in this particular body is precious and finite, and procrastination isn’t helpful, letting go of relentless striving is like switching off the cortisol switch.
Speaking of cortisol, I also appreciated that this book is mildly interspersed with some contemporary understandings, such as neurobiology and our autonomic system. I’ve studied enough to know what Bradshaw’s saying about perception and brain energy (for example) to be true.
There is also, at last, an upsurge of educated information about things as obvious as women’s health rather than “bikini health,” which has been predicated upon the male system aside from reproduction. This means that so many other aspects of what it means to be female, things as obvious as hormone cycles, have been missed or even ignored—and this imbalance has been all-pervasive; in health, society, and religion, including Buddhism. What would happen if the teachings were looked at again but with wider, balanced eyes? I could make an argument that Buddhist practice adhered to the social norms of old, requiring the typical male to conform to ascetic precepts, as his mind and physical impulses were inherently untamed, but I can already hear the walls of repudiation being built by those not liking that thought.
So we learn about letting go, something discussed by Bradshaw. The challenge of letting go, of course, is rather than striving to achieve something, we risk spiritual bypassing—burying our darkness thinking that we’ve unloaded it. Yet one has to be mindful not to become self-deprecating, nor sanctimoniously privileged from a cultural-centric reality bubble. We have to love ourselves and others. Bradshaw reminds us that metta meditation is about seeing good in ourselves as well as in others. An important point in today’s insecure world.
And this is where a good community comes in. Community keeps us in check as well as helping us to strive. Sadly, we’ve lost our trust in the support of others as self-sufficiency has become the overriding paradigm. And this is part of what Bradshaw is helping us to overcome: in embodying ourselves, we’re connecting to both the Earth and to each other.
Empathy and compassion are, or should be, fundamental attributes of human nature and society. However, it is my thought that empathy without action is as useful as a paper cup in a desert. There is also much talk of letting go and accepting what is. In my experience, both are correct yet not always at the same time. And teachers rarely seem to acknowledge this. It is one of the failings of spiritual teachings.
Let me explain. I have let go of anger during periods of my life—for example when my husband, the father of my children, came out as gay and started down a trajectory that I don’t need to go into here, I released my anger. I gave it to the cosmos and felt the weight fall from my being.
Roll forward a few years and a different life, our pet bunny escaped outside. He belonged to one of my daughters who was away at school, but my younger daughter was with me as we were looking for it. I was ready to let go of the possibility of finding it: it was a small black bunny out in the countryside. It was his karma now. His new adventure. That’s what I told myself, anyway. Truth is, I was giving up. I was also getting bored, if I’m even more honest. My daughter implored us to keep going. We did. And, lo and behold, there was the bunny. Not only found, but tangled in thorny brambles in a ditch. He would have surely died had we not found him. Was that his karma or would it have been the result of my laziness disguised as “letting go”?
My daughter taught me a valuable lesson that day. Don’t give up. And also that “letting go” requires discernment.
Both are true at the same time.
Integrating apparently disparate expressions reminds me of an interesting approach Bradshaw takes when discussing when Mara sends obstacles to discourage the Buddha’s awakening. They are representations of psychological integration. In Jungian terms, he is meeting his shadow side and alchemizing it so that it no longer has power over him. Framed like this, we walk away with a different mindset.
And this is what Bradshaw aims to do through this book: not only to reframe the yang approach, but to integrate it so that we walk away no longer trying to escape our living-ness, but to be it in every emoting cell of our being-ness.
See more
Down to Earth Dharma: Insight Meditation to Awaken the Heart (Shambala Publications)
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