Bible-scholar-turned-Buddhist Neil of The New Heretics blog is sick and tired of the self-help ethos that drips into dharma talks and sangha chatter. He finds it downright emasculating, and judging from a few of the sympathetic comments that follow his post, a few women have been likewise put off.
From Neil’s June 30 post:
Tonight in my Sangha marked yet another in a now long-running series of dharma talks that are really just self-help books wrapped in a bit of meditation and the occasional quote from some Buddhist text…. Books like: How Buddhism Can Help You Get Over Past Hurts. How Mindfulness Can Help You Lose Weight. How Meditation Can Heal Past Family Wounds. How Buddhism Can Heal the Wounds of Daddy Not Being There Enough. How Meditation Can Help You Get Over Not Having A Prom Date.
Tonight the topics in the discussion ranged from how someone is afraid they are fat, or another that they are not as smart as their sister or another girl, how someone is afraid they are not as good looking as the next girl…
I forgot to mention, he’s pretty funny, too. Read the entire post here. He leaves us with something worth our while to consider, too.