Bernard Glassman: Bear witness. Buddhism as a committed life, edition steinrich 2012 Bernard Glassman, Zen master, and author, lives and teaches an extraordinary Buddhist practice. We are used to thinking about meditation seminars to retreat to places of silence and tranquility, involving external offers ideal conditions the participating to get inside to rest. Not that Bernard Glassman: he goes with his retreats deliberately places where misery was experienced or will, and he wants to transform his work. The retreats in Auschwitz-Birkenau are a major challenge for all involved, because none of us can deny the deep painful experiences that have happened, there.
Especially since many participating have a personal concern. But succeeds Glassman and others with his courage, his determination and his compassion, to look at the suffering, to recognize and transform. He reported how these retreats will expire and what experiences he and many participants have, in the book. It is very touching to read, such as the people in Auschwitz feel first pure terror and in the course of the retreat, healing happens. One evening, a Frenchman said that, what moved the hearts of many participants and participants. Michel Dubois had lost his relatives here.
The visit to this place was a sad and painful re-encounter with these people for him. But with the growing pains, which he felt was also his joy and love. He said he got the feeling of the souls who resided at this place, love go out. And this is indeed: love radiates from Auschwitz and Birkenau. This love has brought us together here. The differences that existed between us, no longer separated us. The initial silence and the feelings of fear and anger had turned into harmony, humor and a sense of deep appreciation of ourselves and all other attendees. We were a family become “, we read in the part about Auschwitz. The Strassenretreats are another part of his practice. This means that he is with a group of people for a certain period of time on the road goes, there lives, begs and stayed in homeless shelters. When he started to build apartments for the homeless and to provide them with work opportunities, he wanted to learn unity with the people on the street. To do so he had to have lived however, even on the road. How these retreats run, what it means to live, what the patient is experiencing and how they feel treated as outcasts, deliberately on the road of which Glassman writes very impressively. And we know how he founded the peacemaker order as the order of the peace philanthropy and what its goals are and how he and the participants put it. It is a book by someone who lives what he teaches, going deep and even with humor. Glassman can press down never from suffering, but he’s looking for ways, so it can heal and transform. There are unusual ways of practice that can work but also unusual healing. In addition, they are never out of touch, but always quite suitable for everyday use.
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