Susan's Place Logo

News:

Visit our Discord server  and Wiki

Main Menu

Robina Courtin

Started by melissa90299, August 14, 2007, 09:54:25 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

melissa90299

  •  

melissa90299

Pema, oh, you mean my best girlfriend's mother-in-law? That Pema?

  •  

Smith

Thanks Melissa90299, this is great information, especially for me :D :D :D
  •  

Padma

I've been an ordained Buddhist (though in a non-monastic order) for 14 years now, been trying to practise for 20 years. My experience is that it's really easy to use Buddhism (just like just about anything) in a way that shores up your sense of fixed identity rather than making it more fluid. And that's not the fault of Buddhism, it's just the natural human tendency not to want to change except absolutely on our own terms! I certainly spent many years using it to hide from myself (just as I used being "Jewish", and then "gay" to do the same before that). It's what makes it possible for me to laugh at myself when I see myself desperately looking for a term that describes me (I do like this niizh manidoowag thing at the moment...)

Nowadays, I can let it help me have a more permeable approach to my gender, my sexuality, my sense of self in general. And I can even, on a good day, have a more creative response to the fact that the onset of PTSD last year has meant I can't meditate in the way I've been used to doing for the last 2 decades, and that this doesn't make me a Bad Buddhist™, it just makes me have to be a more flexible one in order to find things I can do, instead of worrying about what I can't do. So it's a Good Thing.

I've just arrived on this forum for the first time tonight, and I'm heartened to see people not being too caught up in identity wars (I've had so much of that from being bisexual around the "gay community", and in the poly scene, and etc. etc., and even "brand loyalty" amongst Buddhists).
Womandrogyne™
  •  

rar

  •  

Padma

Whoops, I was still getting the hang of this forum yesterday and posted this in the wrong thread (I didn't realise Next meant next thread, rather than next page of this thread).

So my post above was meant to be on the Do You Identify as being Buddhist? thread, sorry.

As for "identity wars", that's just my term for when people get overattached to their "label" (as something that gives them a sense of security through a "group") and then pick fights about who does or does not belong to the in-group. Done it myself, as I said!
Womandrogyne™
  •