한국여신학자협의회 나와 여신협 – 곽라분이 자문위원

(3) 한국여신학자협의회Korean Association of Women Theologians – Posts | Facebook

한국여신학자협의회Korean Association of Women Theologians

lgdt15 lOcgtofSricpbontlsoreedr  · 

<나와 여신협> – 곽라분이 자문위원

1989년 미국에서 귀국하자 이우정, 안상님 선생님 소개로 아시아 여성신학 교육원에서 여성신학세미나 참석하면서, 한국여신학자협의회의 회원이 되었다. 대전에 있는 한성신학대학에서 1년 강의를 했는데, 학내부정, 비리문제로 학생들의 소요가 있었다. 몇몇 교수들이 학생 데모를 선동했다는 죄목으로 학교에서 쫓겨났다. 그러나 우리는 가처분신청과, 법정투쟁 끝에 1년 후 나는 다시 복직을 했다.

내가 워싱톤에서 귀국할 때는 한국이 민주화가 이뤄지고, 사회정의가 살아있다고 생각했는데 완전한 착각이었다. 학내문제를 보면서 해직당한 좌절보다 우리의 부정의한 구조에 대한 실망과 좌절이 훨씬 컸다.

1년 쉬는 동안 나는 아예 서울로 이사를 했고, 여성학 세미나와 여신협활동에 더 열심히 참여하였다. “하나님의 발길에 채여” 여신협과 깊은 인연을 맺고 시대를 앞서가는 깨어 있는 여성들과 함께함을 하나님의 축복으로 생각한다

1년 후에 복직 후에도 여신협, 여성교회에 열심히 참여했다. 하나님은 나에게 뜻을 같이 하는 여성 동지들과 친교를 깊이 할 수 있는 기회를 주셨다. 1년 해직하는 동안 잃은 것보다 얻은 것이 많았다. 하나님께 감사했다.

여성세미나그룹은 2년에 걸쳐 열정적으로 토론하고 발표하고 친교를 나누면서 한국의 여성문제를 깊이 생각했다. 그러나 여성의 문제가 단순한 여성들의 문제 아니라 사회구조에 대한 근본적 질문과 연결되어 있음을 다시 깨닫게 되었다, 여신협을 통해서 여성운동에 제일 중요한 자매애(sisterhood)를 깊이 가졌다. 그리고 다른 단체와 연대(soliderity)하면서 사회의 정의, 평화, 생명운동을 함께한다는 것이 나에게는 학교애서 강의하는것보다, 더 보람을 느꼈다. 여신협이 진행하는 역사의 현장활동, 연구회, 세미나 등등 거의 빠지지 않고 거의 참여했다. "Paticipation is the Leaning"이라는 교육학에서는 중요한 이론이 있다. ‘참여가 곧 학습이고 배움’이라는 뜻이 아니겠는가. 참여는 내가 성장하는 순간이기도 하다.

나는 여성이 사회를 바꿀수 있는 힘이 있다는 확신을 가졌다. 이 시대 여성으로 태어나 여신협 동지들과 함께한다는 것을 하나님의 큰 축복으로 생각한다.

여신협과 함께한 세월이 30년 넘었다. 여신협은 40주년을 맞는다. 이제 우리는 성숙한 21세기를 살고 있다. 단순한 남녀간의 권리 차원이 아니라 여성의 체험과 통찰력이 살려지는, 평등하고, 인간적인 사회에 대한 비전을 확대해야 한다. 그러기 위해서 그동안 여신협은 노력해 왔고 내 자신도 함께 성장하고 익어가고 있다.

“인생락지심상(人生樂知心相)”이라는 맹자가 한 말이 생각난다. 인생의 즐거움은 서로 마음을 알아주는데 있다는 뜻이다. 나의 정체성를 찾고, 서로를 격려하고 응원해주는 여신협이 있기에 동지들과의 만남이 즐겁고 행복했다. 바라기는 어떤 이유에서든지 여신협을 떠난 동지들이 홈캄잉할 수 있도록 노력하는 구체적인 프로그램이 있었으면 한다.

#한국여신학자협의회40주년기념축하릴레이

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• 이은선

  감동입니다. 선생님!

  

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5] Strength Training for the Mind | Head & Heart Together

5] Strength Training for the Mind | Head & Heart Together

Strength Training for the Mind

Meditation is the most useful skill you can master. It can bring the mind to the end of suffering, something no other skill can do. But it’s also the most subtle and demanding skill there is. It requires all the mental qualities ordinarily involved in mastering a physical skill—mindfulness and alertness, persistence and patience, discipline and ingenuity—but to an extraordinary degree. This is why, when you come to meditation, it’s good to reflect on any skills, crafts, or disciplines you’ve already mastered so that you can apply the lessons they’ve taught you to the training of the mind.

In teaching meditation, I’ve often found it helpful to illustrate my points with analogies drawn from physical skills. And, given the particular range of skills and disciplines currently popular in America, I’ve found that one useful source of analogies is strength training. Meditation is more like a good workout than you might have thought.

The Buddha himself noticed the parallels here. He defined the practice as a path of five strengths:

1. conviction, 
2. persistence, 
3. mindfulness, 
4. concentration, and 
5. discernment.

He likened the mind’s ability to beat down its most stubborn thoughts to that of a strong man beating down a weaker man. The agility of a well-trained mind, he said, is like that of a strong man who can easily flex his arm when it’s extended, or extend it when it’s flexed. And he often compared the higher skills of concentration and discernment to the skills of archery, which—given the massive bows of ancient India—was strength training for the noble warriors of his day. These skills included the ability to shoot great distances, to fire arrows in rapid succession, and to pierce great masses—the great mass, here, standing for the mass of ignorance that envelops the untrained mind.

So even if you’ve been pumping great masses instead of piercing them, you’ve been learning some important lessons that will stand you in good stead as a meditator. A few of the more important lessons are these:

• Read up on anatomy.  If you want to strengthen a muscle, you need to know where it is and what it moves if you’re going to understand the exercises that target it. Only then can you perform them efficiently. In the same way, you have to understand the anatomy of the mind’s suffering if you want to understand how meditation is supposed to work. Read up on what the Buddha had to say on the topic, and don’t settle for books that put you at the far end of a game of telephone. Go straight to the source. You’ll find, for instance, that the Buddha explained how ignorance shapes the way you breathe, and how that in turn can add to your suffering. This is why most meditation regimens start with the breath, and why the Buddha’s own regimen takes the breath all the way to nibbāna. So read up to understand how and why.

• Start where you are.  Too many meditators get discouraged at the outset because their minds won’t settle down. But just as you can’t wait until you’re big and strong before you start strength training, you can’t wait until your concentration is strong before you start sitting. Only by exercising what little concentration you have will you make it solid and steady. So even though you feel scrawny when everyone around you seems big, or fat when everyone else seems fit, remember that you’re not here to compete with them or with the perfect meditators you see in magazines. You’re here to work on yourself. So establish that as your focus, and keep it strong.

• Establish a regular routine.  You’re in this for the long haul. We all like the stories of sudden enlightenment, but even the most lightning-like insights have to be primed by a long, steady discipline of day-to-day practice. That’s because the consistency of your discipline allows you to observe subtle changes, and being observant is what enables insight to see. So don’t get taken in by promises of quick and easy shortcuts. Set aside a time to meditate every day and then stick to your schedule whether you feel like meditating or not. The mind grows by overcoming resistance to repetition, just like a muscle. Sometimes the best insights come on the days you least feel like meditating. Even when they don’t, you’re establishing a strength of discipline, patience, and resilience that will see you through the even greater difficulties of aging, illness, and death. That’s why it’s called practice.

• Aim for balance.  The “muscle groups” of the path are three: virtue, concentration, and discernment.  If any one of these gets overdeveloped at the expense of the others, it throws you out of alignment, and your extra strength turns into a liability.

• Set interim goals.  You can’t fix a deadline for your enlightenment, but you can keep aiming for a little more sitting or walking time, a little more consistency in your mindfulness, a little more speed in recovering from distraction, a little more understanding of what you’re doing. The type of meditation taught on retreats where they tell you not to have goals is aimed at (1) people who get neurotic around goals in general and (2) the weekend warriors who need to be cautioned so that they don’t push themselves past the breaking point. If you’re approaching meditation as a lifetime activity, you’ve got to have goals. You’ve got to want results. Otherwise the whole thing loses focus, and you start wondering why you’re sitting here when you could be sitting out on the beach.

• Focus on proper form.  Get your desire for results to work for you and not against you. Once you’ve set your goals, focus directly not on the results but on the means that will get you there. It’s like building muscle mass. You don‘t blow air or stuff protein into the muscle to make it larger. You focus on performing your reps properly, and the muscle grows on its own. If, as you meditate, you want the mind to develop more concentration, don’t focus on the idea of concentration. Focus on allowing this breath to be more comfortable, and then this breath, this breath, one breath at a time. Concentration will then grow without your having to think about it.

• Pace yourself.  Learn how to read your pain. When you meditate, some pains in the body are simply a sign that it’s adapting to the meditation posture; others, that you’re pushing yourself too hard. Some pains are telling the truth, some are lying[?]. Learn how to tell the difference. The same principle applies to the mind. When the mind can’t seem to settle down, sometimes it needs to be pushed even harder, sometimes you need to pull back. Your ability to read the difference is what exercises your powers of wisdom and discernment.

Learn, too, how to read your progress. The meditation won’t really be a skill, won’t really be your own, until you learn to judge what works for you and what doesn’t. You may have heard that meditation is non-judgmental, but that’s simply meant to counteract the tendency to prejudge things before they’ve had a chance to show their results. Once the results are in, you need to learn how to gauge them, to see how they connect with their causes, so that you can adjust the causes in the direction of the outcome you really want.

• Vary your routine.  Just as a muscle can stop responding to a particular exercise, your mind can hit a plateau if it’s strapped to only one meditation technique. So don’t let your regular routine get into a rut. Sometimes the only change you need is a different way of breathing, a different way of visualizing the breath energy in the body. But then there are days when the mind won’t stay with the breath no matter how many different ways of breathing you try. This is why the Buddha taught supplementary meditations to deal with specific problems as they arise. For starters, there’s goodwill for when you‘re feeling down on yourself or the human race—the people you dislike would be much more tolerable if they could find genuine happiness inside, so wish them that happiness. There’s contemplation of the parts of the body for when you’re overcome with lust—it’s hard to maintain a sexual fantasy when you keep thinking about what lies just underneath the skin. And there’s contemplation of death for when you’re feeling lazy—you don’t know how much time you’ve got left, so you’d better meditate now if you want to be ready when the time comes to go.

When these supplementary contemplations have done their work, you can get back to the breath, refreshed and revived. So keep expanding your repertoire. That way your skill becomes all-around.

• Take your ups and downs in stride.  The rhythms of the mind are even more complex than those of the body, so a few radical ups and downs are par for the course. Just make sure that they don’t knock you off balance. When things are going so well that the mind grows still without any effort on your part, don’t get careless or overly confident. When your mood is so bad that even the supplementary meditations don’t work, view it as an opportunity to learn how to be patient and observant of bad moods. Either way, you learn a valuable lesson: how to keep your inner observer separate from whatever else is going on. So do your best to maintain proper form regardless, and you’ll come out the other side.

• Watch your eating habits.  As the Buddha once said, we survive both on mental food and physical food. Mental food consists of the external stimuli you focus on, as well as the intentions that motivate the mind. If you feed your mind junk food, it’s going to stay weak and sickly no matter how much you meditate. So show some restraint in your eating. If you know that looking at things in certain ways, with certain intentions, gives rise to greed, anger, or delusion, look at them in the opposite way. As Ajaan Lee, my teacher’s teacher, once said, look for the bad side of the things you’re infatuated with, and the good side of the things you hate. That way you become a discriminating eater, and the mind gets the healthy, nourishing food it needs to grow strong.

As for your physical eating habits, this is one of the areas where inner strength training and outer strength training part ways. As a meditator, you have to be concerned less with what physical food you eat than with why you eat. If you’re bulking up for no real purpose, it’s actually harmful for the mind. You have to realize that in eating—even if it’s vegetarian food—you’re placing a burden on the world around you, so you want to give some thought to the purposes served by the strength you gain from your food. Don’t take more from the world than you’re willing to give back. Don’t bulk up just for the fun of it, because the beings—human and animal—who provided the food didn’t provide it in fun. Make sure the energy gets put to good use.

• Don’t leave your strength in the gym.  If you don’t use your strength in other activities, strength training becomes largely an exercise in vanity. The same principle applies to your meditative skills. If you leave them on the cushion and don’t apply them in everyday life, meditation turns into a fetish, something you do to escape the problems of life while their causes continue to fester.

The ability to maintain your center and to breathe comfortably in any situation can be a genuine lifesaver, keeping the mind in a position where you can more easily think of the right thing to do, say, or think when your surroundings get tough. As a result, the people around you are no longer subjected to your greed, anger, and delusion. And as you maintain your inner balance in this way, it helps them maintain theirs. So make the whole world your meditation seat, and you’ll find that meditation both on the big seat and the little seat will get a lot stronger. At the same time, it’ll become a gift both to yourself and to the world around you.

• Never lose sight of your ultimate goal.  Mental strength has at least one major advantage over physical strength in that it doesn’t inevitably decline with age. It can always keep growing to and through the experience of death. The Buddha promises that it leads to the Deathless, and he wasn’t a man to make vain, empty promises. So when you establish your priorities, make sure that you give more time and energy to strengthening your meditation than you do to strengthening your body. After all, someday you’ll be forced to lay down this body, no matter how fit or strong you’ve made it, but you’ll never be forced to lay down the strengths you’ve built into the mind.