Surviving, Shenpa, and Healthy Desire
A Dialogue with Ray Buckner and Kaleigh Isaacs
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What You’ll Learn:
- Hear a brave story about working through trauma with mindfulness
- Explore getting “hooked” (shenpa) and how we can recognize it
- Discover how experiences can create a healthy relationship to love and desire
About Ray Buckner
Ray Buckner practices at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, CA and Insight Meditation Community of Berkeley in Berkeley, CA. They have written for LionsRoar.com, publishing such articles as: Healthy Desire: A Buddhist’s View of Mindfulness and Sex; Even a Broken Heart is Fundamentally Good; See us Clearly: A Buddhist’s View of Transgender Visibility; and, Countering Oppression by Cultivating Peace. Ray examines and writes on trauma, gender and sexuality, racial oppression, and love and relationships. As a white, trans and genderqueer Buddhist, they are committed to using the dharma to understand and transform intrapersonal, interpersonal and structural forms of violence.
To read more of Ray’s articles, you can visit their Lion’s Roar author page here.
About Kaleigh Isaacs
Kaleigh is the Founder of the Awake Network and producer of the Mindful Relationship Summit. She aspires to create a platform that encourages collaboration and allows people around the world to access wisdom teachings for free. She loves using strange metaphors related to gardening, dancing and sea creatures.
This talk touched my heart. Thank you.
How beautiful to look at mindfulness and shenpa; no matter what form it takes. Looking at how we get hooked by familiar patterns, and to do this with compassion for ourselves can bring healing. thank you so very much.
without shenpa, there wouldn’t be the opportunity to be mindful….poison as medicine…when we can see that we are bigger than our “narratives” about who we think we are..both are right and we often need to be reminded of both!
Thank you to Ray for the honesty in sharing. I never heard of shenpa. What a wise soul. Very authentic. I was deeply touched and opened. .
This is so helpful, thank you Ray!
Thank you, Ray, for your eloquence and bravery. I know that my queer friends suffer in ways that I might not fully understand, and your talk helped me get at least a glimpse. I regret the suffering you have encountered, especially the suffering at the hands of ignorance and compassion-levels-not-yet-adequate. Your talk inspires me, and you inspire me to build as much kindness as I possibly can in this life. May our world’s queer children (and all our children) grow up to feel beautiful and worthy of deep, abundant love and respect.
What a beautiful spirit you are, Ray! Thank you for this fine teaching.
What Ray shares in this discussion is important. The toxic partner behavior they described also occurs in heterosexual relationships: the effort of the partner to make us feel responsible, like a bad person, guilty of causing the difficulties in the relationship, unworthy of the other’s attention. This causes us, the victim of the abuser, to take on unhealthy patterns to try to make the relationship work. Thank you, Ray for sharing your experience and for helping everyone understand shenpa and how we can use mindfulness to grow out of this habitual patterning.
Salute to the Honesty!!!
Thank you so much for letting us into this realm.
How wonderfully honest Ray! You are beautiful and an extremely inspiring speaker. I am definitely caught up in shenpa, mindfulness brings me home. Thank you
Thank you for this wonderful presentation Ray. I recently found your article on Lion’s Roar and I shared it among some Buddhist peers of mine. I am so glad you are talking about the relationship between sex, desire and Buddhism – things I have been musing on for many years.
What a gift! Thank you so much for this production. I will share on.
I had never heard of shenpa. Much more to read. Thank you!