monkey see, monkey do serves as a personal blog and creative outlet for
•
shenpa
I just read an inciteful, short essay by Pema. it’s all about the way we get ‘hooked’ by experience and react to it. the tibetan word she uses for this ‘hook’ is called shenpa. I recommend this short essay.
If you're new here, thanks for visiting! Please subscribe to my RSS feed and consider visiting my design-related blog and my meditation-related blog.
•
6 comments to “shenpa”
•
19. June 2003 at 4:31 am :
Davee!! Do you remember I was telling you about Shenpa when you were here?? That’s even the same article that introduce me to the concept, too! I think it was in the Shambhala Sun or some other glossy magazine about meditation…
21. June 2003 at 12:30 pm :
It’s a great article. I even got my boss to read it and he doesn’t like that spiritual awareness stuff generally. I think that Pema is a great introduction to buddhism and practice for folks. She uses the jargon but in a way that people who are unfamiliar can pick it up and it’s not too intimidating. She also brings you along with her by talking about her own sticky emotions. She’s been a real gift to me over the years.
-Hooked- C-
Great dancing last night BTW, let’s do it again soon.
26. June 2003 at 10:09 pm :
I liked that essay - that shenpa place of just realizing the hooked-ness is where I start to write poetry. The poetry is in order to interrupt the shenpa.
26. June 2003 at 10:18 pm :
As a translator I notice that Pema uses translation and untranslatability as an interruption. "Here is this word, there is no exact equivalent to it in English, but a lot of almosts and explanations. " The leap of mind required to learn the word jolts your thinking out of its ruts. A Tibetan might be equally jolted by studying some English word that is important philosophically that has no equivalent in the Tibetan language. The last few weeks I have been translating from Hebrew, or helping a poet translate from Hebrew to English, and I don’t know any Hebrew, or didn’t when I started. To sit and listen to her explain the connections between two or three words in the poem - their similiarites in sound, their etymologies and nuances of meaning - it was a strangely ecstatic experience. I would note this is also a good thing about science fiction.
8. March 2005 at 1:00 pm :
I recently counseled a young girl (18) going through the breakup of her first love and was able to use the shenpa term quite effectively. She is a poet also, and so was able to understand that, in the same way a creative idea hooks us into building a story that becomes a poem, the idea of a love that might have been — but which is no more — hooks us into a cycle or cycles of stories detailing what might have been, but which is not. Just watching the story that you make out of your life go by is very healthful, I think. For me, it keeps me in the now, in the sense that Tolle uses it.
13. September 2006 at 4:12 pm :
I am interested in your comment about how the idea of a lost first love can hook you into a cycle of stories about what might have been. Can you explain further? Are you saying that you should hook yourself into the story of what is rather than the story of what might have been?