Ethan Nichern's Confidence

 

A few months ago I received Ethan Nichtern's amazing book, Confidence: Holding Your Seat through Life's Eight Worldly Winds.  I've been interested in these teachings for many years.  My first Zen teacher used to mention the eight worldly winds at the beginning of every sesshin.  His teachings focused on how the winds could be transformed through deep meditation.  

The winds are:  pleasure and pain, praise and criticism, fame and insignificance, and success and failure.  These pairs of opposites assail us regularly as human beings.  Nichtern is an American-born Tibetan Buddhist teacher, and his book couldn't be more timely, as we all work with these worldly winds in the aftermath of the recent US election.  

Nichtern lived through an organizational crisis in his own sangha, much as I did in Boundless Way after the 2016 election.  He is open about that, and other aspects of his personal life, without getting caught in whining and "too much information."  All of the ways we process our difficulties, blown about as we are by circumstances, show up clearly and with great heart and tenderness in this book.  Free of Buddhist jargon, it's a clear-eyed guide to navigating human life in all its complexity.   I highly recommend it!