Gosh what to say! I've been on the path as long as I've been alive. Anyone who suffers is: it is always the central question at the heart of any kind of dissatisfaction, at whatever point on the continuum that may be, namely, "How the $%^# can make this stop? Whats wrong with me, what's wrong with [it, them, __ ]?". My central practices have been Chinese internal arts as practice [generally] lead towards truth, peace, or at least, more reality than typically passes for normal. Gravity, breath, change, movement, space, touch, and "listening" ("ting jin") as well as "relax / release / sink / surrender" ("song") have a way of working. I got serious about "meditation" a couple of years ago as a result of the 12 Step Recovery framework ceasing to give me the kind of meaning and healing it had. All the vehicles I've used all along eventually got to their end of usefulness. I started using a brilliant resource that incorporates elements of simple mindfulness within a non-dual framework, and it wasn't long before my "self" (the guy I always thought I was) dissolved and all that was left was...this. All of this. Starting my own community is important to me but I'm not very good at it, and neither standard approaches to Buddhism nor the (so-called) "Secular" versions seem quite right. What a surprise! Yet again, I don't fit in anywhere - only EVERYWHERE ;>)
I chose "Zen" as my affiliation because there is (strangely) no option to say something like "unaffiliated", "secular" (which wouldn't quite be accurate either) or "eclectic". Zen is cool though. After my "awakening" all the koans made perfect "sense", so I might as well be a Zen guy, esp considering the fact that I ruined my knees doing seiza in Karate years ago (my knees were never meant for that stuff) and even went as far as to go with a friend to his temple, get a gohonzon (sp?) and try chanting for a while. So, yeah. No. Whatever.
