About

Left alone by my family for a weekend in June 2010, I, among other things, decided to start a blog – mostly as an outlet for my frequent need to write stuff.  After flailing around on different titles and topics, I decided my blog needed a main point.  Even though there are plenty of Buddhist blogs out there, I decided to start another one. 

Dukkha is the first Noble Truth of Buddhism.  It’s quite often translated as “suffering,” as in, “life is suffering,” but that misses the point.  The sense of this word is something being off kilter – like a piece of pottery on a throwing wheel that’s not aligned just right, or a wheel on a cart that’s wobbly.  So Dukkha is a sense of awkwardness, of something just not being quite right – and there are many forms of it, from actual pain, to not getting what you want, to having something you do want that then ends…and so on.  So this sense of off-centeredness, just-not-quite-rightness, is something we’ve all experienced.  It seemed that my life had a heaping-helping of it at the time, so DukkhaGirl (though “girl” is a misnomer as I’m now officially ‘middle aged’ though I don’t feel like it) I was.

I wrote frequently at first, but then tapered off when I went on retreat and had the sudden insight that (duh!) I was, perhaps, spending too much time online.  I began checking my blog and posting with less frequency…until I came back to my blog one day and found it had been hacked.  Where my main page had been, there was an online banking phish.  My site had lots of broken links, hacks…”some serious Dukkha,” as one Twitter follower put it.

I considered abandoning DukkhaGirl, but found myself a bit over-attached to my posts.  With some effort, I was able to recover most of my posts.  I moved to a friendlier, more secure, web host, played with starting another site, thisiszen.com, but finally put together DukkhaGirl again at this web address.

DukkhaGirl is a personal practice blog.  The stuff posted here is just my personal experience and opinion.  Hopefully there is something here someone will find helpful or useful.  If not, that’s OK, too.

Thank you,

CJ