Thursday, January 24, 2013

Focus on Teens and the Dharma

This blog is quiet because I’m putting my time into meditation and writing a book.  The book is a novel for young adults, intended to share my joy and endless curiosity about the lived through experience of a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism in modern American life.  I’m about a third of the way through my rough draft.  That is really near the beginning because there are many rewrites necessary in writing a good book.  Or so they say… I wouldn’t really know because this is my first work of fiction.

My personality is such that I approach everything from the big picture first.  Perhaps this is from the combination of being an Aquarian and the daughter of a lawyer—who wrote legislation for the U.S. congress no less.  So, I usually approach things – even human interaction – based on principle first, then narrow it down to the personal… much to the bafflement of the people in my life. 

So, I have a pretty complete outline of the book and the cast of characters, and I’m writing the book based on that.  This is not a fantasy work, it is a girl’s experience of meeting with the Dharma for the first time—enlivened by all the kind of natural magic and synchronicity that regularly enlivens the lives of Vajrayana practitioners.

Yesterday, I went to Facebook headquarters—the real place in Menlo Park, California where Facebook is based.  It was Compassion Research Day that they kindly hosted, presenting what they are learning about how to gently foster better communication between Facebook users based on their research with their billion user strong database.  They are specifically focusing on 13-14 year olds right now.  What causes them to report what they feel is an inappropriate post or picture to Facebook?  The most common thing that is reported by this age group is girl reporting being tagged by a friend in a photo.  Guess why?  Because they are embarrassed that they look bad in the picture!   Hundreds of thousands of instances like this are reported to Facebook by teens.  So they have a crew of psychologists working on refining how to redirect the kid back to communicating with their friend about it, rather than having Facebook intervene.  They have developed little template messages that kids can send to their friends that are customized to communicate what they are feeling about the post, and how strongly they feel about it.

Of course, there are instances of real bullying and other issues that come up between people on Facebook, and these vary a lot from country to country.  In India, one of the worse things you can do is to deface images of someone’s favorite sports figure or celebrity and post it on a friend’s wall!  It was fascinating, and I learned a lot from the adult presenters and a panel of teens they had come in at the end of the day.  Next week I am going to a training for writing tutors at my neighborhood (tough!) high school, something I hope to do, partially because I always have wanted to volunteer in the schools, and partially to improve my skills in working with youth.

When my book is done, hopefully by the summer/fall, and on the way to be published somehow, I am going to be starting a youth group here in the Bay Area based on the Dudjom Chö tradition.   I’m hoping the book will spark kids’ interest.  We are very rich with wonderful lamas in the Bay Area, and I’m lucky enough to have been acquainted with a bunch of them for a long time.  I’m starting to go around and invite the lama’s to come do short pithy teachings for the kids once we get going.   I will be the organizer and head coach, and will be assisted by other yogis and yoginis of our tradition.  More later, of course.