holding a hot coal

Perry Garfinkel describes his experience meditating at aushwitz in the huffington post today. also an amazing story.

I had joined the Peacemaker Institute’s Bearing Witness Retreat, a five-day session held at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camps, now a memorial museum, as a way to gain a deeper understanding of suffering and one’s own reaction to it…

We walked the grounds, sat in barracks, sat on the tracks, and had evening discussions in order to try to synthesize the intense emotions that inevitably arise. My worst nightmare was that just seeing the wooden watch towers, the barbed wire fences and the sadly iconic brick gateway through which trainloads of doomed prisoners passed would cause me unbearable suffering. I feared sitting cross-legged on those infamous tracks, silently meditating in the Soto Zen tradition in bitter cold winds slapping my face under a monotonic gray sky… The nightmare was realized. And then some.

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