Our understanding of dharma is obscured by the narcissism of our time. Studying the lives of great exemplars of dharma has helped me to see that the primary distortion in my dharma life has been the age-old misery of self-absorption. Deep in midlife I had begun to feel the awful burden of wanting to be special; wanting to be better; wanting to experience every possible adventure in this life; wanting to be, as we have sometimes said at Kripalu, an “expanded self.”
