What was it about Ruth that drew me back, year after year, for almost three decades? Sandy Boucher asks herself early in Dancing in the Dharma. Delving into Denison's dramatic and sometimes tragic past, Boucher examines the life of this beloved and controversial teacher to try to understand what shaped her and informed her teaching. In the great movement of Buddhism to the West, Ruth Denison pioneered and innovated with her own quintessentially female and unique way of teaching the Dharma. She was the first Buddhist ...
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What was it about Ruth that drew me back, year after year, for almost three decades? Sandy Boucher asks herself early in Dancing in the Dharma. Delving into Denison's dramatic and sometimes tragic past, Boucher examines the life of this beloved and controversial teacher to try to understand what shaped her and informed her teaching. In the great movement of Buddhism to the West, Ruth Denison pioneered and innovated with her own quintessentially female and unique way of teaching the Dharma. She was the first Buddhist teacher to lead an all-women's retreat and the first teacher to use movement and dance to train her students in mindfulness. As Sharon Salzberg, cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, remembers, The wisdom, and the emptiness side of things, were very clear in her. She expressed all that very, very well. Catching the unique charm of Ruth's voice in vivid scenes and anecdotes, Boucher tells the gripping story of Ruth's youth in Nazi-dominated Germany, her years in Hollywood in the sixties and seventies as a participant in the counterculture, her world travels to study with the major spiritual teachers of the twentieth century in Asia and Europe, and her flowering as a Buddhist teacher. Along the way, Boucher also addresses the hard question of how to continue to learn from a spiritual teacher while responding to that teacher's complex personality.
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I came upon "Dancing in the Dharma", a biography of the Buddhist teacher Ruth Denison, by chance. I read the book because I have been studying Buddhism and meditating for several years, but I had not heard of Ruth Denison. This authorized biography of Denison is written by Sandy Boucher, a long-time student of Denison's who has become an author of books on Buddhism and a well-known teacher in her own right. The book discusses Denison's impact on Boucher. At the time she began her Buddhist practice, Boucher was a social activist devoted to feminist and other causes. She retains her strong social commitments but was able to learn to turn and look within with her commitment to Buddhism. The book is strongly flavored with Boucher's own political activism, feminism, and lesbianism -- traits Ruth Dension does not share -- and the book offers an interesting interplay between Boucher's own story and that of her subject.
Ruth Schaefer was born in a rural area of East Prussia and came to young adulthood during WWII. As an adolescent and young woman in her early 20s she joined the Nazi party and supported its efforts while working as a schoolteacher. With the end of WWII and the allied occupation, Denison faced a difficult time and was raped repeatedly by allied soldiers. She secured passage to the United States where she ultimately met and married Henry Denison. Henry Denison was independently wealthy and a spiritual seeker who had been a monk at one time. Denison and Ruth had a difficult marriage, but it lasted for 42 years until Denison's mental illness and death.
Boucher offers an excellent account of Ruth Denison's introduction to Dharma and of her many teachers. Her first teacher was a woman named Charlotte Selver who did not teach meditation but rather taught Denison a sense of bodily awareness and movement that she ultimately integrated into her meditation teaching. Denison studied with the famous Burmese lay teacher U Ba Khin who was intent on spreading the Buddha's teaching -- the Dharma -- to the West. U Ba Khin taught a form of meditation known as insight meditation or Vipassana. U Ba Khin authorized Denison to teach, but he limited Denison to teaching women. Denison studied with a variety of Buddhist teachers in Asia and the United States from other traditions giving her Buddhism, with the combination with Charlotte Selver's teachings, an eclectic, unorthodox flavor, consistent with her own personality.
Denison gradually established a reputation as an gifted, if eccentric teacher and slowly built a meditation center in the Mohave Desert of California near Joshua Tree known as Dhamma Dena. Although she is not a feminist, she led the first all-women meditation retreat in the United States and is best-known for her work in bringing meditation and Buddhist teachings to women. But Denison did not limit her teachings to women. She has taught Buddhism and meditation to both sexes.
Boucher's biography captures well the difficulties she experienced during her years with Denison. She describes Denison as difficult and controlling at times and as a person who could be harsh towards others and insensitive to the difficulties that others, particularly Denison's many Jewish students, could feel about her early Nazi past. But Boucher grew to learn to accept her teacher with her eccentricities and her failings. She offers a portrait of a unique, strongly willed woman who combined her talents for bodily movement and dance with a deep understanding of Buddhist teachings of change, impermanence, suffering, and ignorance.
Among the best parts of this book is the next-to-final chapter, "A Teaching" in which Denison shows great insight in teaching Boucher about forgiveness and about the need to let go of grudges.
Boucher has written a good biography of a complex individual. Denison's life reminded me of another famous German woman who emigrated to the United States and became a Buddhist teacher. Ayya Khema also came to adulthood during the Nazi years when together with her family she fled Germany. Khema came to the United States and after several failed marriages and raising her children she became a Buddhist nun. Khema and Denison knew each other and I would have liked to have learned more about their thoughts of each others work. This book will appeal to readers who are interested in the spread of Buddhism to the West.
