From Publishers Weekly
"How do you maintain balance in an environment that promotes imbalance, comparison, and competition?" Yoga instructor Jeon offers readers a dharma, or way, to cope with the commotion, stress and accelerated pace of modern life in this warm, entertaining spiritual guide for urban dwellers. He examines the aspects of our lives that often cause the most stress: encounters with people made rude by routine hustle, the trap of "keeping up with the Joneses," the monotony of jobs and/or love lives, and violence in our society. Jeon uses his personal experiences (including the devastating theft of his computer and finished manuscript) to illustrate the path to a peaceful and happy life amidst chaos and challenges. Rather than looking outward to spiritual leaders, Jeon suggests opening ourselves to what is happening now, being awake and in the moment. He says that too many Americans work harder and longer days in an eternal quest for more luxurious possessions—and while Americans may have bigger houses than our European counterparts, the stress of making more money ultimately reduces our life expectancy and negatively affects our relationships with others, he argues. Being awake to the "NOW," as Jeon writes, revives us from the rat race so that we maintain a calm perspective on what matters most. Although written for city folk and high-powered suburbanites, this book should delight anyone living anywhere. Unlike self-help books that ask you to change part of yourself to become a better you, this dharma simply asks you to be a bit more considerate of who you already are. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Is your nightly commute a nightmare? Do you suffer from SUV envy? Are headlines giving you the heebie-jeebies? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then it's quite possible your dharma is deeply disturbed. Dharma, an Eastern concept, is the manifestation of one's basic outlook on and approach to life, from the trivial to the monumental, the personal to the global. Whether it's the ubiquitous chirping of cell phones or the unctuous posturing of coworkers, potential pitfalls to personal peace abound everywhere. Within today's supercharged, security-conscious society, there are many who seek a more peaceful, less stressful way of navigating the world. Incorporating strategies based on painful experience and honed from years of personal practice, Jeon crafts a soothing strategy for reevaluating our internal responses to external stimuli such as road rage, status seeking, and other unnerving behaviors. Straightforward, sensitive, and sassy, Jeon's approach offers effective methods for turning down that annoying voice in your head from a wail to a whisper. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
“This witty, wise, anecdote-filled examination of the perils and possibilities of pursuing the spiritual path is an entertaining, illuminating read.” —Yoga Journal

“Hip, smart, urban, and funny—a new voice for the dharma that lives in the city.” —Catherine Ingram, author of Passionate Presence

“A manual of contemplations to get you through the urban elements that wreak havoc on your soul.” —New York Daily News

“Straightforward, sensitive, and sassy, Jeon’s approach offers effective methods for turning down that annoying voice in your head from a wail to a whisper.” —Booklist

“This timely book is very relevant to our current concerns in the here and now, as well as our connection with the timeless verities.” —Lama Surya Das, author of Awakening the Buddha Within


From the Trade Paperback edition.


From the Inside Flap
It's one thing to lead a focused and peaceful life in the quiet seclusion of an ashram or monastery, but what about where most of us actually live--in a noisy metropolis or bustling suburb, constantly inundated with the world's latest disturbing news? Hip, helpful, and humorous, City Dharma teaches you how to keep your cool even when the road to enlightenment leads you straight through downtown at rush hour.

When we're cut off in traffic, crammed on the subway, or elbowed aside on a crowded street, such thoughtless or aggressive behavior can make our blood pressure rise and our serenity disappear. But it doesn't have to be this way. In City Dharma, Arthur Jeon suggests that it’s not what happens to us, but how we react to events and thoughts that causes most of our suffering.

City Dharma is the essential guide for everyone living in the accelerated world most of us call home. Offering smart, practical ways to overcome daily stresses and the crazy-making reactivity of our own minds, Jeon explores the most challenging aspects of modern urban and suburban life, including:

Another Day, Another Dollar
Avoid Working Stiffness
Walking Down a Dark Alley
Awareness and Violence
Sex and the City Dharma
Seeking Love vs. Expressing Love
Scaring Ourselves to Death
Transcending Media Negativity
Road Rage
Dealing with Mad Max Within and Without

Drawing wisdom from the ancient Eastern teachings of Advaita Vedanta and filled with engaging stories, City Dharma offers a new way of seeing the world--one that is based on connection rather than separation, direct experience rather than belief, and love instead of fear.


About the Author
ARTHUR JEON leads weekly talks called Dharma Conversations and teaches yoga in Santa Monica, California. Visit his website at citydharma.com.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE"

Was Jean-Paul Sartre Right?

To straighten the crooked you must first do a harder thing--straighten yourself.
--BUDDHA


In a cartoon in The New Yorker a woman walks down a Manhattan street and, in reference to the changed atmosphere of New York post-September 11, says to her friend: "It's hard, but slowly I'm getting back to hating everyone."

This is funny and startlingly honest. So many spiritual teachings and books sugarcoat the reality that people are difficult. But there's no denying that people are difficult; greed, selfishness, and narcissism run rampant in the human species. And as world history continues to demonstrate, many millions are schooled in repression, brutality, and deprivation. All of these disparate aspects of consciousness can be found in crowded urban and suburban areas.

My main impetus in writing this book is to help other people in the way that I have been helped by the teachings of the Dharma. There is no getting around the fact that most of life's difficulties, excepting illness, are caused by people's relationships to themselves and to those around them. This is true whether the conflict is between nations or the two people fighting in the apartment next door.

The Dharma doesn't deny these difficulties; it simply lessens them in a couple of ways.

We assume that other people are the cause of our unhappiness, the source of our "hell." When we look around us there is much to support this assumption. From rudeness to murder, it seems as though all the hell is coming from outside ourselves. Other people are making us mad, crazy, unhappy, and unfulfilled. They cut us off in traffic; they sleep with our spouses; they don't give us the promotions we deserve; they lie, steal, and cheat--they create hell on earth in ways great and small. We tend to think, I'm not an angry person; they made me angry.

Then, after some reflection, we begin to recognize that most of our hell is actually inside us. Negative things happen, people act badly, and the world is an imperfect place. However, when we think about it, there is very little that happens to us on a daily basis that is really "bad," and when it does occur, it passes quickly. But we then create endless suffering through our interpretation, our conditioning, and our identification with the thoughts around the event. It's not what happens to us; it's our relationship to what happens that creates the suffering.

In other words, bad things happen to good people, but most of the suffering comes afterward, in the netherworld of our own minds, as we rehash the incident, unable to let it go. For instance, after my computer was stolen, I went through a few moments of berating myself: If only I had sent the book to myself by e-mail or This shouldn't be happening to me or I should have known better than to hide my key outside.

We each react to the situation according to our own conditioned thought, which almost always creates more suffering. In my case it's usually something along the lines of I should have known better. Instead of reacting with compassion for myself, I was filled with self-recrimination. But the reality is, I don't even know how the thief got into my apartment. Anything could have happened, including someone picking the lock.

Another person might react to the situation by focusing on the people who stole the computer, going on a rant about criminals, and becoming more hardened and suspicious of the world. We will all have different reactions based on our different conditioning.

How strongly we react is dependent upon how identified we are with our thoughts. By identified, I mean how attached we are and how much we think those thoughts define us. For instance, the thought comes up: I'm stupid. If we are identified with that thought, then we believe it to be true and it becomes part of our identity.

So why do we believe these thoughts and give them such power? Because all the random conditioning hardwired into us by a combination of nature and nurture dictates our reactions.

For instance, in the nature end of the spectrum, they have just found a gene called 5-HTT that determines why some people react to stressful events such as death, abuse, or job loss by falling into deep depression or paralyzing anxiety, while others are much less affected by the same events. According to the journal Science, it turns out that those with two copies of the long allele of this gene are able to withstand such events much better than those with two copies of the shorter allele. This is a person's nature, made up of our individual inherited and biological reality.

The other aspect that determines our behavior is our nurture, our early experiences in our family, our culture and our society. For example, if your father told you, "You're stupid," or if your mother was hyperimpatient with everything you attempted when you were a child, that negativity becomes ingrained. It becomes a part of the voice in your head that plays every time a difficulty arises. These experiences are our nurture, which is either negative or positive or a combination of both, and continues all our lives.

So we create our own hell because of our own internal conditioned thought patterns, created by our nature and nurture. The way of lessening the hell of the outside world is not by getting other people to change but by lessening the hell inside ourselves.

How do we do this?

By not identifying with your internal story, judgment, and belief systems as they arise in the form of thought, you are in a sense empty of your conditioned response. This doesn't mean reactivity is going to magically disappear--it's incredibly difficult to be human. But although reactivity may happen, you don't hang on to it; you release it as soon as you recognize the conditioned response. In short, you are now awake to it. You simply don't believe the thoughts to be true and you don't project them onto the outside world. Because you're not contributing anything extra to the conflict or negative occurrence, you create peace. You experience much more internal freedom, and you lessen your hell and that of everybody around you. It's akin to the old saying "If everybody swept their own doorstep, the whole world would be clean."

The Dharma goes one step further and suggests that the ultimate recognition is to realize there is no "I" at all, that "I" is a construct of the mind.

What is the answer when we ask ourselves the age-old question "Who am I?" Are we our education? Our beliefs? Our jobs? Our families? Our thoughts? Society would say yes. But is it true? This is one of the main inquiries of this book.

The Dharma says we are not any of these things. We are not the small self, the little "me, me, me" of conditioned personality imprisoned by our attachment to and identification with people, experiences, and material possessions.

If we are not the small self with its constant striving, filled with desires and fears, thinking constantly about acquiring and then protecting what we have acquired, what is the truth of who we are?

We will get to that. But first we must take a long, deep look at who we have been trained to be.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

It's one thing to lead a focused and peaceful life in the quiet seclusion of an ashram or monastery, but what about where most of us actually live -- in a noisy metropolis or bustling suburb, constantly inundated with the world's latest disturbing news? Hip, helpful, and humorous, City Dharma teaches you how to keep your cool even when the road to enlightenment leads you straight through downtown at rush hour. When we're cut off in traffic, crammed on the subway, or elbowed aside on a crowded street, such thoughtless or aggressive behavior can make our blood pressure rise and our serenity disappear. But it doesn't have to be this way. In City Dharma, Arthur Jeon suggests that it's not what happens to us, but how we react to events and thoughts that causes most of our suffering.