Product Description

Fueled by the music of revolution, anger, fear, and despair, we dyed our hair or shaved our heads ... Eating acid like it was candy and chasing speed with cheap vodka, smoking truckloads of weed, all in a vain attempt to get numb and stay numb.

This is the story of a young man and a generation of angry youths who rebelled against their parents and the unfulfilled promise of the sixties. As with many self-destructive kids, Noah Levine's search for meaning led him first to punk rock, drugs, drinking, and dissatisfaction. But the search didn't end there. Having clearly seen the uselessness of drugs and violence, Noah looked for positive ways to channel his rebellion against what he saw as the lies of society. Fueled by his anger at so much injustice and suffering, Levine now uses that energy and the practice of Buddhism to awaken his natural wisdom and compassion.

While Levine comes to embrace the same spiritual tradition as his father, bestselling author Stephen Levine, he finds his most authentic expression in connecting the seemingly opposed worlds of punk and Buddhism. As Noah Levine delved deeper into Buddhism, he chose not to reject the punk scene, instead integrating the two worlds as a catalyst for transformation. Ultimately, this is an inspiring story about maturing, and how a hostile and lost generation is finally finding its footing. This provocative report takes us deep inside the punk scene and moves from anger, rebellion, and self-destruction, to health, service to others, and genuine spiritual growth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26025 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-01
• Released on: 2004-05-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780060008956
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Fierce and disarming in its honesty, raw and true in its expression...This is not your average spiritual autobiography!" (Norman Fischer, Zen priest and poet, and founder of the Everyday Zen Foundation )

"An entry point for many others into a potentially life-saving practice...an empathic and moving offering." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Full Catastrophe Living and Wherever You Go, There You Are )

"This book is a great success story that shows that violence, negativity and self destruction doesn't accomplish anything." (Mike Ness, lead singer of Social Distortion )

"Noah takes us through his own personal genocide in this honest and at times unbearably painful account of his journey." (Sothira, lead singer of Crucifix/Proudflesh )

"Honesty and wildness that become transformed and inspiring." (Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart )

About the Author
Noah Levine is a Buddhist teacher in training with Jack Kornfield and the teaching collective at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. He teaches meditation retreats nationally as well as leads groups in juvenile halls and prisons around the San Francisco Bay Area. Noah is the director and co-founder of the Mind Body Awareness Project, a nonprofit organization that serves incarcerated youths. He has studied with such well-known and respected teachers as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Norman Fischer, and Sylvia Boorstein, to name a few. He lives in San Francisco.

Customer Reviews

Echoes of the Heart
I really enjoyed this book. It's simply told, and has a measure of honesty to it that I don't find in more polished works. This is Noah's story, with all his confusion, anger, puzzlement, flaws and discoveries shared with us. Having grown up hippy-trippy on California's Central Coast, I heard echoes of my own experiences in thinking everybody was really too precious for words when they talked about Zen and buddhism, or mantras or tantras or whatever. I really appreciated the author's willingness to to share his own dichotomies with us-in one scene he describes threatening a hostel owner with a wooden stick, while he was on a journey searching for inner peace. I heard other echoes of my own experience as well: the desire to have peace and tranquility to think on things, yet instead getting angry and restless once the opportunity is at hand, the need to feel things intensely and yet the wish to be quietly placid, or even the desire to have no desire. I read this almost like reading somebody's REAL journal, not some edited and cleaned up literary masterpiece. The book helped me see that the path toward enlightenment starts wherever you are-for Noah it was a padded cell and taking his father's advice to do some breathing exercises-just to get through it all, just to survive.

A word on some of the other reviews: I don't think it's relevant who Noah's father was-I have several friends who have been on similar trips to monasteries, seen the Dalai Lama, etc. who have no connections, and the author was very up-front with his interactions with his father-good and bad. He even talks about some of the negative things he experienced when people disliked his father's writings.

In the end, this is Noah's story, but I also found echoes of my own experiences. I found it insightful, honest, and pure.

Rude Boy's Dharma Vs. Dharma Punx
When I saw Dharma Punx I was drawn to the promise of a story not too dissimilar to my own, but by the end of the book I was left quite disappointed. My biggest problem with Noah's story is that he's not really a Buddhist, but rather a generic spiritual kind of guy, who likes to meditate. Noah talks in great depths about his adherence to the 12 Steps(AA,) but doesn't mention adherence to the Eight-Fold Path, he mentions the Four Noble Truths in passing, but spends much more time in sweat lodges. Buddhist shortcomings aside, Dharma Punx is moderately interesting story of a man's struggle with addiction and growing up.
With a name like Dharma Punx one cannot help but comparing this book to Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums, but don't, after finishing Dharma Punx I realized that the title is not an allusion to Kerouac's classic of disenfranchised youth finding refuge in the works of Zen lunatics and booze, rather, Dharma punx is the story of disenfranchised youth finding refuge from booze, drugs and violence in an amalgamated spiritual practice the author has called Buddhism.
I don't think that the lifestyles portrayed in either book could properly be called a middle path though.

Pseudo-spiritual garbage!!!!
I don't want to sound overly critical, but I just can't bear the thought that people would actually see this as being a good book, let alone a spiritual instruction manual.
Poor little rich punk Noah grows up in the "tough streets" of Santa Cruz, then falls prey to drugs and alcohol to fit in with the tough kids. He gets 12 stepped, then proceeds to transform himself into some kind a of sober, quasi-Buddhist messiah. He also likes to talk about all of the famous people in "the scene" he knows. Wow Noah! You know Rancid!? Neat!

Please don't waste your time. Read Brad Warner's book if you want a decent "young person's" outlook of the Buddha.