Dharma Punx by Noah Levine
Posted on August 26, 2003
I just finished reading Dharma Punx by Noah Levine. My first thought is I probably shouldn’t review it right away, because there is a lot of stuff going on in the book that bears further reflection. On the other hand, it would probably be useful to give some impressions, while it still fresh in my mind.
Noah Levine is a punk rocker turned spiritual teacher, and Dharma Punx is his autobiography. Actually, to call it a biography seems a bit of an overstatement. Based on the information in the book, I’m guessing he is in his mid-30′s, so maybe it’s just better to call it his story.
The book starts out with his youth – his parents divorced, his father living with a new wife in New Mexico, his mother in California, and he is being shuttled between the two homes. He starts rebelling, by becoming a hard-core skate punk. He and his friends start drinking, smoking pot, and attending punk shows. Gradually, he and his friends start getting into harder drugs and become junkies. Stealing stereos and other items to support their habits, they are in and out of juvenile detention. Then, he finds himself in a padded cell, agonizing through withdrawl symptoms, and he realized he has hit rock bottom. With the help of a twelve step program and some breathing exercises, he begins the long, slow, and rocky road to recovery.
After his release, he has some relapses, but quickly realizes that he doesn’t want to go down that road again. Still bearing the punk ethos, he gets into Straight Edge – a group of hardcore punkers that refrain from alcohol and drugs. It doesn’t keep him out of trouble though. He keeps getting into fights and decides to make his mark on the world with grafitti. Narrowly escaping jail time for vandalism, he grows a bit disenchanted with Straight Edge and their holier-than-thou attitudes, and decides to keep with the twelve step program while cultivating his growing spirituality.
That’s the meat of the book. The depths of despair and recovery from addiction. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. That’s only about half of the book. His father is a meditation instructor and an author of many books on meditation and spirituality. His father, Stephen Levine, hooks him up with people in California to help him explore the spirituality aspect of the twelve step program. Most of the rest of the book is about his trials and tribulations with spirituality, primarily Buddhism, and coming to terms with himself in the process. His desire led him to abstain from many things, although not quite to the point of being an ascetic. He went to Asia to learn more about Buddhism and Sufism, which seemed to be a jarring experience the first time out, but one he later repeated when he was more spiritualy experienced.
One of the most interesting (and saddening) parts of the book is the story of Toby. Noah and Toby had been best friend since little league (where they were the only skate punks). They did everything together. Drinking, stagediving, shooting up, steling, going to jail – everything. However, when Noah is in the padded cell and finally realizes that he hit the bottom, Toby is still doing much of the same stuff as they did before. He goes through some of the motions of recovery, keeps getting into situations that cause him to relapse. Toby is like a mirror image of Noah’s life. Up to a point, they were on the same path, but when they came to a fork in the path, Noah took one path and Toby took another. They still got together every now and then, but they realized that their lives were just different. In one of the later chapters, Noah remarks that Toby was, “the only witness to see me both shoot dope and teach meditation.”
Dharma Punx is a story about recovery and a spiritual journey. If you saw Noah Levine, you probably wouldn’t think he was a Buddhist, much less a spiritual teacher. His background as a hard core punk would certainly seem an odd path for someone who once considered becoming a Buddhist priest. His path still goes on (and will probably span some more books), and it gives me a greater awareness of my own path.
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- Jennifer Government
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