Zen Buddhism practitioner Eric Jordan credits regular meditation with making him a better and more patient father to his three kids.

“One thing I find—and I typically meditate every day—is, if I don’t meditate over a three-day period or week, I start getting shorter with my kids,” Jordan told the Georgia Straight by phone from his Victoria home. “This little voice starts going in my head; it starts out saying, ”˜Eric, you have a choice as to what kind of father you want to be. Do you want to be one who is shorter with your kids or one who is more patient?’ It is a choice, and if I meditate, it is easier to be more patient. If I don’t meditate, I am not as patient, and I can just see it in my actions.”

The 38-year-old software pioneer sold his company, Pure Edge Solutions, to IBM a few years ago. Now he devotes larger chunks of time to Zen Buddhism, which he started some four years ago. Jordan is now planning to augment that with his social conscience in an event not yet seen in Victoria: a faith-based street retreat where 15 or so participants live homeless in the provincial capital. They will meditate twice daily for 30 minutes at a time.

Jordan got the idea for this after attending Vancouver’s own street retreat in the Downtown Eastside last August, which was organized by Vancouver-based Skull Skates graphic designer Lisa Hill. Hill told the Straight she is actively involved with Awake In Action, which she said is the activist arm of Vancouver’s Shambhala Meditation Centre.

“I got to know Awake In Action through the street retreats,” Jordan added. “It was a powerful experience and very worthwhile. It was worthwhile enough that I am going to organize one in Victoria.”

There are many benefits attributed to meditation. In a 2005 book compiled by faculty at the Massachusetts-based Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy—Mindfulness and Psychotherapy (Guilford Press)—Christopher Germer discussed “mindfulness” in the opening chapter. (Germer is a clinical psychologist using mindfulness to overcome anxiety and panic in clients.) Germer described mindfulness as a “deceptively simple way of relating to experience”.

Germer also looked into formal mindfulness—a Buddhist term used to describe the calm achieved through meditation—as a means to help with psychotherapy. He defined “informal” mindfulness training as “the application of mindfulness skills in everyday life”—something like what Jordan and Hill are doing.

“Any exercise that alerts us to the present moment, with acceptance, cultivates mindfulness,” Germer wrote. “Examples are directing attention to one’s breathing, listening to ambient sounds in the environment, paying attention to our posture at any given moment, labelling feelings”¦”

For the Victoria retreat, happening July 31 to August 3, Jordan will have the spiritual tutelage of Zen Sensei Grover Genro Gauntt, whom he calls “a great guy and dharma heir of [New York–based Zen Roshi] Bernie Glassman.”

“It’s a first-come, first-serve basis,” Jordan said of the retreat. “It is the first 15 people who sign up and get everything together. Interestingly, one thing you have to do is get donations to go. So you pay [$400] to go homeless, which is somewhat ironic. There are two wrinkles to that. One is that the money goes to the homeless services that you end up using while on the street. You are not truly homeless, but you do end up going to food banks and things like that. So the money goes to support those groups.”

In his 1988 book, The Meditative Mind (Tarcher Putnam), Daniel Goleman described insight and mindfulness as the “primary healthy factors”.

“When they are present in a mental state, the other healthy factors tend to be present also,” Goleman wrote. “The presence of these two healthy factors is sufficient to suppress all the unhealthy factors,” such as delusion and egoism.

According to Jordan, his grounding in Buddhist philosophy provides a “comfort with meditation” out on the street.

“If you have never meditated before, it might be a little bit hard-core for you,” Jordan said. “You spend time in shelters, spend time chatting to people, and spend time finding something to eat. You typically spend time doing panhandling and those sorts of things.”

Hill called her experience “a spiritual retreat”.

“It is very much about one’s own self and seeing your own separation of self and other, recognizing your neuroses and things [that come up] when you have no security and comfort—or the illusions of things we think of as securities and comforts,” she said. “Then you just open to what arises, and so, moment by moment, as life is happening, you respond to that without any of your barriers or walls. You may still have those up, but they generally fall away pretty quickly because you don’t have a lot to hold on to. A lot of the self-identity and the ways you identify yourself are not there. I think being in those environments, where it is quite raw and gritty, it puts most people in an unfamiliar and groundless state, so they can’t really hold on to the things that they think that they are.”

A central tenet of Buddhist philosophy is the dissolving of the ego, particularly in relation to imposing a judgment on something else, thus creating the I and Other dichotomy, which the Buddha’s teachings state leads to suffering.

“The first phase [on the path of insight], mindfulness, entails breaking through stereotyped perception,” Goleman wrote. “Our natural tendency is to become habituated to the world around us, no longer to notice the familiar. We also substitute abstract names or preconceptions for the raw evidence of our senses. In mindfulness, the meditator methodically faces the bare facts of his experience, seeing each event as though occurring for the first time.”

The street retreats were started in 1991 by Glassman. To learn more about the Victoria event or Awake In Action, visit www.AwakeInAction.org/.