lotusinthemud

off to amida france for the amida order intensive retreat

Tomorrow morning (Wednesday) I'll be driving down to London with Kuvalaya. We'll stay at Sukhavati. Then we'll set off in Padma's car, with Modgala, on Friday morning, via the ferry and off to Amida France, taking a couple of days so the journey is part of the fun. Then, a week with friends and an opportunity to meet members of the team that I only know via skype, phone and email - so looking forward to this

Gosh, it's a long time since I was there - the summer of 2005, the summer of the London bombings - I was overwhelmed by text messages when I was finally able to get a signal on my mobile, to tell me that my son Simon was safe. Safe from what? I hadn't heard the news, so rushed to the landline for clarification. (Like many Londoners, Simon has a history of being nearby bombings - IRA, Al Qaeda. London commuters are used to the Underground being shut because of bomb warnings. I lived in London through the 70s, when we were all on high alert and no journey was undertaken without vigilance.)

It was also the year of the death of the sister of one of my Order, so she and I travelled to Ottawa together. It seemed so long ago, but casting my mind to those days, I could almost be back there.

So much has happened in the intervening years, both for me and also Amida France - I wonder what changes I'll see when I get there!

asking for - and accepting - help

It's easy to feel embarrassed when there are things we can't do - so we struggle on manfully! But actually, allowing others to help can be a gift to them. I've been touched by the tales of my dharma sister Sahishnu, working with the poorest of the poor in India - how grateful and joyful her sangha are to be in a position to offer her aid in any way - including carrying her when her health has meant she is infirm.

This is an interesting take on the subject from Toni Bernhard:

How to ask for help

How many times have you said to a friend or relative in need, "Let me know if there's anything I can do to help," and when you didn't hear back, fail to follow-up? I've lost count of the number of times I did just that—fail to follow-up when I didn't hear back from someone in need, even though I would have been happy to help in any way I could.

Yet, despite this pattern in my own behavior, when I became chronically ill and didn't get back to people who offered to help, I decided that, because they failed to follow-up, their offers weren't sincere.

I learned otherwise quite by chance. A friend came to visit and showed me an exquisite handmade dress she'd just bought for her granddaughter at a local boutique. When I told her how much I loved it, she asked if I'd like to get one for my granddaughter. I said "sure," and before I could get "but I'm not able to go shopping" out of my mouth, she was out the door.

She returned shortly with the dress in two sizes for me to choose from. I picked one, wrote her a check and, when she left to go home, she took the one I didn't want back to the boutique. That made three trips for her to the same store that day.

When I got sick, was she one of the people who had said, "Let me know if there's anything I can do to help"? Yes. But I'd never asked her to do anything. On that day, however, I saw in her face that going to get that dress was a gift from me to her. She can't restore my health, but she can buy a dress for me to give to my granddaughter, and doing it made her feel terrific.

Here's what I've learned about people who offer to help:

1. They're sincere in their offer: they mean it.

2. The responsibility falls on me, not on them, to follow-up.

3. The best way to take them up on their offer is to give them a specific task to do.

:: read more here

16/6/11: a dharma talk from dharmavidya on the four noble truths

Video streaming by Ustream 

it's 'knit in public' day on saturday

Time to find your needles and yarn, wherever you are.

Watch this lovely video and get in the mood!

 

:: via tangleknot

on taking a “buddhist path through divorce”

From Shambala Sun:

The author of the book Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky: a Buddhist Path Through Divorce (and, of a Shambhala Sun article about the end of his own marriage), Gabriel Cohen will be joined by counselor and therapist Mary Myers in teaching a course called A Buddhist Path Through Divorce, at Omega Institute (June 24-26). Here he shares with us his thoughts on how Buddhism can be helpful in such a difficult time.

Buddhist teachings are of course geared toward helping us to face and/or relieve suffering. How is the kind of suffering that divorce brings with it different from other types of suffering?

I think divorce is especially painful for several reasons. First of all, to get married we have to really open ourselves up and make ourselves vulnerable to another human being. In order to convince ourselves to do that, we tend to idealize the other person. This is The One; I’ve finally found the person who will make me happy; I’ll be with this person forever. When it turns out that they don’t match our idealized vision, we feel crushed and betrayed.

Of course, exposure to Buddhist insights quickly reveals that a lot of our pain is coming from our heads, rather than our hearts. Some of our most cherished ideas have been shattered:  that external things or people can make us happy; that something in life can be permanent and unchanging; that we can perceive another person’s fixed identity. The great thing about divorce, if I can use such a phrase, is that it can really wake us up to a truer sense of how life works. Nothing is unchanging or permanent; nothing has a fixed identity; we need to find happiness within. I would never want to go through the pain of it again, but my own divorce was the thing that set me on a whole new course in life, a way that helps me suffer less from painful things. I might never have gotten on that path if life didn’t give me a good kick in the ass, so for that I’m deeply grateful.

Your book is called Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky: a Buddhist Path Through Divorce, and the book is concerned with positively transforming the experience of divorce. How does one do that? How does a former couple do that?

Doing that requires possession of a fundamental Buddhist insight:  we think that external things cause us suffering, when we really manufacture a lot of that suffering in our own heads. Pain and suffering are two different things. Some things in life — like illness or a job layoff — are painful, but we add layers of suffering by spiraling into negative thoughts about them.

And we often want to relieve the pain of divorce by changing our former partner’s behavior. The bad news is that this is often very difficult or even impossible. The good news is that we can radically improve our experience of divorce by working on it from our own side. We can learn to see that expressing anger — thought it might temporarily feel like a release and a relief — doesn’t move us toward the peace and serenity that we ultimately want. We can learn to develop patience so that our interactions with our exes are less corrosive. We can practice forgiving our spouses for what they might have done. (This is not a matter of excusing bad behavior — it’s a matter of letting go of the burden of resentment that weighs us down.)

This is not just a matter of changing our intellectual understanding. There are specific techniques, such as meditation and mindfulness practices, that can literally retrain our brains to help us become more patient and happy—even in the middle of a painful experience like divorce.

:: continue reading, add any comments (and read the other comments)  here

alice's bucket list

Alice is 15 years old - slightly older than my first granddaugher. She lives in Ulverston, Cumbria. She has terminal cancel. She has started to blog with a list of things she'd like to do in the time she has left. On her profile she tells us that she was due to see Take That this coming weekend and won't be well enough to go.

Is there any of this that you can help her achieve?

• To swim with sharks
• To make everyone sign up to be a bone marrow donor
• To go to Kenya (I can't travel there now but I wanted to))
• To enter Mabel in a regional Labrador show
• To have a photoshoot with Milly, Clarissa, Sammie and Megs
• To have a private cinema party for me and my BFFs
• To design an Emma Bridgewater Mug to sell for charity
• To stay in a caravan
• To have a purple Apple ipad but I'm not really allowed to put that on here and mum is trying to borrow one
• To be a dolphin trainer (I can't do this one either now)
• To meet Take That
• To go to Cadbury World and eat loads of chocolate
• To have a nice picture taken with Mabel
• To stay in the chocolate room at Alton Towers
• To have my hair done if they can do anything with it
• To have a back massage
• To go whale watching

letting the world speak for itself

Toni Berhard, author of How to Be Sick, writes on six benefits of mindfulness outside of meditation:

Mindfulness is the practice of paying careful attention to what is happening in the present moment, whether it be a sight, a sound, a taste, a smell, a sensation in the body, or mental activity (the latter includes emotions and thoughts). Practice it for a few moments or for a few minutes—lying on your bed, sitting in a doctor's office or on a park bench, standing in line. Anywhere.

What's the difference between meditation and mindfulness?

1. Meditative practices are found in most religious and spiritual traditions. The Buddha didn't invent meditation. He did, however, devise the practice of mindful awareness—what we call mindfulness.............

What are the benefits of practicing mindfulness outside of meditation?

1. Mindfulness gives the mind a rest from our fixation on discursive thinking. Of course, we need to think at times. But the mind tends to get lost in stressful thoughts about the past and the future: we replay painful experiences from the past; we mock up worst-case-scenarios about the future. It's exhausting and rarely productive. Paying attention to what is happening in the present moment is a welcome relief from these stressful and habitual thought patterns.

2. Mindfulness takes us out of ourselves. You can see from #1 that most of that discursive thinking is self-focused. It's refreshing and energizing to open our awareness to the world around us instead of always being preoccupied with our personal stories. Mindfulness also helps us cope with painful physical sensations when their intensity takes over our entire sense of self and we feel we are nothing but painful sensations (see my post, Mindfulness: Potent Medicine for Easing Physical Suffering).

:: read the whole article here

amidism - the basics

Dharmavidya has written:

I do not think that it is possible for a human being to write the final and definitive text on Amidism. It is part of the definition of this form of spirituality that none of us has such final or ultimate knowledge. Not only that, but there is a sense here that the nature of ultimacy is not such that a once and for all definition would be possible even if one were superlatively wise. Wisdom consists not in knowing something final but in being open to leadings of the Spirit.

Spirituality is a relationship between oneself as a mortal, limited, fallible being and guiding powers that remain mysterious. As we are Buddhist, we associate the guiding powers with Buddhas and bodhisattvas, but we have no problem with the fact that those drawing on traditions other than Buddhism may find other names for them and we ourselves may sometimes use other names. It may sometimes communicate more to talk of angels, saints, celestials, or the divine than to use words drawn from Sanskrit. Spirituality is not the exclusive property of one ancient civilisation, still less any modern one. It has been a dimension of human life all over the planet throughout history. On the other hand, adopting a totally smorgasbroad approach does not provide one with an adequate frame for building community or sharing practice. Amidism, therefore, while being open to the mystical traditions of all great faiths, primarily follows the traditions, symbols and ideational framework of Mahayana Buddhism, especially in its Pureland variety. 

Amidism is thus an inclusive, generic form of spirituality that draws its traditions and imagery substantially but not exclusively from Buddhism, especially Mahayana Buddhism, and especially the Pureland traditions of Japan. There are three principle core points that we take as axiomatic in this approach. These three provide us with a framework for understanding and conducting the spiritual life. By holding to them we provide ourselves with enough common ground to work together, yet a sufficiently open space that many people can find a place within it and room there to explore their own unique experience of spirit, The first principle is what we call the bombu paradigm. This is the fact that we are ordinary beings. It is the principle that humans are fallible and subject to conditions; that we do not have the power within ourselves to attain spiritual perfection, salvation or apotheosis; that any such consummation comes as a grace and not as something attained as a result of deliberate aspiring practice.  

The second principle is the trikaya: we regard the object of worship or veneration as having threefold nature: ultimate, spiritual and apparent. The ultimate nature stands in relation to ordinary beings rather as infinity stands in relation to finite numbers. The spiritual nature is the fact that the Spirit does appear in dreams and visions, does provide response to the spiritual seeker, and so is accessible through devotional life. The apparent nature is the fact that Buddhas, saints, bodhisattvas, and other great beings do appear in human form in this world and that ordinary beings like ourselves do manifest varying degrees of spirituality in the midst of ordinary life: the Spirit appears in practical ways in our midst. 

The third is the principle of prayer, especially the prayer of calling. This is called nembutsu. It often is expressed in a single line prayer that varies with languages but in the English world often has the form "Namo Amida Bu" - "I call to Amida Buddha" 

The ordinary nature of ourselves, the graduated manifestation of the Spirit and the practice of calling prayer make up our system. This is our way of clothing what I take to be a universal archetype of the spiritual ife. First there is the experience of finitude - we are limited. Second there is the intuition of infinitude - we can conceive of (though not reach) something that transcends our limited state. Third there is a reaching out across the abyss that separates these two. 
This reaching out is active and passive. We reach toward Amida. Amida reaches toward us. In the resulting dynamic transformations occur - some dramatically, some quietly. In the process our appreciation of our finite all-too-seen world and our infinite, mostly unseen one grows, expands, deepens and works in, on and all around us. Something happens. A mystery unfolds. A Life that is more than ordinary occurs in the midst of our ordinariness and we give ourselves to it. This Life is love in myriad forms.

Amidism is the evolving spiritual community of those touched by such love, in which there is a strong sense of common purpose yet a great diversity of activity, in which a simple understanding provides a common, enduring anchor yet wherein new development is always possible. We are led by spiritual powers wiser than ourselves and kinder than ourselves. We can rejoice in them

:: please join the Friends of Amida spiritual network and comment on this post here

ethical wisdom

An interview with author Mark Matousek:

Mark Matousek is a Tricycle contributing editor. His new book, Ethical Wisdom, is now available in bookstores.

Your new book, Ethical Wisdom, is about maybe the most important subject in the world: human goodness. People have been thinking and writing about ethics for a long time, what's interesting about this field today? What made you want to take this project on? Science is finally catching up to what Buddhism has been telling us for millennia: namely, that the human brain is hard-wired to be good. We are born with what moral psychologists are now calling a “moral organ” that enables us to make ethical choices. This ethical faculty is not unlike our inherited aptitude for things like language and mathematics. Just as in learning language, we are born with a “feel” for parts of speech, we come into the world already sensitized to five primary areas of ethical concern: harm and care; justice and fairness; loyalty toward the in-group; authority and respect; and sacredness and purity. These are the chords of our moral organ, and learning to “play” them—becoming sensitive to how our “ear” for these chords affects the ethical choices we make—can transform how we behave in the world and the quality of our lived wisdom.



This is fascinating, vital information at a time when it’s easy to look at mounting violence, destruction, and greed in the world, and feel discouraged about our future as a species. I wanted to bring together this new research, as well as perennial truth from the wisdom traditions, to create a more realistic view of human nature based on the facts—as opposed to our miserable, inherited Western view of man as a fallen, original sinner—in order to give people hope and to demonstrate just how much power each of has to utilize, and cultivate, the gifts of this evolved moral organ.  What we now know about the role of mirror neurons in the learning empathy is enough, alone, to revolutionize how we think about our human potential for goodness.



mindful writing prompts....#1

Here's the first of  Kaspa's writing prompts:

Mindful writing prompt #1

Welcome, this is the first in a series of writing prompts that will encourage you to pay attention to the world.

We'll post a new prompt every Tuesday. We'd love to read what you come up with. You can post your response as a comment below, or on your own blog, or just write in your paper notebook, or all three!

Mindful writing prompt #1: Going into the kitchen

This week we'd like you to write about something you find in your kitchen. This is about paying attention to the world, so really do go into the kitchen and choose something. Examine it, and then create a piece of writing.

You could write a small stone, a poem or a short piece of prose.

:: link to site