lotusinthemud

10 days continuous nembutsu chanting

 

The Amida sangha are now into day 3 of the nembutsu chanting. I'm joining in at a distance whenever I can - the Amida Newcastle sangha participated for 2 hours on Tuesday evening from the shrine room here...via the wonders of the video link. I have this playing practically the whole time, day and night, on my laptop.

Fiona and Kaspa of Amida Malvern have written movingly about this experience.

fill the hole in your heart

Rick Hanson: What supplies do you need? 

The Practice  Fill the hole in your heart.

Why? As we grow up and then move through adulthood, we all have normal needs for safety, fulfillment, and love. For example, children need to feel secure, adolescents need a growing sense of autonomy, and young adults need to feel attractive and worthy of romantic love. When these needs are met by various "supplies"-such as the caring of a par¬ent, the trust of a teacher, the love of a mate-the positive experiences that result then sink in to implicit memory to become resources for well-being, self-regulation, resil¬ience, self-worth, and skillful action. This is how healthy psychological development is supposed to work. But it doesn't always go this way, does it? In the lives of most people (me included) - even without any kind of significant mistreatment, trauma, or abuse - the incoming stream of supplies has sometimes been a thin soup: perhaps your parents were busy caring for a sick sibling or preoccupied with their own needs and conflicts, or you moved a lot as a kid and had a hard time connecting with peers, or high school was more than the usual social nightmare, or potential lovers were uninterested, or jobs have been frustrating and dispiriting, or . . . in other words, a typical life.

living buddhism - buddhism is not just a set of techniques for self-help

There is something much bigger going on.

Dharmavidya David Brazier ::link

In the 1980s, I knew a remarkable man named Carl Rogers, one of the most eminent and influential psychologists of the last century. Carl, not unlike Shakyamuni Buddha, saw virtually limitless potential within human nature, and this inspired him in all he did. He was an explorer of human relations, a visionary, and a rigorous researcher. He was willing to ask awkward or demanding questions, consider them thoroughly, and then think about things in new ways as the situation required. Indeed, one of Carl’s favorite expressions was “the facts are friendly,” by which he meant we should not fear the truth even though it may not fit with what we already believe.

During Carl’s time, the world of psychotherapy had become polarized between various schools of psychoanalysis on the one hand, with their complex and untestable esoteric theories, and on the other, behaviorism, which in the name of a very narrow definition of science reduced human experience to simplistic terms and therapy to mechanically applied techniques. In his approach to research, Carl did not impose a theoretical structure on clinical practice; instead, he let theories arise from careful investigation of what actually happens in the clinical setting. His work was instrumental in the development of humanistic psychology, which presented itself as a “third force” in the field.

I find that the concerns Carl had about the psychology world of his time has parallels in the Buddhist world of today. With this in mind, we might do well to reflect on whether we modern practitioners of the dharma are not in danger of falling into one or the other of two extremes, one insular, heavily esoteric, and self-validating, and the other characterized by a narrow focus on the application of technique alone. I am especially concerned with the latter, because it seems to me that in adopting that perspective, we might think we are being progressive when in fact we are merely fitting Buddhism to certain unexamined but commonly held beliefs about the world.

buddhist and yoga teachers issue open letter in support of occupy movement

Ethan Nichtern and Michael Stone have composed a letter about why teachers of Buddhism and yoga should support the Occupy Movement. And they’ve reached out to their peers, asking a number of fellow leaders to sign the letter as a gesture of “commitment to align our practice and values and work together to help our society.”

Initial signees include Sharon Salzberg, Stephen Batchelor, Sean Corne, Robert Thurman, Jack Kornfield, David Loy, Joan Halifax, Norman Fischer, Susan Piver, Anne Cushman, Gaylon Ferguson, Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Trudy Goodman, David Nichtern, Sarah Powers, Judith Simmer-Brown, angel Kyodo williams, Adam Lobel, Eihei Peter Levitt, Cyndi Lee, Koshin Paley Ellison, Robert Chodo Campbell, Ty Powers, Sarah Weintraub, Ted Grand, Maia Duerr, and Ari Pliskin.

::read more

being kind in unkind times

I was looking at today's newspaper and was feeling the contraction from the barrage of intense, difficult and often extremely painful experiences that we have in our world today -- economic recession for whole countries; extreme financial hardships for many; ongoing revelations of atrocities in Libya, Afghanistan and other wars; escalating mean-spirited rhetoric of current politics; unabated suffering caused by natural and human-made disasters.

If the human heart is inherently gentle and kind -- how do we cope with a world that seems so harsh and mean?

dharmavidya, his history, philosophy, writing and travels: an interview

Expat Author Interview with David Brazier

(Dharmavidya) David Brazier lives a mobile life – about ten countries so far this year, rarely more than three weeks in one place, but his anchor points are the Canary Islands, where his partner lives, France, where he has a small retreat, and the UK, his home country. He writes prose and poetry. His latest – Her Mother's Eyes and Other Poems – comes out in November 2011 by QUG. Most of Brazier’s writing is on spirituality, psychology and culture. Love and Its Disappointment is considered to be his most important essay on the meaning of life so far. Brazier’s books have been translated into around ten languages.

 

IMBO: David, welcome to I Must Be Off! Reading about you has been fascinating. Ten countries this year. Wow. Why do you move around so much?

Brazier: The reason for my travelling is to teach Buddhism and Buddhist psychology, to promote inter-faith understanding, support cultural events and simply deepen my own encounter with the big existential questions.

On the one hand, I am an internationalist, happy to put up my hammock, as it were, wherever. On the other hand, I'm definitely English and very much European. My mother gave me a love of England and of poetry and although one can sometimes transcend one's home culture, one never throws it off.

I spent much of my childhood in Cyprus when it was a British colony and a very cosmopolitan place. My parents had friends who were Greek, Turkish, Armenian, Lebanese, Egyptian, and American as well as British. Coming back to spend my adolescence in UK was a shock. I felt hemmed in. I have always had itchy feet.

IMBO: And the fingers? How did you get started writing?

Brazier: When I left school I went to university, but dropped out. Dropping out was what one did in those days. I went back to do a masters degree when I was in my forties and went on to do a doctorate. While I was doing it my tutor asked me if I would take off his hands a book of conference papers that.he was editing That, in due course, turned into my first full length book, Beyond Carl Rogers: toward a psychotherapy for the 21st century. I'd already done a lot of shorter pieces of writing – articles, monographs, pamphlets and so on – on Buddhism and psychology mostly. The book sold better than the publisher expected and so I was asked to write more. Writing books has become an integral part of my personal evolution.

I am a Buddhist priest, but I have the mentality of an artist. Nonetheless, I was useless at art at school and did not get a feel for writing either until much later. Interestingly, of my three children, my younger daughter is an artist (painting and sculpture) and my elder one works in the music industry.

::continue reading

remember what really matters most

.........While it’s good advice not to sweat the small stuff, we also need to nurture the large stuff.

There are many good reasons to do so, from simply enjoying yourself to recognizing the truth that one day you’ll have just A Year to Live, the title of Stephen Levine’s haunting book. You’ll never know when you step over the invisible line and the countdown begins – 365 days left, then . . . – but you can know, before and after you cross it, that you’ve remembered the big things.

How do we do this?

A Few Questions

In this life, what do you really care about?

Looking back, what has mattered to you? Looking ahead, what do you want to keep on the front burner?

Consider this well-known suggestion: imagine resting comfortably in your last few days and reflecting on your life; what do you want to be glad that you felt and did, that you made a priority?

::link to whole article

compassion is something you train in

I wanted to share a fairly simple observation from teaching this week, related to the meditation practices that focus on the development of compassion, such as metta and tonglen. It's interesting that if we see a great athlete or yogi, or just someone in prime physical condition, we have a tendency to think that this person has gone through an immense amount of training and work to get in that condition. We say things like, "I wonder where they work out" or "I wonder where they practice."

At the very least, we are interested in how they got to be in such great shape, and we know intensive training was part of their process. We have a slightly lessened tendency to think of their condition as totally given -- we know they must have done some work to now be able to run that far or flip up into that handstand, even if their current condition is also the result of lots of natural gifts.

When we are in the presence of a really kind or compassionate person who smiles a lot, there seems to be a greater tendency to say things like, "they're just a really great guy," to perceive kindness and compassion as self-existing traits that a person either possesses or else, just kind of doesn't have. We don't think, "Oh, they must've really worked out their heart and mind for a long time to get in that kind of place."

::continued

nonjudgmental judging

The Dalai Lama's refusal to judge the food on MasterChef Australia is part of the Buddhist tradition of equanimity. Photograph: Strdel/AFP/Getty Images

The reality television program MasterChef Australia made news when the Dalai Lama agreed to appear as a guest judge. But while His Holiness clearly enjoyed some of the dishes – particularly the yummy Sri Lankan vegetarian curry – he refused to render judgments: "As a Buddhist monk it is not right to prefer this food or that food," he said.

Why not judge the food? Maybe His Holiness didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. It is also an ancient rule for Buddhist nuns and monks to eat whatever food they are given as alms, without judging whether it is tasty or not. And that takes us to the issue of likes and dislikes.

You may have heard the Buddha taught that life is suffering, and suffering is caused by desire. Updated to modern terms, what the Buddha taught is that we're all twitching masses of greed, insecurity and social programming. We hurtle through our lives grasping at whatever we think will soothe our existential angst while batting away whatever hurts us or pushes our ego buttons. And as we do this we cause a lot of trouble for ourselves and for those around us. There is a 6th-century Chinese text of the Chan (Zen) school that says: "To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind." Very simply, sorting all phenomena into "like" or "dislike" bins gets in the way of enlightenment.

To be free, the Buddha said, we must first thoroughly perceive the illusory nature of all the things that jerk us around, including likes and dislikes......::continue here

the question of buddhist reincarnation and population growth

Thousands of Buddhist monks attend an alms offering ceremony in Bangkok. Photograph: Damir Sagolj/Reuters

There are now 7 billion people on earth, a billion more than 12 years ago, and 6 billion more than two centuries ago. How does this fact fit with the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation?

The idea of reincarnation is commonly thought of as "one-out-one-in"– you die and then you get reborn somewhere else. That's not at all how it's perceived in Buddhism: one of the hallmarks of the Buddhist teaching is a refutation that there's any permanent self or soul that could endure from lifetime to lifetime. This is such a different view to the one above that most Buddhists prefer not to use the word reincarnation at all, opting instead for something like "rebirth" or "rebecoming".

The Buddha taught that all things are impermanent, in a state of continuous change and flux – and this includes us. We're constantly mutating as we grow, develop, age and decay, and what we tend to think of as "myself" is actually an ever-changing heap of body parts, thoughts and feelings, influenced by a vast range of past and present causes and conditions (family and cultural history, environment, schooling, biology and so on). Ask yourself: are you the same person you were when you were five years old? The same person as five years ago? Five minutes ago? If not, then aren't we being born and dying in every moment?