Living with change

Photo by Nick Kenrick
Photo by Nick Kenrick

Written late spring/early summer

Suzuki Roshi was once asked if anything was constant in this life. He replied with one word: change.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a wave of hail moving from behind the hills, over the temple and through the valley. Directly above my office, directly above my writing desk, is the dining room balcony. Drum-rolls of hard ice falling onto the flat surface of the balcony roused me from my concentration.  I went upstairs to watch the weather.

A few days earlier it had felt like summer had arrived. The sunshine was bright, and the air was warm. It was a real change from the sun and cold wind of winter and spring days. The sun-rose in the garden started to flower. Each delicate, Barbie-pink, flower lasts for just one day.

On my day off, I was looking forward to a day in the heat. I sat in the garden eating breakfast, looking out over the copper-beech, with its orange-yellow blossom, and the plum tree just coming into leaf. Grey clouds drifted in, settling over the sky like a soft blanket. Still, I spent most of the day outside.

In the evening it started to rain. Noisy rain. The cats ran inside, mewing at us, complaining about the weather. I could hear the water from the roof flooding down the downspout and overwhelming the drains. It rained hard through the night. The following morning it eased a little. The rain drops were smaller and softer. More like mist than rain. The slate tiles of the coach house roof I can see from my office window were dark with the wet.

It’s tempting to complain about the rain, and praise the sunshine. But they are each beautiful in their own way. Someone was decorating our shrine room on those wet mornings. It wasn’t ideal conditions, the light was dim, and the paint took longer to dry, but the garden loved the rain. The potatoes plants doubled in size in a couple of days, and the cucumber seedling I planted out on my day off grew taller by an inch a day.

The summer colours were dulled a little by the mist, but still the deep pink magnolia flowers burst from the grey.

If we can just find the right place to stand, all weather is beautiful weather. And all weather changes. The same is true of our own lives.

There are large changes that a life goes through, and we might have some sense of what they are: of how the energy of a life shifts from childhood, through the teenager years to adulthood and old age. Having some sense of this can bring us a kind of solace, we can make peace with knowing that one thing changes into another.  But we shouldn’t hold on to tightly to this idea of cycles. Just like the weather there can be unexpected storms in the summer, or days of sunshine in the winter.

Thoughts, feelings, our physical health, all of these change over the years, and all of these change on a daily basis, and all of these change from moment to moment.

The simple act of knowing this can bring us to a calm centre point.

We can’t control man, if any, of these circumstances. But, like the weather, we can change how we look at them, and how we experience them.

In every circumstance there is something beautiful, and every circumstance is always beginning to change into something new.

email kaspa@thebuddhsittherapist.com to book in a first therapy session, via Skype or face to face.

This article first appeared in All About Malvern Hills

 

How accepting ‘what is’ leads to real change

Sun rays through the fog by Jean-Daniel Echenard
Sun rays through the fog by Jean-Daniel Echenard

Yesterday afternoon I was tired, and I was grumpy. I was upset with someone for not having behaved how I wanted them too, or how I thought I would have behaved in their situation. I worked over the situation in my mind. I was justifying my upset feelings to myself, but of course this just kept the frustration alive.

I watched the rain running down the window as I did the washing up after lunch. The view across the valley was obscured by a fine grey mist.

Somehow I managed to catch sight of what I was doing: I was resisting reality. I couldn’t change what had happened, and every time I went over events in my mind I was getting more upset. I was pitting what I wanted against what had actually taken place and, naturally, reality won out.

We create a huge amount of pain for ourselves by resisting reality. We’ll all have our own style of doing this, and different styles at different times. Perhaps we distract ourselves by opening a bottle of wine; or reaching for another chocolate; or ordering a new pair of shoes, or that latest collectable online. Perhaps we’ll try to push reality away, getting upset with other people, or inanimate objects. Often anger is an attempt to create distance between us and something unsettling. Perhaps we’ll simply try to pretend that what we don’t like isn’t there, and become exhausted or even depressed as it takes all of our energy to hold reality at bay.

When I was stood at the sink, as soon as I noticed what my mind had been doing my tiredness started to lift. I felt awake again. As I had started to accept reality the energy that I’d been putting into railing against it, or just ignoring it, was suddenly available for other uses.

Along with giving us some energy back, accepting what is means that we can then give ourselves options: the more we resist reality the less options we have.

With my hands in hot water, washing the dishes, I not only saw the choices my friend had made that had upset me, but also saw his reasons for making those choices. I was also able to see the version of reality that I was trying to protect, and that it was simply a misplaced expectation.

Once I had seen more of what was real I was able to sit down with my friend and talk over what had happened in a pretty relaxed way.

One common thing that affects how well we are able to accept reality is a confusion between things that are inside our control and things that are outside our control. I couldn’t change what had happened, or my friend, but I could change my response. Many situations that we struggle with are like this, and thinking clearly about what is and isn’t in our control can help us move towards acceptance and creating options.

There’s a simple exercise I use sometimes to help with this. I create three columns in my journal, the first for elements within my control, the second for elements I can influence, and the third for things completely outside my control. Then I fill in the blanks.

Anything that brings us closer to seeing what is really there is a good thing. The more clearly we can see, and accept what is in front of us, the more likely we are to be at ease with what is happening and to make a good response.

 

To book a therapy or mindfulness session, email: kaspa@thebuddhisttherapist.com

A version of this article appeared in All About Malvern Hills

Taking care of ourselves in a busy world

Autumn Colors by Paulo Valdivieso
Autumn Colors by Paulo Valdivieso

As autumn approaches we start to feel the first trace of autumn in the air. The nights draw in and the days slowly get cooler. Trees turn from bright summer greens into reds and yellows until the sides of the roads are lined with dried brown fallen leaves.

At the same time the natural world is drawing in on itself and growth is slowing there is a sudden burst of energy in other spheres of life. School is about to begin, new uniforms and stationary need to be bought and even those of us out of academic life feel the impulse to start something new or reinvigorate our working life, hearing the echo from childhood of our own first days at school. At the same time we begin to anticipate Christmas, complaining about the first adverts on television, wondering if we have to invite the whole family around for lunch on December the 25th and if our pockets are deep enough for everything on our loved one’s wish lists.

I sometimes feel there is a tension between these two impulses: on the one hand the quietening down and withdrawing of the natural world, which often seems to trigger some deep hibernation instinct in people, and on the other hand the excitement and pressure of new beginnings and the build-up to the holiday season.

Even in springtime when the days are lengthening and the whole world seems invigorated with life new starts can be difficult. They can bring us closer to our learning edges: intellectually as we learn new skills and emotionally as we are taken to (and sometimes beyond) the edge of our comfort zones.

How can we take care of ourselves in these situations? How can we make sure that we do not become overstretched and burnt-out, for ourselves and for others sake?

We need to pay attention to ourselves and to others. We need to look out for the clues that we are becoming too tired, or too challenged.

This kind of noticing is difficult in the midst of the business of new projects and of the frenzied world. The more we are caught up reacting moment to moment the harder it is to see ourselves and the situation we are in clearly. We thrash around like someone thrown into a pool of water stirring up silt, muddying what was clear and forgetting that we can stay afloat more easily by lying back and relaxing, than by splashing around making great waves.

It is important to make some space in our lives to be still, to allow ourselves to relax, to begin to soften the tension in our mind and bodies.

When we have found a moment of stillness or relative quiet we can then ask ourselves, “How am I doing? What’s happening in my life right now? Can I make any changes to make life easier, or better, or do I just need to sit and enjoy this moment of peace?”

Making these quite spaces is especially important as we go into busy times. It may feel selfish to take time for ourselves when the world is asking for so much of us, but these moments in which we can begin to relax and to pay close attention to ourselves and our lives will put us in a much better to position to take care of others, as much as they help us feel better in ourselves.

To book a therapy or mindfulness session, email: kaspa@thebuddhisttherapist.com

A version of this article appeared in All About Malvern Hills

How can we begin to grow?

How our relationship with our therapist leads to change

Most research that compares different types of therapy, to see which is more effective, reaches the same conclusion: the quality of the relationship between the client and the therapist is more important than the style of psychotherapy.

Putting yourself into a good relationship with a therapist is one of the most powerful ways to encourage change and growth.

Carl Rogers talked about three core conditions that enable personal growth. If the therapist can embody these qualities, he suggested, the client will naturally become more at ease, more satisfied with life, more able to take positive action. What are these three conditions?

Unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence.

No therapist embodies these perfectly, but the simple act of being in relationship with someone who is aiming to embody these, and mostly managing it, begins our process of transformation.

In my experience as a client, and as a therapist, as we begin to trust the therapist, and the space created in the therapy room, we begin to relax. This process of relaxation means that whatever we have been holding onto, or in denial about, begins to bubble up to the surface. This process is a natural unfolding. Often we experience all sorts of feelings during the process of letting go; sometimes this can even feel like grief. But in the safe environment of the therapy room, we move towards acceptance.

Professor Gisho Saiko took Rogers’ understanding of this growth-promoting relationship and added a new layer of meaning to it.

Gisho Saiko was a psychotherapist, and a Pureland Buddhist priest. He was an inspiration to my own teacher, also a psychotherapist and priest, and as I now have both of those roles, I feel some affinity with him and his ideas.

He suggested that there is some underlying existential truth, or reality, which supports the growth of each of us.

He wasn’t just talking about the space in the therapy room, but in our whole lives.

Saiko expressed this in Pureland Buddhist terms, but we could describe it as the understanding that each of us has access to some benign process that supports us and encourages us to grow.

Rogers used to use the image of a potato sending out shoots towards the light, as a metaphor for the innate potential for people to grow towards the light themselves.

Saiko encourages us to remember that the conditions for growth are present all the time.  However, there is some act of forgetting (or perhaps simply a ‘not-knowing’) which means we feel cast aside, and without hope.

So the therapist’s job is not so much to embody Rogers’ core conditions, but rather to simply remember, on behalf of the client, that the conditions for growth are already here.

In time, the therapists trust in this begins to rub off on the client. Initially the therapy room becomes the place that vulnerability, and letting go, and growth, is possible, but ultimately the client begins to understand that this movement towards the light is possible anywhere – inside or outside the therapy space.

Sometimes we forget again, of course, and then it’s helpful to have good friends, or a therapist, to remind us of this basic truth.

 

email kaspa@thebuddhsittherapist.com to book in a therapy session, via Skype or face to face.

Dogma, the Kalama Sutta, and a Bad Book Review

Buddha teaching the first five disciples

Over the Christmas break a book review appeared on Amazon.com that amused me. It was a review of mine and Satya’s book Just As You Are: Buddhism for Foolish BeingsIt was a three star review, which I thought that was pretty generous, considering what the reviewer had to say…

I’m not sure I could read this book though I’m making an assessment from one sentence. “… he created community based on rituals, precepts, and dogma.” The Buddha was so against dogma that he gave a teaching called the Kalama Sutra, in which he said to question even what he had to say.

I think that might be from the introduction, or perhaps it’s from the chapter I wrote called Buddhism is a Religion, in which I quote David L. Mcmahan. Mcmahan deliberately uses the word dogma about Buddhism, in contrast to Anagarika Dharmapala who in the 1893 World’s Fair, described Buddhism as ‘free from theology, priestcraft, rituals, ceremonies, dogmas, heavens, hells and other theological shibboleths.’

David L. McMahan comments that ‘even a cursory knowledge of Sinhalese Buddhism on the ground belies Dharmapala’s characterization of Buddhism as free from ritual, priests, ceremonies, heavens and hells; yet this sentiment is often repeated by early apologists and its echo continues today.’[1]

Why did Dharmapala describe Buddhism in that way? To appeal to rational westerners and garner their support for Buddhism in Celyon, which he felt was becoming threatened by Christian missionaries.

That’s an aside really. The reason for writing this post was to give me an excuse to go back and re-read the Kalama Sutta. I know from past readings that it doesn’t really suggest cherry picking the bits of Buddhism you like, and leaving the rest (as it’s often used by westerners), but I wanted to see what it really says.Continue reading →

Free will, love and freedom

by Travis Morgan

There were a handful of Christmas cards on the mantelpiece. We had spent three hours cleaning the flat earlier in the day. Rain clouds were gathering in the darkening evening sky.

I was sitting on the floor, drawing a baby monster for my youngest niece. Satya and the older niece, and the niece’s mother were off doing something else somewhere.

The cats had been scared off by the children.

As I was drawing (something like a cross between a furby, a gremlin and false teeth) the brother-in-law and I were talking ethics. I’m not sure how it came up.

At one point he mentioned that he didn’t believe in free will. Then everyone else reappeared, the conversation moved on, and we didn’t come back to it.

I spent a while not believing in free will myself. Continue reading →

Reasonable attachments?

Are there such thing as reasonable attachments?

In the training community I lived in, one of the old rules was that people should not be attached to their rooms, and trainees were moved around every few months, keeping their belongings in a single box.

By the time I moved into that community that practice had ceased, and most people had their own rooms.

I lived and trained there for four years, as an Amidist Buddhist monk, before deciding to give up some of my vows and become a priest. (In our order we have two ordination tracks, one which is more friar like, and one which is more vicar like).

Although we are a Pureland Order much of the training I received was in a Zen spirit. My teacher trained with Jiyu-Kennett Roshi, a Soto Zen Master, before choosing the Pureland teachings as the most appropriate vehicle for his own teachings, and some of the style of training he received in the Zen monastery was passed onto us.Continue reading →

Absolute Love —Total Freedom

I became a Pureland Buddhist in 2006. I didn’t know anything about Pureland Buddhism at the time. I had been practicing Buddhism for a few years, and then I met Dharmavidya and the Amida community. I knew that I wanted to join this community and have Dharmavidya as my teacher. That was enough.

I learnt about bonbu nature: we are foolish beings of wayward passion; full of greed, hate and delusion. I learnt that Amida Buddha, the Buddha of wisdom and acceptance, loves us just as we are.

I saw the shadow of those teachings. What in medieval Japan was called licensed evil: if we are loved just as we are, if we are going to be reborn in Amida’s Pure Land regardless of our karma, why bother to do good at all?Continue reading →

Into The Junk Cupboard

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The process of creating this video almost mirrored the theme of the poem. I created an ideal in my mind, of myself as a film poet and of what I imagined the final produce might be (much better drawn than this), and nearly threw the whole project in the cupboard because of that ideal.

At some point during the middle of production, when I had scrapped my first ideal of filming the drawing process, and was trying powerpoint (powerpoint!) I nearly gave up. What was happening in reality didn’t match what I had imagined. After a break for lunch and a walk around the garden I went back to the original idea. I managed to talk myself into having lower expectations and finished the project. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.

There’s still a chance my filmpoet self will get shoved back into the junk cupboard (he’s been there before), but perhaps less so now I know that it’s usually idealism that shoves things in there. If I can come to terms with how things actually are (the fact that I can’t really draw, for example) I’m much more more likely to keep enjoying this persona, than throw it away.Continue reading →