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. (more…)
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? (more…)
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. (more…)
After a very peopled few days it is quiet in the temple today. It is lunchtime, and the only other person I have seen waved at me from a top floor window, whilst I was in the garden, before disappearing again.
Satya got up at 5:30am this morning and went to a half-day yoga retreat at a converted flour-mill out in the countryside. I slept in until 9am, had breakfast and a cup of tea in the garden, and started the very good Ali Smith novel. The Accidental.
In a recent blog post, floatsam and jetsom, my teacher, Dharmavidya, writes about the difficulty of practising in the modern age: the pressures of work have increased with technology, rather than decreased, we are increasingly connected to each other and the world through social media, and the connections we do have are less personal.
I grew up in a world where this was already true, although it may have become more so, and I found it easier to take refuge in impersonal connections than to make meaningful relationships with people. That’s why my first experience of living in community was such a challenge. I was plunged into a world of real connection and intimacy. Part of my reaction to that environment was to draw in and protect myself, but at the same time I did begin to learn to trust people and to understand that it was possible to be vulnerable with another person, that not everyone would let you down, and that even when that did happen there was something that would hold me, and meant I would be okay.
On Thursday evening, after a day of seeing clients, Satya and I went out with some friends to support our new housemate who was playing at an open-mic night. On Friday morning we held our usual morning service, supported a friend who thought they had just received some bad news (it turned out to be crossed wires), supported another friend by going with them to their mother’s funeral, had our lively community meal, and hosted a quiz night. On Saturday we met friends for coffee, made new friends, my family came over for tea in the afternoon, and then we had a Eurovision Song Contest party in the evening. Yesterday (Sunday) we had morning service, I had a one-to-one with a Sangha member, and then spent the day in the garden with our volunteers.
A few years ago that amount of time spent with people would have exhausted me and in the midst of it all I would have been desperately looking forward to today, a clear day without much social activity. But I notice that not only have I survived the last few days, I enjoyed them, and I am looking forward to catching up with another friend at the Malvern Food Festival this afternoon.
Whilst I’m not clinging on to the quiet space of this morning like my life depends on it, it still feels important to have space to myself.
When I spend time with people (probably when anyone spends time with other people) inevitably some part of my ego is provoked. In the past, when I really struggled sometimes to be around others, there was a great deal of ego noise, worrying what other people thought, trying to protect my self-image, trying not to provoke other people because I didn’t trust their reactions, and so on.
There’s not just my own stuff at play. Whenever we spend with others they often unconsciously ask us to take on roles in their own ego-dramas, either to prove something they believe about the world (other people can’t be trusted, say, or other people will save me) or to try and disprove it by testing it to extinction. For me, those unconscious invitations take some energy to decline, especially if they happen to provoke some of my own ego-noise. It takes energy to treat people even-handedly, and not buy into the games they are playing (and that I play too, of course).
Over the years my own ego-noise has quietened down and it has become increasingly easier to become social.
What allowed that process to happen? Learning to have faith in others, and being around others who reward my faith in them by accepting me, mostly, just as I am; being interested in the specifics of my ego-noise, what exactly am I afraid of, and where does that fear come from; and learning to accept myself as I am and not worrying too much when I do find it more difficult to be around others. It can also help to be interested in other people’s process too, not so that I can judge them, but so that I can find a deep empathy for their position. When I have true understanding it is much easier to have compassion for others, and to gently decline their unconscious invitations to play ego-games.
I’m not sure I’ll ever get to the position of having completely clean relationships with people though, and that’s why spaces like this morning are important. When it’s quiet around me, my own stirred up ego has time to settle down and become quiet, ready for the next social engagement.
Dharmavidya has some good advice too, in that blog post I mentioned:
If we treasure simplicity and do not unnecessarily complicate our existence, the burden will be lighter. If we treasure both friendship and solitude, we will find opportunities for spiritual refreshment. If we have faith, then we can let go of many worries and take things as they come, trusting that there are always deeper purposes at work. However complex the system within which we live our lives, there is always some space, some emptiness, pauses in which a simple prayer may return us to peace and bliss.
I have not deliberately been out of touch. I have not deliberately sent you to Coventry. I have not had my hands tied behind my back since December, but neither have I written anything here since then.
Next Thursday will be our six month anniversary of moving into the Temple, and in that time my energy has been focussed on the community here, on the people that live within these walls (seven of us, now) and the many people that pass through, rather than on the community out there.
I recently finished reading Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking, and I was impressed by how wonderful she is at creating a community, and how much this is to do with communicating, how trusting she is of her community, and how powerful asking for help can be.
The temple is taking on a life of its own. It has always been bigger than me, and bigger than me and Satya, but it that is much more obvious as the energies of other people and of the group take us into lovely and sometimes unexpected directions, like the garden transformation, the Quiz night and Adam’s monthly discussion group.
As the project grows it has become obvious that Satya and I need to ask for help more, instead of imagining that we can manage the whole kit and caboodle, and not only manage it but do all the work ourselves too. We’re getting better at this, Amanda’s book helped (I feel like I can call her Amanda, now that she very nearly stayed the night here) and the house-mates and wider community are stepping up and taking on more as the temple life grows around them.
I also need to get better at speaking to the outside world, I want you all to be part of the Amida Mandala community, but there’s no community without communication.
So I’ve set that intention – let’s see how I do.
In the last six months
My teacher Dharmavidya has led a retreat here.
We have had the roof repaired, and a new 40% more efficient boiler fitted.
I have dug a small veg. patch and the runner beans, potatoes, courgettes and kale are in the ground. There’s more turf to lift and soil to turn over, and the leek seedlings are nearly ready to be planted.
Ron has helped us take down lots of Leylandii
We have gone from three house mates (temple mates?) to four, to five.
I have just started playing my ukulele again
Satya and I are halfway through writing an introduction to Pureland Buddhism….
I could go on but that gives you some idea of life here. The Quiz is on Friday (we are raising money for a meditation hut), and on Sunday we have a gardening day. Today I am supposed to be writing more of that book – I’d better get back to it.
There is a thin pink streak of light in the eastern sky. The sun is well over the horizon and that last thread of colour tells me what a glorious sunrise I would have seen if I had been up a little earlier.
The valley is heavy with mist; a few hilltops and the tips of the tallest trees stand above the almost liquid fog. A little closer to me the fields and gardens I can see are covered with a heavy frost. Not for the first time I can understand why C.S. Lewis and Tolkien used to come walking here.
There is something magical about a morning like this one. Looking out to this view gives me a sense of a much bigger world, a world beyond my own concerns and even a world even beyond what I can see outside. Somehow the mist which covers up what is there gives my imagination the space to image what isn’t there too.
It is me looking out into this magical scene: me with my ordinary body that aches in the cold and complains when I eat too much at Christmas, and my ordinary mind that takes selfish concerns and makes them into the whole of the world.
And I am living with ordinary people. Although we live in a space which inspires us to connect with something greater (and I am sure that tempers the selfishness) each of us carries our own concerns and dysfunctions with us.
When I first moved into a Buddhist community nearly 10 years ago I remember imagining that I could leave of all my baggage at the door. Just by stepping over the threshold I thought I could become someone new.
I have become someone new – but that process was fuelled by all of the baggage (excuse the mixed metaphor) rather than despite it.
As we move into the New Year it feels important to me to remember both halves of this picture: the beautiful magical landscape and also the ordinary human beings that live within it.
It is all too easy to forget how beautiful the world is. We create our own suffering and our selfishness bumps up against other people’s and then turns in on itself again.
It can be easy to make the same mistake in the other direction as well. To only see the ideal and become blind to the suffering of ourselves and others in case it disturbs the sense of peace we have gazing at the landscape. This is another form of selfishness, harder to see, but equally problematic as what we don’t see piles up and eventually comes tumbling down on us much more heavily than if we had paid attention to it sooner.
I will make a resolution to keep the beautiful landscape in the corner of my eye, to sometimes gaze at it with both eyes, and also to see the ordinary foolish beings (myself included) inhabiting this landscape. It is from the relationship between the two that compassion appears.
This post also appeared on the Amida Mandala website
This morning I was supposed to be giving a talk on how to relax. I had the flowchart of the talk I had prepared earlier in the week in one hand (‘flowchart’ is the grand name I gave my few scribbles on a page) and a cup of tea in the other. I watched as the clock ticked towards ten, and waited for people to arrive.
No-one turned up.
I might have been disappointed (Why on earth wouldn’t people want to come and hear me speak?) but in fact it felt like a gift.
Satya and I have just been given a tentative moving date. In four week’s time (or perhaps five) we’ll be given the keys to our new home: Bredon House. It has been a guest house since the 1820s and is about to become a Pureland Buddhist Temple.
One of the things keeping me from relaxing recently has been the ever expanding to-do list of jobs that we need to complete before moving, and the anticipation of a continually growing to-do list when we move.
Years ago when I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance one of the few parts of the book that made sense to me was the advice that if worry about an outstanding job keeps interrupting your meditation, getting up from your cushion and completing the job might be the best course of action.
This morning, instead of giving a talk on how to relax, I decided to tackle some of the jobs on the to-do list that had been keeping me from actually feeling relaxed.
A few hours later and the garden is now ready to handover to whoever inherits this house from us, the contents of the shed are packed and ready to move, and I’ve started collecting assorted books from the corners of rooms and packing those away too.
As I closed the shed door at lunchtime one layer of worry evaporated and I relaxed a little.
So thank you to whoever arranged the gift of a free morning.
In the talk I had planned to say how it’s taking refuge in impermanent things that keeps us from truly relaxing, and there was something of that going on in my worry about getting things ready. I had become attached to the idea of specific outcomes like keeping people happy, creating a beautiful looking space, and having a smooth transition from one place to the next without ruffling anyone’s feathers. With those expectations I was bound to become disappointed at some point, and part of me knew that – hence the worry.
If I can remember the spirit of the move instead, the compassionate impulse and the act of love, then all of those specific outcomes suddenly become less important.
The more I take refuge in what is not impermanent, the more I can step out of the cycle of attachment and disappointment.
Nonetheless, here’s to a smooth move and no ruffled feathers 😉
There is that dimension, monks, where there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor wind; neither dimension of the infinitude of space, nor dimension of the infinitude of consciousness, nor dimension of nothingness, nor dimension of neither perception nor non-perception; neither this world, nor the next world, nor sun, nor moon. And there, I say, there is neither coming, nor going, nor staying; neither passing away nor arising: unestablished unevolving, without. This, just this, is the end of stress
Yesterday morning as I was getting into the car, a harried looking nurse ran down our garden path, opened our door and called into the house. A few moments later I heard her apologising to Satya for getting the wrong address.
By the time I had started the engine she was back in her own car and driving down the road. I passed her a little later, pulled up in front of another house.
This afternoon as I was pulling up weeds in the front garden I noticed a hearse passing. It parked up further down the street. It had stopped in the same place the nurse had stopped yesterday. Two suited men got out, with serious expressions and black ties. I watched them getting an empty stretcher out of the hearse.
It’s possible, but unlikely, that these two events are unconnected. When the hearse passed I was already thinking about tidying up the gardening tools and getting a cup of tea. I didn’t wait around to see if the two smart men brought a body back out of the house with them.
This morning Satya gave a talk on A Buddhist Approach to Following Your Dreams. She talked about which dreams come from the Ego, and which are more selfless, how we can tune into our dreams and what the risks and rewards are of following them.
In the discussion afterwards we talked about broken dreams: what is it like when you have a vision in mind and suddenly it is taken away? Sometimes we let our dreams die and sometimes we try and keep them alive beyond their natural lifespan.
A few weeks ago I thought there was a reasonable chance that the building I had begun dreaming about would be taken away from me.
The Trust that supports our Buddhist group is in the process of buying a wonderful building for Satya and me to run as a temple here in Malvern, and for a little while I thought the whole thing was at risk of falling through.
Any house purchase has a whole host of things which are outside of the control of a single person. I remember the stress of buying our current home: there were phone calls every day to make sure other people were doing the jobs they were supposed to be doing. With this deal it’s not even me buying the building I have set my heart upon; I’m even less in control.
When it looked like the deal was at risk I must have been disappointed at some level, although I think I would have appeared pretty pragmatic if you’d spoken to me at the time. I suspect I pushed all those worried feelings deep down inside somewhere. Occasionally they would slip out in a few sharp words but mostly they kept themselves pretty hidden.
It was only the great sense of relief I felt when the deal was back on that clued me in to what level of feeling I’d been keeping at bay. It was also at that point I accepted the project was really going ahead, and not just something that I would like to happen. I began to get excited about moving and then suddenly I was surprised by grief.
After our offer was accepted on the new place, dark dreams disturbed my sleep for a couple of nights. In the wee small hours of the morning I woke up in tears.
I traced back my thoughts into my dreams and I realised that I was grieving for futures that could no longer be, now that I was committing my life to running the temple.
Theatre director Anne Bogart has said that every creative act is a violent one. Even the simple act of placing a chair in place on a stage destroys all the other possibilities for where that chair might be.
I’m not even sure what those old dreams were: the last wisps of the teenage fantasy of being a rock star, perhaps, or my dreams of going back into the theatre myself. There is still time for those things of course, but not in the magical way of my most grandiose of dreams.
Every now and again I catch myself fantasising about life in the new place. My ego works hard to create visions of being there in a way in which I can be up on a pedestal and life is easy. I try to give those dreams up as soon as I spot them.
If I didn’t want to grieve for those unlived futures I could have tried to keep the dreams alive. I could have turned them over in my mind in the quiet spaces of the day and allowed them to infect my sleep too.
Down that path leads madness: resentment of the gap between my lived life and the dream world and a lack of gratitude for the amazing dream that is being realised.
Just like our physical being, every dream has a natural lifespan.
Recently I met the death of some of my dreams, and it was good.
I don’t know who lives at the house the hearse stopped in front of this morning, but I hope that whoever lived there lived well, I hope that those that were close to them can grieve well, and that new good dreams will flourish.
The bass rolled across the dance floor and into my chest. I could feel it through the floor, and the wall behind me. The dance floor was surrounded by young people.
We were at the festival of colours in Birmingham; a celebration of street art. We were in a small bar in the middle of the old Custard Factory. We had gone there expecting a beat-boxing completion, but when we squeezed through the crowd at the door we encountered an empty dance floor. On the stage behind an MC was mixing and sending out tunes. We hunkered down in one corner of the room and waited to see what was going to happen.
For the next hour or so people took it in turns to step on to the rolled out square of vinyl that was the dance floor and break dance. There were some stunning performances. As we sat watching I noticed that I preferred some dancers over others. I began to wonder what it was that made the difference between a good performance and a great one.
Years ago I studied performance as part of my Drama degree. One of the definitions we used then was that performance happened when someone was working on stage. What attracts an audience is seeing effort applied, particularly effort that takes the performer to their own learning edge. This is when the performance, whatever it is, comes alive.
That gave me part of the answer. All of the dancers were working hard. They were working hard physically and in some cases you could feel their mental concentration too; their focus on each of the moves individually (how to keep your balance in a float, or a flare) and even in which sequence of moves to perform.
Another part of the answer came from some of the reading I’ve been doing recently.
A couple of weeks ago I found my old copy of Robert Pirsig’s Lila on a shelf in the flat in India, covered in an inch of dust. I cleaned it up and brought it home with me. In Lila Pirsig takes his previously undefined ‘quality’ and divides it into static quality and Dynamic quality. (Pirsig always capitalised ‘Dynamic’ but not ‘static’.)
I’ve also been reading about Chaos theory recently and found some parallels there with Pirsig’s work. Systems with what Pirsig calls static quality are what chaos theory might call ordered systems, patterns which repeat and copy themselves – like certain social mores that are passed down unchanged through the generations. Dynamic quality is the value that comes from patterns on the edge of chaos: ideas or physical systems that, instead of repeating without changing, are developing in unpredictable ways – often to bring themselves into a higher value relationship with their environment.
The dancers I preferred were the ones with the most Dynamic quality.
The first break dancer was a young man in shorts and a t-shirt. He looked strong; I could see the definition of his abs and his calves, and his veins standing out as he strained in the physically difficult moves. He reminded me of the acrobats doing floor work I had seen on TV during the Olympics. He certainly ticked the box for working hard on stage.
Despite all of this there was something missing from the dance. I didn’t realise what it was until I saw the next person enter the space and start to move.
Like George Gershwin, he had rhythm.
The first dancer hadn’t treated the music any differently to how he’d treated the walls of the bar. It was there behind the dance but he didn’t notice it or react to it. The dance and the music were separate and bound never to meet.
The second dancer was less acrobatic but the music became his partner in the dance. His moves bounced off the beat; he slid in and around the melody. It was like the MC had stepped on the floor and was dancing too.
This was the real stuff. Here was a dancer working hard and also displaying Pirsig’s Dynamic quality. When the music changed the dance changed with it.
Maybe that’s just a really long way of saying I preferred the dancer who was tuned into the music, and not just going through his best set of moves, but I think there’s more to it than that.
Or at least I think there are some lessons here for how I live my own life. Life isn’t a performance but the most exciting moments are those which include Dynamic quality – when we put ourselves in relationship to something outside ourselves and let ourselves, our performances and our projects, be changed and affected by those influences.
When we are first learning to dance, or to write poetry, or any new skill, we have to learn the static patterns first. How to hold a brush and make a stroke, how to gauge the metre of a line of verse, or to cha-cha-cha.
The kind of art and the moments in life which stop us in our tracks are those which go beyond the usual and take us to the edge of something new. They are the moments in which we dance in relationship to music that comes from somewhere other than the simple patterns we have inherited. We are inspired by a muse and use what we have learnt, those static building blocks, in the creation of something new.
Break dancing is outside of my usual culture. I don’t spend my time practicing spinning on my head or perfecting the worm. I read ‘b-boy’ competition on the events programme and was expecting beatboxers not break dancers. I’m glad that I was surprised though – this too is Dynaimc quality at work. It took me out of my usual world, exposed me to something new, and changed me.
