Dharma Glimpse by Emily

This line of thought will have no resolution since it’s new to me, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a “big life” vs a “small life.” I was talking with one of the monastics about how my first year or two in Zen was the happiest period of my life. I didn’t think about anything else. Every hour of my day was full, I woke up at 5:30, went to temple to sit, eat, and clean, went to one job, had an hour for lunch, went to my other job, had an hour for dinner, went to temple again, came home and showered and went to bed at 9 to do it again the next day. I made meal offerings with a full prayer before every meal, at the altar. During spring and fall, I wrote the text we were studying on high pieces of paper and taped them to the walls of my apartment. I was very, very happy. It’s important to know that I was very mentally unwell when I came to Zen, so I had essentially forgotten about the world as I was healing through practice. When I told this to the monastic last week, she said I had had a very small life, and it can be easier to be happy in a small life. Also that I can’t go back.

I think she’s right, I was very happy in my small life. Over the years, I became more aware of things outside that I felt like I was missing out on. Friends outside of Zen, cute clothes that didn’t cover my shoulders and knees, TV and people to talk about it with, vices. At first, when I left I was overjoyed at feeling connection to all the people outside of Zen, life got very big. But it’s much lonelier, even though I feel every person got more accessible, it makes me a very little fish in a big pond, instead of a medium fish in a medium pond back in my little Zen world. Of course, NYC is known for this, it’s very lonely despite there being so many people. Who knows what percentage of people are just the same, living in some little 8″x8″ room with few to no connections in a city of 8.5 million?

Anyway, my main point is, is there something wrong morally or spiritually with a very small life? I’m not sure I’m doing anyone any more good now in the big wide world than I was in my little world. But it feels like something is wrong with making a little world to be happy in? Why does it feel that way? I think because, for me, it meant disconnection from everyone “outside.” But are my new feelings of kinship with everyone actually benefitting me or them? How can I make it benefit? Am I and others better off if I just make a new little world?

What do you do for people in a city where most people don’t want to be interacted with in public, myself included? Here, if you are crying on the train, it’s actually a kindness for everyone to ignore it. I know that seems odd to anyone not here, but you have to understand that there is no private life here, almost no one lives without roommates and everyone can hear you all the time. So it’s a kindness to give each other this pretend privacy. So, that said, what does connection even look like here? I guess it means going places where people are actually looking for it, but isn’t that making a little world then?

I hope this counts as a dharma glimpse, if nothing else it’s a glimpse for you about this city. And to me, this is the Dharma, giving some thought to things, questioning things.

Dharma Glimpse by Sam

‘In the corner of my room, I see a spider in its web. It’s been there a few days now – I don’t mind its company. But I wonder how the spider feels. I haven’t seen any flies lately, so I don’t imagine it has caught any.

Is the spider hungry and frustrated? Or is it happy, just chilling in its web, in its element, doing what it was made to do?

I suppose spiders may not have evolved to experience those feelings of frustration in the same way that humans do, because what purpose would it serve? The spider cannot do much else but sit in its web and wait. As human beings, we get frustrated and impatient because there are usually other things we can try, and the painful feelings are our mind’s way of telling us that it is time to try something else.

But we humans are foolish beings, and our response to those feelings are not always helpful. ‘The computer isn’t working, I’ll try hitting it.’ Sometimes there isn’t anything to do but wait. Sometimes there is, but we need to take a step back and calm ourselves down before we can think clearly enough to find it.

Recently, I have been involved with the Parts Work book group online. I wonder if I can, from the Self, Buddha nature, observe my frustrated part, and show it the same kindness I might show a small child or a close friend. Let the part be heard, and help it to see clearly.

Namo Amida Bu

A Dharma Glimpse by Dayamay

The concept of Beginner’s Mind got me thinking after our day retreat last week. It reminded me of A, how little I actually know, in comparison to how much there is to know and B, how beneficial this seeming disadvantage can be on the spiritual path.

We talked about how Beginner’s Mind shows up in our lives. How it can open up whole new understandings on life, practice and the universe. And how, as a society, we favour the glory of competency and being good at everything, over the vulnerability of not knowing.

I don’t think I have ever met a scholar or an “expert” who isn’t in some way humbled by the fact of just how much information there is out there…about everything – an inexhaustible font of facts, ideas, perspectives and opinions. In any realistic evaluation of the universe, where experience informs the evidence of the senses, all of our encounters with knowledge and understanding would be firmly grounded in an attitude of Beginner’s Mind. Because we can never reach the limits of learning – there is always more to know. And therefore, we are always, in a certain sense, beginners.

As a practitioner with a terrible memory and limited capacity for retaining information, I can really identify with the concept of Beginner’s Mind. Buddhist and generic spiritual concepts and teachings that I learned and assimilated over many years have now faded to an almost irretrievable extent. When I am reintroduced to them, I often find a fresh perspective that maybe I hadn’t seen or really appreciated before. Or that the teaching comes from a different angle altogether and is associated with an unexpected source. This can be very disruptive to my ego and the parts of me that like the idea that I’ve got it all boxed off. My Expert Mind might inspire me to study a bit harder in order to throw up defences against the pain of having to say ‘I don’t know’. But, surely enough, I will find myself back at the same place, defeated by reality, once again.

And the defeat is not an empty one. The teaching is implicit in the journey, as is often the case. We never actually reach the end.

In a culture that doesn’t like limits or failure, Beginner’s Mind is not a popular concept. The intellectual and materialistic carrots that we are all chasing are not rooted in compromise or concession. But if we are prepared to actively align ourselves with our inherent limitations, we may be able to see ourselves more clearly and, therefore, live more deeply.

Beginner’s Mind is a state of genuine humility, where we really know that we don’t know and accept it as a blessed truth.

Namo Amida Bu.

Dharma Glimpse by Helen

For as long as I can remember there has always been a part of me that has believed I am ‘missing’ something. That everyone else is walking around, going about there day fully actualised and safe in the knowledge that they are fully intact, with everything they need to proceed. But here I am with a nagging suspicion that I was in the canteen when the divine was handing some integral part out (that would track). I don’t know what part that would be of course, its intangible, but its some knowledge that isn’t present.

I know I’m not alone in this thought. I’ve had many conversations over the years with various people describing a similar feeling. Some describing it as feeling that at a certain age some invisible piece of themselves would simply appear and everything would make complete sense.

I know that, from a religious or philosophical perspective I’m talking about a question which has plagued great thinkers for millennia; the perceived separation between oneself and everyone and everything else. Heck I’m in a Buddhist temple, wasn’t the whole journey of his life’s work…

Anyway I digress. Sometimes the latent feeling lays dormant and at others it rears up to visceral levels which I can best label as ‘imposter syndrome’.

There are moment however when the divine mother plays a startlingly simple trick on me, a glitch in the matrix occurs, usually to hilarious effect. One such moment occurred this week at the gym.

I sat across from a fellow gym goer and noticed them on a piece of equipment Ive been perplexed by for months. It’s a leg and glute machine with a peddle on one side which the user pushes backwards to create tension in the upper leg muscles. But the thing is it makes no sense. Everyone knows that you have to work both limbs on an exercise or you will be a wonky donkey, right? So how can this machine work since its only possible to peddle on one side because of how its oriented.

I have consoled myself that this must just be science I done understand and its somehow cleverly working both sides.

So you can imagine my amazement when, without a second thought, this fellow gym user… flipped the peddle over…

Silly I know but it brought my heart a smile and warmth to know. I’m not crazy, or missing anything. I just didn’t know the peddle flipped over…

Namo Amida Bu

Dharma Glimpse by Theresa Larkins

I’ve been thinking a lot about change and impermanence after last week’s book group discussions.

I spent time in my garden last week after our meeting, clearing last year’s dead plants from the flowerbeds. It lifted me to see new shoots and bulbs coming up under the dead material. Spring will be here soon. I thought about how different the garden will look in spring. I imagined how it may look, it will be a surprise as it is a new garden. Then I thought about the impermanence of the garden, how every little part changes across moments, days, seasons and years. It is the same place but it is always different from one moment to the next as life slowly evolves and moves.

These kind of changes are very different to the cataclysmic change of my partner dying. I’ve felt since losing Tony that I have also lost pieces of myself. I think this is tied up with changing my name as we got married just before he died. I’ve often wondered which parts of Theresa Larkins still apply to Theresa Morton. Can I still enjoy the things I used to enjoy, especially those things we did together? Nina and I drove to Merseyside on Friday to visit friends. It suddenly hit me that it is a bit meaningless to think (as I have many times) that ‘I am having an identity crisis’ if I am constantly changing anyway. Who I was or who I am doesn’t really matter. I just am and I am here now.

Namo Amida Bu

A Dharma Glimpse by Frankie Carboni

couple of weeks ago a small petrol station in the middle of town closed down. It was a family business and the owner has retired. It’s something of an icon, the only petrol station actually right in town, situated in an awkward triangle of roads right on the portside. It’s tiny, a couple of pumps, but what made it special was that the operators actually put the petrol in the car for you, no self service, just like the old days when you handed over a note and said ‘fill ‘er up!’. I don’t drive, but for older drivers like my husband it was such a boon not having to get out of the car, figure out the self service stuff etc. That petrol station has been there forever, and it seems unthinkable that it won’t continue to be part of our cityscape.

I’ve always held a personal mantra that All Change is Good. I fully subscribe to the truth of impermanence, yes suffering is inevitable when change happens, but something Good will always be born out of it.

But when I heard the news about the petrol station, I couldn’t summon up my mantra. This particular change wasn’t good for the people who relied on the ease of service, its familiarity, even its iconic status.

It occurred to me that all change isn’t good after all. But neither is it all bad, or anything between. I suddenly realised that I could let go of always being obliged to cheerfully accept change, find the positive, deny the negative.

And far from feeling as if I’d taken a step backward and forgotten all of those lessons about impermanence, I felt liberated by accepting that Change just IS. No more or less than that. It just is.

Namo Amida Bu.

Dharma Glimpse by Mat Osmond

From time to time I fall into a pattern of waking around 3am, often when there’s some conflict or turmoil at work in me. I had one of these wakeful nights last week. As I lay there in a familiar pool of unease, an odd thought came to me.

I’m the one who’ll die.

Why did that seem to matter? Are there are other I’s, then, besides this one lying here? The answer’s a resounding yes, I think, but what this means exactly feels less clear to me now than it did lying there in the dark. I suppose it had to do with the difference between the selves I perform before one mirror or another, and this person lying here – the one those selves omit to mention or actively conceal.

Funny how something can make compelling sense in the middle of the night, then you try and say it aloud in the morning and it all feels a bit laboured. But I remembered this night-thought when I saw I was writing this week’s dharma glimpse, mainly because of the curious sense of reassurance or confirmation it brought. Whatever happens, I’m the one who’s going to die here. So things are OK.

I remember a beautiful passage in Shinman Aoki’s little book, Coffinman: Journals of a Buddhist Mortician, where he recounts a realisation that crept up on him over time as he dressed corpses for traditional Buddhist funerals. Aoki speaks of the deep peace that he began noticing on the faces of the dead. All of them. And as he worked alone with their quiet faces Aoki came to a new understanding of nirvana: as a fulfilment which comes to us all. Not as a result of our striving, nor of what we’ve ‘made of ourselves’. Just, an inescapable homecoming that every death returns us to, whatever sort of life we happen to have lived.

Lying in the dark what struck me as if for the first time was that every single thing that is ‘me’ will end when I die. That, in a way that requires no shoring-up or work on my part, I am quite literally ‘grasped, never to be forsaken’ by the intimate reality of this. And the intimate presence of my certain death is here already, holding me in measureless being as I lie here.

…

As I’ve tried to write down what happened last week another memory has surfaced, and they feel entangled now so I’m to just going to run them together here.

It’s three and a half years ago. I’m sitting alone at night with my mother-in-law Christine. Already in steep decline, Christine has just found out that she has terminal cancer, with only a few weeks to live. This first night-watch with her is also the first time I’ve seen her since she received this news.

As we chat about it, Christine says she sometimes wishes she’d paid more attention to the spiritual. ‘You now, going to church and stuff’. We wonder about this together. Supposing she had? Would having done so make any difference at all to what lies immediately before her now? Would her doing that have made where she’s going now any more or less real? It seemed clear to both of us, I think, that it would not. And the deep sense of confirmation I found in this, anyway, feels much the same as the one that came to visit me the other night. Namo Amida Bu.

Dharma Glimpse by Satya

This morning the view from my office window is spectacular. The sun has laid a strip of electric orange at the horizon, and above it heavy blue-grey clouds hang, edged in pink. As I watch, a plane is rising through the sky, leaving fading contrails behind it.

I think for a moment about the people on that plane. I am here, typing at my computer, and they are hurtling through the air at five hundred miles an hour. I think about the many times I have flown in the past, and wonder if I will ever fly again. A few years ago I vowed to give up flying as a personal response to the climate crisis. For me, travelling at those speeds is probably a part of my history. More and more of my life is behind me – this is true for all of us, and, over the past few years it has taken on a special significance to me as loved ones have got sick or died, and as I become more conscious of the signs of ageing in my own body. A little arthritis in one finger, minor injuries that take longer to heal. It’s all downhill from here!

Impermanence. When I look up from my screen again, the plane has gone. The sky has already changed – the clouds are now a dark aubergine purple, and the blue of the sky above them is stronger. There is more light and I can see the frosty vegetable patch more clearly, and a robin resting for a moment on the white plastic chair.

It is as if the Buddha is offering me a lesson on a vast canvas. Don’t waste your life! Before you know it, dusk will be arriving and your allotted portion of daylight will be over. Enjoy yourself! Learn what you can! Wake up! I try to listen, but it’s difficult for a small ego-laden being such as I. I feel grateful in this moment for Amitabha, and for the Pure Land teachings. I don’t have to do it all alone. I can rely on Amitabha’s vow. I can remember that I am loved and that, if I ask, I will receive help.

I look out into the sky one more time. It’s daytime now, with white candyfloss clouds and yellow light streaming from the horizon. Next I will bow in gratitude to my golden Buddha, and go and make some breakfast. Waffles with chocolate chips! I will enjoy the taste of every bite.

Namo Amida Bu.

Dharma Glimpse by Katie Cove

What is Leadership?

As I sit at my desk before the working day begins and look at the Buddha which guides me through each day, I wonder what challenges I will face. As a new journey and pathway in my life is being built I find myself managing a very busy and large nursery in Cheltenham. I question what leadership means?

Power?

Authority?

Anger?

Wealth?

No, Leadership means

Compassion

Listening

Understanding

Role modelling

Keeping others safe

A leader guides us in the right direction, keeps us safe and makes everyone feel valued and part of a team.

This is how the Buddha guides me to be a strong leader to have strength and belief in myself and those around me.

At the end of my working day a little 4-year-old always pops into the office full of awe and wonder at the Buddha on my desk and each evening we have a little chat about the Buddha and what it means to me. The little boy opens his hand to which I place the Buddha for him to touch and hold, his eyes open wide he looks at me and smiles.

As Buddhists we are all leaders.

Namu Amida Butsu

A Dharma Glimpse by Karmadeva

Recently I’ve been reflecting on my work and life in general. I worry that I’m not concentrating on the important things; especially in terms of my practice. I do a lot of interfaith work and my concern has been why?

The reason for my uncertainty is; I had to refuse to take on a mentor role. This was with a student wanting to learn about Pure Land Buddhism. This made me wonder why I’d been attending multi faith events yet not teaching the dharma when the opportunity arises. Much of what I do in terms of inter faith brings me into contact with a lot of people, some very important and high ranking faith leaders, politicians etc. So I then ask the question – is this about my spreading/teaching the Buddhist way, or is it to satisfy my ego?

Reflecting only raised more questions – why do I attend Islamic, Christian and Jewish events? None of these people are suddenly going to convert. So therefore what have I achieved? Would I have been better off going to meditation at my temple? Attending more Buddhist services? I haven’t visited Malvern for months and my Birmingham dharma friends rarely see me.

As I had reached a point where the more I looked at these issues my mind raised even more, there were no answers forthcoming. I turned to an old teacher from my vow 22 days and explained my predicament. After several days thinking about my question he said: All practice and all we do is nembutsu, therefore all my work is valid.

This helps. It tells me that I need to think of my life rather than my work. Is my life balanced? Do I see friends and family enough? Do I have right view right speech and right mind?

I know I should end with some philosophy on what all this means or answers that I’ve reached. I’m sorry but there is none. My mind still wanders and reflects. I’m full of doubts and restless due to this. Again I think of another teachers words “so this is how it is to be human” the reality is I’m a foolish being. Maybe, as Shinran did, I should just refer to myself as a shaved headed fool. What I hope for is a sign from the universe, but then maybe I’m following that sign already. I hope so.

Namo Amida Bu.