INSIGHTAotearoa
A newsletter for New Zealand's insight meditation practitioners and communities
98 Riverside Road, Gisborne, 4010 Aotearoa New Zealand
deborah @ insightaotearoa.org | ISSN 1177-5076
JANUARY 2010
IN THIS NEWSLETTER YOU'LL FIND...
1. EDITORIAL: INTENTION
2. Help Wanted
3. Mindfulness of Intention
4. The Power of Intention
5. POEM: The Buddha's Last Instruction
6. POEM: Everything is Waiting for You
7. Questions ... questions ...
8. Sangha News
9. The Last Word: The Intent to Bless and be Blessed
1. EDITORIAL: INTENTION
Intention has become INSIGHTAotearoa's traditional theme of the New Year. Jack Kornfield refers to intention as the "compass of the heart." He says, "Be mindful of intention. Intention is the seed that creates our future."
I invite you to read and reflect on Gil Fronsdal's article Mindfulness of Intention. This article offered our Gisborne sitting group two weeks of rich discussion and reflection. The article invites careful reflection on your deepest intention and asks, "What is your heart's deepest wish?"
Whatever a person does, the results will follow him to the furthest reaches. There is nowhere, not on earth or in the sky, that the results of our deeds will not bear fruit.
-- The Dhammapada
INSIGHTAotearoa has given dana to the Red Cross of New Zealand for earthquake relief in Haiti.
Wishing you a belated Happy New Year.
May your heart's deepest wish be your guide,
Deborah White
Editor
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In the universe there is an immeasurable, indescribable force which shamans call intent, and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to intent by a connecting link.
-- Carlos Castaneda
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2. HELP WANTED: EDITOR NEEDED
It has been my profound honour to be the editor of INSIGHTAotearoa for the past two years and part of our fabulous team that brings you the newsletter each month. I cherish the opportunities the newsletter has given me to engage in the Dharma and to be introduced to the insight community of Aotearoa. I am deeply grateful.
It is time for me to pass the leadership to someone new to guide and edit INSIGHTAotearoa. Kanya and Peter will continue as the editing team. Adam and Ramsey will continue their wonderful technical support. Caren Wilton is our new keeper of the website. Thank you, Caren.
Thank you to all of you in our virtual sangha of INSIGHTAotearoa for your dana of support, commitment, and contributions to the newsletter. Let's keep INSIGHTAotearoa alive: New editor needed.
CONTACT: Deborah White | deborah @ insightaotearoa.org | 06 863 0020 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 06 863 0020 end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 06 863 0020 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
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Intention is the core of all conscious life. It is our intentions that create karma, our intentions that help others, our intentions that lead us away from the delusions of individuality toward the immutable verities of enlightened awareness. Conscious intention colours and moves everything.
-- Master Hsing Yun
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3. MINDFULNESS OF INTENTIONS
-- by Gil Fronsdal, edited by INSIGHTAotearoa
One of the most direct ways to bring ease and happiness into our mindfulness practice and into our lives is by investigating our intentions. While our activities have consequences in both the external world and the internal world, the happiness and freedom to which the Buddha pointed belong to the inner world of our intentions and dispositions. This is one of the prime reasons why the Buddha placed such emphasis on attending to our intentions.
Buddhist practice encourages a deep appreciation of the present moment, which strengthens our ability to respond creatively in the present rather than acting according to our habits and dispositions. Mindfulness places us where choice is possible. The greater our awareness of our intentions, the greater our freedom is to choose. People who do not see their choices do not believe they have choices. They tend to respond automatically, blindly influenced by their circumstances and conditioning. Mindfulness, by helping us notice our impulses before we act, gives us the opportunity to decide whether to act and how to act.
According to traditional Buddhist teaching, every mind-moment involves an intention. This suggests the phenomenal subtlety with which choices operate in our lives. Few of us keep our bodies still, except perhaps in meditation or in sleep. Each of the constant movements in our arms, hands and legs is preceded by a volitional impulse, usually unnoticed. Intentions are present even in such seemingly minute and usually unnoticed decisions as where to direct our attention or which thoughts to pursue. Just as drops of water will eventually fill a bathtub, so the accumulation of these small choices shapes who we are.
Our intentions-noticed or unnoticed, gross or subtle – contribute either to our suffering or to our happiness. Intentions are sometimes called seeds. The garden you grow depends on the seeds you plant and water. Long after a deed is done, the trace or momentum of the intention behind it remains as a seed, conditioning our future happiness or unhappiness. If we water intentions of greed or hate, their inherent suffering will sprout, both while we act on them and in the future in the form of reinforced habits, tensions and painful memories. If we nourish intentions of love or generosity, the inherent happiness and openness of those states will become a more frequent part of our life.
Some volitional acts actually hamper the awakening of awareness. One example of this is intentional lying. The fear of discovery, the continued need for deceit that often follows, and the avoidance of the truth tend to reinforce the mind's tendency to preoccupation, which is the opposite of wakefulness.
An important function of mindfulness practice is to help us understand the immediate and longer-term consequences of our intended actions. This understanding helps ensure that our choices are wiser than those based only on our likes and preferences. Having a realistic and informed sense of consequences keeps our "good" intentions from being naive intentions. It can also guide us in knowing which choices support our spiritual practice and which detract from it.
We can bring awareness of intention into mindfulness practice in a number of ways. Perhaps the most significant is to reflect carefully on your deepest intention. What is your heart's deepest wish? What is of greatest value or priority for you? Mindfulness practice connect- ed to your deepest intention will bear a different result than practice connected to more superficial concerns. The business- person who undertakes mindfulness practice as a means of stress reduction in order to gain an edge over the competition will sow the seeds for very different results than the one who undertakes mindfulness to strengthen his or her compassionate service to others. When the effort to be mindful is fueled by greed, that very effort also fortifies the tension and insensitivity of greed. When the effort is fueled by loving- kindness, it energizes the inner openness and sensitivity of loving-kindness.
I believe that a daily sitting practice is extremely beneficial. But I believe there is even more benefit in spending a few minutes each day reflecting on our deepest intentions. In a busy life, we can easily forget our fundamental values and motivations. To remind ourselves of them allows our choices to be informed by them. Furthermore, when we drop below the surface cravings and aversions of the mind to discover our deeper stirrings, we tap a tremendous power of inspiration and motivation. For example, at one point, I took on the practice of consciously reflecting on my intention for each task of the day, allowing my deeper sense of intention to inform each one. Even the seemingly mundane activity of going to the grocery store became an opportunity to strengthen my intention to connect with people with care and compassion. This simple practice brought me a great deal of joy.
Another way of including intention in our practice is to pause briefly before initiating any new activity, which allows us to discern our motivation. Being aware of an intention after an action is started is useful but it can be like trying to stop a ball after you have thrown it. The momentum has been set in motion.
We can investigate the intentions behind major activities and decisions such as work, relationships, or what we do during our free time. What is the motivation and how does it relate to our deepest intentions? Similarly we can investigate the intentions that shape our decisions around such minor matters as what and when to eat, how we drive, what we read or watch on television. Is the choice based on fear, aversion, loneliness, or addiction, or on generosity or caring for ourselves wisely? Different motivations are not necessarily good or bad. They may, however, create very different consequences even when the external actions that they generate look the same.
Trying to bring attention to all our motivations may be over- whelming. It can be useful to choose one activity at a time to look at more carefully. For example, spend a week becoming a connoisseur of your many intentions around eating, shopping, or cleaning house.
Perhaps one of the more significant applications of mindfulness of intention concerns speech. We often speak without reflection. Attention to the multiple reasons underlying what we say is one of the most powerful windows into our hearts. Speech is seldom a simple offering of information or expression of caring. It is closely tied to how we see ourselves, how we want others to see us, and our hopes and fears. Distinguishing wholesome intentions from unwholesome intentions can serve as a useful criterion for when to speak and when to take refuge in wise silence. Speech can powerfully support or undermine a spiritual practice.
Attention and intention are two cornerstones of Buddhist practice. Bringing attention to intention does not, as some fear, lead to a life of endless effort at monitoring ourselves. Self-consciousness and self- preoccupation may be exhausting, but not awareness. As we become clearer and wiser about our intentions, we find greater ease. We begin to act with less and less self-centered concern.
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The truth is that we are not free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free.
-- Nelson Mandela
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4. THE POWER OF INTENTION
-- by Sharon Salzberg
I recently attended a yoga retreat where I was the rank (and awfully timid) novice. Every other student in our class was far more limber, easily flowing into pretzel-like poses. Almost worse, they all seemed to know the traditional Sanskrit name for each move.
One day as my teacher, John Friend, was demonstrating a pose, he made an awkward-looking movement, then rebalanced. Coming out of it he asked, "What just happened?" One by one, my classmates offered a Sanskrit name for that extra little twist. Finally, John turned to me and repeated his question, "What just happened?" I replied, "To be honest, I think you fell." "You're right," he said. "I fell. Then I started over. That's good yoga."
I have always regarded John as a wonderful teacher, and I think of that incident as one of his very best lessons. It was about honoring the role of intention, the heart space that guides everything we undertake. If we fall, we don't need self-recrimination or blame or anger—we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to recommit, to be wholehearted once again.
Often we can achieve an even better result when we stumble yet are willing to start over, when we don't give up after a mistake, when something doesn't come easily but we throw ourselves into trying, when we're not afraid to appear less than perfectly polished. By prizing heartfulness above faultlessness, we may reap more from our effort because we're more likely to be changed by it. We learn and grow and are transformed not so much by what we do but by why and how we do it.
Intention is not just about will — or about resolutions we make on New Year's Eve with shaky hope in our hearts — but about our overall everyday vision, what we long for, what we believe is possible for us. If we want to know the spirit of our activities, the emotional tone of our efforts, we have to look at our intentions. When my hand reaches to offer someone a book, only my heart knows whether I'm doing it because I like the person or because I think, Well, I'll just give her this and perhaps she'll give me what I want in return.
Each decision we make, each action we take, is born out of an intention. I sometimes envision a cartoon dinner party, based on a scene in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. In that book, one of the characters, Mrs. Ramsay, is so sensitive that she can perceive the thoughts and feelings of each of the people around the table. In my imagined party, I see a scenario where, underneath the polite conversations about world politics or mutual acquaintances, some discerning soul can hear the silent intentions: "If I say this, it might exact the best revenge." "This will make me look good, far better than that oaf in the corner." "I'm going to extend an invitation because it will help that lonely person over there."
The momentary urges that shape what we do are intentions, as are the convictions and aspirations we hold. When we stop before blurting out a nasty piece of gossip and ask ourselves, Why would I be divulging this? we're tuning into our positive intention, our wish to not cause harm.
When someone smiles and congratulates us on a good turn in life, yet we feel we're at risk of being stabbed in the back, we are — either through unfair projection or good intuition — attempting to read between the lines for the hidden motivation. And when we meet adversity and disappointment, and want to remember what we care about most, we're searching for our deeply held core vision.
Having been raised, like almost everyone I know, on the maxim "The road to hell is paved with good intentions", I used to be fixated on achievement. I could feel good about myself if the results of my efforts were measurable by conventional standards and if I received recognition in the eyes of others. If I gave someone a gift, the only way I could regard myself as generous was if the other person thanked me—in fact, usually only if she thanked me long and lavishly enough. Being willing to take a risk, trying hard to navigate new terrain, courageously working to overcome setbacks instead of despairing—noone of these counted. Without praise, I didn't know where to look to find myself.
But if we're judging our actions solely on the results we see before us, and not considering the heart space giving rise to and threading throughout what we do, then we have to ask, On whose timetable do we measure success and failure? Any ordinary favor we do for someone or any compassionate reaching out may seem to be going nowhere at first, but may be planting a seed we can't see right now. Sometimes we need to just do the best we can and then trust in an unfolding we can't design or ordain.
There are times, though, when our "well-meaning" actions arise from a complex set of intentions that we aren't aware of. A seemingly generous act born out of a tangled skein of self-hatred, feeling, I don't deserve to have anything so I might as well give it away, is more a kind of martyrdom. An act that appears to be ethical but is really born out of fear has its center in rigid repression. Professing love for someone else through giving a gift when, deep down, we can't easily love ourselves becomes codependency, a loss of boundaries, and a painful and fruitless search for intimacy.
By making an effort to notice our intentions with honesty and clarity, we gain a great deal of freedom. If we take the time to pay quiet attention, perhaps through meditation or contemplation, we may develop a completely different understanding of why we do the things we do and a new perspective on how to trust that we've done the best we can.
When we develop the habit of noticing our intentions, we have a much better compass with which to navigate our lives. We learn to cast a glance at our motivation before we speak or act, which frees us to live the life we want.
And it frees us to see more clearly into what our actions mean to us and how we can genuinely manifest what we love and care about. We have the power to create our lives from the inside out. I'm inspired by the example of Sudha Chandran, a contemporary classical Indian dancer whose career was abruptly brought to a halt when her right leg had to be amputated. After she had been fitted with an artificial limb, she went back to dancing. When asked how she had managed it, she responded simply, "You don't need feet to dance."
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From intention springs the deed, from the deed springs the habits. From the habits grows the character, from character develops destiny.
-- Chinese Buddhist Text
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5. POEM: The Buddha's Last Instruction
-- by Mary Oliver
"Make of yourself a light"
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal-a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I'm not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
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6. POEM: Everything is Waiting for You
-- by David Whyte
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.
As if life were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions.
To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice
You must note the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things to come,
the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.
The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink,
the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good
in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves.
Everything is waiting for you.
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7. QUESTIONS ... QUESTIONS ...
Do you have a question about your practice or about Buddhism in general? Send it in, and we will put it before a teacher. If it can be answered easily, it will be in a future INSIGHTAotearoa. Send your question to deborah @ insightaotearoa.org or by post to Newsletter, 98 Riverside Road, Gisborne 4010.
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8. SANGHA NEWS
This newsletter comes to you without a subscription price because our readers offer dana to support it. A traditional Buddhist generosity practice, dana received will be used to develop the newsletter, and the community that practices insight meditation. Regular automatic payments are very welcome. You can also post cash or cheques to 98 Riverside Road, Gisborne 4010, making cheques payable to INSIGHTAotearoa. Here is the bank account information:
Account name: INSIGHTAotearoa
Bank: ASB Bank
Branch: Lambton Quay
Account number: 12-3140-0285603-00
From outside New Zealand, the SWIFT code is: ASBBNZ 2A.
Mindfulness in Plain English can now be downloaded from http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.htm
Aotearoa Buddhist Education Trust
A charitable trust which raises funds to bring insight meditation teachers to New Zealand. To find out more visit http://www.abet.net.nz
Insight meditation in Aotearoa on the web
http://www.insightmeditation.org.nz – information on New Zealand's insight meditation practitioners and communities
http://www.insightaotearoa.org – the website for this newsletter
http://www.southern.insightmeditation.org.nz – Christchurch sangha Southern Insight's website
Gratitude: It is with deep gratitude that INSIGHTAotearoa offers dana this month to The Red Cross of New Zealand for earthquake relief in Haiti. Thank you for the skilled healing work you provide. May the people of Haiti be restored to health and safety.
Volunteers wanted
INSIGHTAotearoa needs two volunteers: 1 someone to post the newsletter to 15 subscribers who don't have email; 2 – Editor needed.
INSIGHTAotearoa goes out on the first of the month listing insight meditation events during the month to follow throughout the country as well as containing article of interest, encouraging and assisting the formation and growth of communities of meditation practitioners around the country. If you'd like to write for INSIGHTAotearoa or there's an insight meditation event you'd like included, contact Deborah: deborah @ insightaotearoa.org | 06 863 0020 | 021 238 5347.
This issue went by email to 390 people and to 15 by post.
9. THE LAST WORD: The Intent to Bless and be Blessed
As I travel along the road of Life, I meet my intent at every step. My intent arrives before I do, setting the tone for how I experience the events of the moment. My intent is to bless and be blessed by all people, events, and circumstances. What a pleasure it is to be an active agent of healing and grace! There is a sweet harvest to be reaped from thoughts, words, and deeds sown in love.
-- Rev Deborah Johnson, Inner Light Ministries
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Thank you for taking the time to read this. If you would like to remove yourself from the INSIGHTAotearoa mailing list you can unsubscribe via the website: http://www.insightaotearoa.org. If you've received this from a friend and would like to be on the email mailing list, subscribe via the website: http://www.insightaotearoa.org. Write to Newsletter, 98 Riverside Road, Gisborne 4010 if you would like to receive this by post.
With Metta,
Deborah White, Kanya Stewart, and Peter Fernando