INSIGHTAotearoa
A newsletter for New Zealand's insight meditation practitioners and communities
kanya @ insightaotearoa.org | http://www.insightaotearoa.org
Monday March 7th, 2011
The theme of this issue is ‘Tragedy In Our Midst’
Kia ora,
In this newsletter you’ll find…
EDITORIAL: Support for the sangha
REFLECTION I: On Equanimity, by Peter Fernando
POEM: Dinah Hawken
LETTERS OF SUPPORT
REFLECTION II: Bearing Witness, by Kanya Stewart
POEM: Mary Oliver
REFLECTION III: Self-Soothing in Difficult Times, by Phillip Moffitt
WISE WORDS: Pema Chodron
THEMES: For upcoming issues
RESOURCES: for Dharma study and support
THE LAST WORD: Joan Halifax
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EDITORIAL: SUPPORT FOR THE CHRISTCHURCH SANGHA
In the days following the earthquake, Lindsay Lyons set up two websites in support of the Christchurch sangha, one a place where people could post messages about the safety of members and how they were faring, the other where messages of support and places to stay for respite could be posted. In response there have been many messages of heartfelt caring and concern, many generous offers of practical support. More recently, a further resource has been added, a webpage offering information about relevant dharma talks and articles, and the beautiful poem by Naomi Shihab Rye – ‘Before you know what Kindness is’.
Thankfully, none of the sangha were harmed, though many suffered damage to their homes. Some have left Christchurch with their families for safer ground.
An email was sent out via the INSIGHTAotearoa mailing list to let people know about the websites. We apologise for not getting the message out immediately. Both of us were without email contact, Christine because of the earthquake, Kanya because she was in Perth supporting her sister after radical surgery.
If you haven’t yet checked out the websites here are the links below:
Messages to the Christchurch sangha:
http://insight.orconhosting.net.nz/messages.htm
is where people are writing messages of support to the Christchurch sangha. Messages of support are very much appreciated.
Messages from the Christchurch sangha:
http://insight.orconhosting.net.nz/InfoAboutOurPeople.htm
provides information about Christchurch sangha members and their families and is updated as we hear more.
Resources page:
http://insight.orconhosting.net.nz/HelpfulStuff.htm
If you would like to make a donation to the Southern Insight Meditation Support fund the details are: Account number; 12-3148-0078078-50 Account name; Southern Insight Meditation. Money raised in this fund will assist people who are experiencing financial hardship to attend retreats.
Christine is not contributing her usual ‘Cultivating the Dharma Garden’ piece to this issue of the newsletter, but you can see two reflections on the earthquake and its implications on her blog – http://ecogardenernz.blogspot.com.
May this edition of Insight offer nourishment, support and inspiration in these difficult times. May we be tender with our fragile hearts. For the Christchurch sangha, may your journey of recovery be supported by your practice and by those of us that are holding you in our hearts as you heal.
Kanya Stewart
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REFLECTION I: On Equanimity
The day after the quake in Christchurch happened I was sitting alone waiting to lead a session in a course a group of us are currently exploring on the Ten Paramitas. The theme for the week was ‘patience’, and I was feeling into the theme, wondering what would emerge. As people began to arrive I had it in my mind that we would go ahead with this theme, even though internally I noticed there was a resistance in me – a feeling of ‘not quite rightness’ in the heart. Before the sit, we naturally began talking of the events in Christchurch, and the sense of grief and shock was becoming palpable. I had been feeling quite affected by the events in what was my home town during university days, and my thoughts were going out to the people I knew down there, and whether or not they were alright. As we began the sit I decided it wouldn’t feel right to just introduce a theme that seemed abstract in relation to the events. It’s not that patience isn’t necessary at time like this, it’s just that it didn’t seem in tune at that time.
So I began to think quickly, ‘Hmm, we’ve already done metta… maybe… equanimity?‘. So I went with that. As it turned out it was very useful – for myself in finding a space that could hold the shocked effect in response to the lives lost down South, and also in exploring the subtle ways that equanimity is actually a great support for genuine kindness and compassion. We began to explore how equanimity is a full receptivity to the raw feelings of the heart, but without reaction and without proliferation. In this way it began to occur how precious this quality is in terms of its transformative effects. Without this ability to hold, fully, and not get caught in stories, our raw emotions of grief, for example, can easily turn into fear, helplessness, worry, or outrage. And in our conversations it became apparent how different this receptive presence is from its ’near enemy’, indifference. Indifference in response to tragic events also seems to result from a desire not to feel – to deflect, to rationalize (or Buddhistize) our experience, and in turn become numb or dissociated from a real human response. Equanimity also prevents the heart from contracting into feelings of guilt, or self-blame that can creep in when we aren’t the ones affected directly.
It turned out then, that equanimity was a key piece of the process for many of us. Over the last week I have turned to this heart presence as a resource and a refuge, and interestingly, it has been possible to touch the reality of people’s experience in Christchurch more fully, with more natural compassion, and in turn my own mortality with a sense of sobriety and calm.
Peter Fernando
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POEM: Hope
It is to do with trees:
being amongst trees.
It is to do with tree-ferns:
mamaku, ponga, wheki.
Shelter under here
is so easily
understood.
You can see that trees
know how it is
to be bound
into the earth
and how it is to rise defiantly
into the sky.
It is to do with death;
the great slip in the valley:
when there is nothing left
but to postpone all travel
and wait
in the low gut of the gully
for water, wind and seeds.
It is to do with waiting.
Shall we wait with trees,
shall we wait with,
for, and under trees
since of all creatures
they know the most
about waiting, and waiting
and slowly strengthening,
is the great thing
in grief, we can do?
It is always bleak
at the beginning
but trees are calm
about nothing
which they believe
will give rise to something
flickering and swaying
as they are: so lucid
in their knowledge of green
Dinah Hawken (1995), Water, Leaves, Stones,Victoria University Press. Dinah lives in Paekakariki.She wrote ‘Hope’ after the Cave Creek Disaster. Her 6th book of poetry, The leaf-ride, will come out in April this year.
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LETTERS OF SUPPORT:
Dear Friends, I am thinking of you. I hope that you are safe and sound and with your family.
It is hard to imagine living with unstable ground. I hope that your practice is helping you to work with these difficult times. If there is anything I could do to help, let me know.
With all my love and support,
Martine Batchelor
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Dear Ones, I was on retreat with Hameed Ali when I heard the news. I have been sitting with my own sadness and grief as I read the news and saw photos, as I had emails from some friends and began taking in the extent of the crisis. As you know, I was going to come to ChCh in 2 weeks and I have been sitting with the uncertainty of whether it makes sense to come into the city. It is still unknown at this time. I am arriving in New Zealand on March 8 and if there is anything I can do to support the sangha there, I am willing. The most important thing for me is knowing you are safe. The message board for this has been heart-warming. My hope is that you are finding your dharma practice to be a support during this very shaky time.
Many blessings to you all,
Sharda (Rogell)
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Dear dharma friends, My heart goes out to all of you, hearing the news and it is so sad to see images of the devastation of your beautiful city. David and I merrily walked down those streets only a couple of weeks ago. I am thinking of you and what you must be going through, the level of disorganisation of work, home and school etc, and amazed at the warmth and friendliness, care and compassion that so many Kiwis offer to one another in times of crisis. It is that good old mateship and lending a helping hand that makes such a difference. While the news moves on to the tragedies in other countries and places, you remain in my heart and not forgotten. Jeremy & I have offered to provide some counselling for grief, PTSD, and shock via skype for Dharma friends. Jeremy has offered to organise this. My skype address is Subhana01. Glad to hear that so many of you are safe and doing okay.
Much love to all
Subhana (Barzaghi)
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REFLECTION II: Bearing Witness
For most of us, the natural and immediate response to the suffering caused by the Canterbury earthquake is one of compassion and solidarity for the people of Christchurch. We are a nation in mourning. A tragedy of such massive proportions in our midst breaks our hearts wide open, bringing down the barriers of separation that keep us locked into our own small world of personal concerns. The nation has become unified in a way most of us haven‘t experienced before. There are so many inspiring stories that make the reality of connectedness tangible and heartwarming. Generosity and acts of kindness have, like a tidal wave of goodness, flowed out in abundance from every part of the country and beyond.
When we are open, not turning away, we can receive the vastness and depths of loss, despair and grief into our own hearts. The losses have been unprecedented in New Zealand; some have lost family, friends, workmates; many have lost their homes, jobs, community, the city that they love, and all that was familiar. Few of us alive today have seen this level of suffering so close. Bearing witness to the trauma brings home to all of us that life is unpredictable, that everything can be taken away from us at any time.
The truth of impermanence on such a grand scale is brutal. Any experience of loss and disorientation is difficult to deal with and the challenge to remain present to what is unfolding requires great inner strength. Resources of faith and trust are tested. When fear of ongoing loss is part of the equation, and the most basic requirements for survival and security are taken away, it takes great inner resources to not get lost or overwhelmed in the intensity of the suffering.
Joan Halifax Roshi, in writing about her work with the dying, talks about what supports her to be fully present in her work. These are the three tenets of not-knowing, bearing witness, and compassionate action. She refers to them as ‘like having a key that opens many doors, doors that have led to the same place – the unknown, the inconceivable, the place of simply being present for the truth of what is happening”. She says “I have come to see the tenets as a boat that takes me across unchartered waters”.
Thousands of Cantabrians have been thrown into uncharted waters since the quake struck. As they journey into the unknown, the fabric of their daily lives shattered, those of us that bear witness to their suffering feel the pain in our own hearts. We stand alongside them, offering love, support, solace.
It is hard to see light when the darkness is so deep. Yet the paradox is that, in the midst of tragedy and despair, there are gifts. The spirit of community and interconnectedness has flowered during the past weeks. As a country we are offering the best of who are, and in doing so we are going beyond the concerns that keep us locked in the prison of self. This is the light within the dark, the capacity to become more than who we usually are, to manifest the best qualities of the human heart.
The trauma from the earthquake will go on for a long time, as aftershocks continue and people struggle to rebuild their lives. One of the ways we can continue to hold those affected in our hearts is to practice Loving-Kindness, or Tonglen. In both forms of meditation we send out the lightness and spaciousness of well-being. We radiate wishes for health, happiness and freedom from suffering, using our own hearts as a transformer, a tool for healing. In this way we can continue to be engaged and responsive, taking in the suffering, sending out love. No-one wants to feel alone and abandoned when they have gone through such trauma. We can continue to bear witness and share the suffering. The pain becomes our pain, the losses become our losses.
Kanya Stewart
For more information about Loving-Kindness and Tonglen meditations see:
Pema Chodron (2001),The Places That Scare You, London, Harper Collins, and http://www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/tonglen1.php
Sharon Salzberg (2005), Loving-Kindness – The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, Boston, Shambala
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POEM: Blackwater Woods
Every year
Everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this. The fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation, whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it
and when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Mary Oliver
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REFLECTION III: Self Soothing in Difficult Times
As anyone who has ever studied with me will tell you, I emphasize how to apply mindfulness in daily life. Recently I have been focusing on how to use mindfulness to self-soothe during times of difficulty. We’ve all experienced how unsettling and uncertain life can be and how easily we can be knocked off center at any moment. When we’re not in balance, we can become defined by whatever is happening and get caught in what I call “reactive mind.” But through the skillful application of mindfulness we can learn to self-soothe whenever life delivers us a blow and soon regain our balance. When we lack the ability to self-soothe, we resort to using less skillful strategies to deal with difficulty such as escaping into fantasy, or overindulging in drugs, alcohol, or food, which usually prolongs our suffering.
Self-soothing begins with softening into your experience and then applying mindfulness to recognize that “this moment is like this.” From within the spaciousness that this softening creates, you can start to investigate the experience and gain access to insight. Specifically, there are three phases to the self-soothing process:
Phase I: Re-establish your equilibrium
Calm yourself using whatever strategy works best for you. Examples of how you might do this include focusing on your breath or your feet touching Earth. One person I know holds one hand with the other and imagines that the universe is embracing her; another calms herself by looking up at the sky. Next, name what’s going on and acknowledge that you’re upset. Can you identify the aspect of yourself that is upset? Allow the part of you that knows you’re upset to comfort the part that’s upset with compassion and loving-kindness.
Phase II: Remember your intentions
Once you’ve returned to equilibrium, reconnect with your intentions. As you begin to remember your intentions, you become less and less defined by the difficult experience. You have more clarity of mind; although it may not be clear to you what to do, you remember what you’re about. I call this “self-remembering.”
Phase III: Redirect your attention
Lastly, as your clarity returns and you re-engage with life from your intentions, begin to redirect your attention. What dharma insights can you apply to this difficult situation? For instance, you might reflect on the impersonal nature of life. Although you are having a personal experience, it is just causes and conditions that are creating this experience. This too is going to change because everything changes. Life is hard; therefore, it’s not a mistake that your life is hard in this moment. This insight alone can be a source of great comfort.
For more detailed instructions about how to self-soothe, listen to Phillip’s dharma talk on self-soothing at http://www.lifebalance.com.
© 2011 Phillip Moffitt. This article is a gift of dharma. Printed with permission.
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WISE WORDS: Pema Chodron
“Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness—life’s painful aspect—softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose—you’re just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.”
Pema Chödrön (2005), Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living, Element Publications
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THEMES: for upcoming issues
Short contributions from readers (original or fully attributed) on the theme of the month are welcomed. Please email them to the Editor – kanya @ insightaotearoa.org
APRIL 2011 – The Buddha Smiles. Deadline for contributions: Sunday March 20. (Do you have any stories or poems that illustrate the Dharma in a humorous way? Please send them to us!.)
MAY 2011 – Dealing with Fear. Deadline for contributions: Sunday March 24.
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NOTICE: Aotearoa Buddhist Education Trust is looking for a volunteer to become our admin person, which means to be our bookkeeper and look after the annual return to the Charities Commission. You should be meticulous and committed to the dharma, and have an hour or so a month available. To find out what’s involved phone Ramsey on 04 970 3531 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 04 970 3531 end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 04 970 3531 end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 04 970 3531 end_of_the_skype_highlighting at home or 04 384 4595 at work, or write to heuristics @ mac.com. Visit http://www.abet.net.nz for more info on the work of the trust.
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SANGHA NEWS
SUPPORTING INSIGHTAotearoa
INSIGHTAotearoa goes out in the first week of every month (except January). INSIGHTAotearoa aims to encourage and assist the formation, connection and growth of communities of Insight meditation practitioners around the country, by
- listing current insight meditation events and groups throughout the country, and promoting future events;
- publishing articles and other items of interest;
- sharing news and views from insight meditation groups, teachers and practitioners.
Please help us keep the SANGHA NEWS section of INSIGHTAotearoa up-to-date by sending news and corrections regarding events, sitting group details, etc. to christine @ insightaotearoa.org
INSIGHTAotearoa comes to you without a subscription price because our readers offer dana (donations) to support it. A traditional Buddhist generosity practice, dana received will be used to develop the newsletter, and the community that practises insight meditation. Regular automatic payments are very welcome. You can also post cash or cheques to 13 Wrantage St, Westown, New Plymouth 4310, 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.
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RESOURCES: for Dharma study and support
NEW! Locally-produced Stephen Batchelor DVDs/on-line talks
The November 2010, panel discussion between Buddhist teacher Stephen Batchelor and Christian theologian Lloyd Geering at St Andrews on The Terrace in Wellington is now available as a DVD. A well attended meeting, the DVD includes responses to the questions which were put by a lively audience. The topic of the evening’s discussion was “Can Christianity and Buddhism Remain Relevant in the 21st Century?”.
Also available is a DVD of the talk that Stephen Batchelor gave at the National Library in Wellington in December 2004 on the topic of his book “Living With The Devil”.
Produced by the Wellington Insight Meditation community, each DVD costs $30, including postage. To get one or more DVDs, make a deposit into the WIMC account at Kiwibank 38 9010 0244181 00 with the reference ‘Geering Batchelor DVD’, “Batchelor DVD” or “both DVDs”. At the same time send a message to treasurer @ wimc.org.nz letting treasurer Janice Hill know how much you’ve deposited, which DVDs you want along with your postal address.
Alternatively, send a cheque to WIMC, PO Box 6626, Marion Square, Wellington 6141 with a letter stating which DVD you want, and how many copies.
OR
You can watch both the 2010 panel discussion and the 2004 talk online at http://www.wimc.org.nz.
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‘MINDFULNESS IN PLAIN ENGLISH’
This excellent basic guide to Insight meditation by the Ven Henepola Gunaratana can now be downloaded from http://www.urbandharma.org/dharma4/mpe.htm
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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
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INSIGHT MEDITATION IN AOTEAROA ON THE WEB
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
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THE LAST WORD: Joan Halifax
An old woman once told me that wisdom and compassion are not given to us; they can only be discovered. The experience of discovery means letting go of what we know. When we move through the terrible transformation of the elements of loss and grief, we may discover the truth of the impermanence of everything in our life, and of course, of this very life itself. This is one of the most profound discoveries to be made as we engage in Buddhist practice. In this way, grief and sorrow may teach us gratitude for what we have been given, even the gift of suffering. From her we learn to swim in the stream of universal sorrow. And in that stream, we may even find joy. For this Buddhist, this is the essence of a liberative practice.
Excerpted from “Being With Dying” by Joan Halifax Roshi
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with metta, Christine Dann, Kanya Stewart – supported by Peter Fernando & Marianne Adams.