Tag Archives: Thich Nhat Hanh

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shadow 2

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Sangha Arana is our home sangha – or more correctly, it’s our sangha-in-the-home.  As you may have seen in other photographs, our living room/dining room is the zendo and what constituted the LR/DR is tucked warmly into the “TV” room and kitchen.  My non-Buddhist friends (whose numbers diminish by the day) look at me as if I’ve lost my mind but I think it’s only because they miss the weekend long gatherings punctuated by beer, hot dogs, and hamburgers on the BBQ.  My Buddhist friends (whose numbers are quite static) also look at me as if I’ve lost my mind – which coming from a bunch of Zennies should be a compliment, I suppose.

And therein lies many a session about form and wholeheartedness, ritual and zealousness.

Sangha Arana started out as a space and time limited to health care professionals so that we could gather and practice mindfulness through meditation (that is worded deliberately).  As an experiment in providing a space for us to “be ourselves,” where we could disrobe from our professional obligations, it was a minimal success.  The shadow side of prajna kept creeping in and finally absorbed much of the light.  We are so highly trained in the “compare and contrast treatment efficacies” that it is hard to leave that judgemental, preferential mind on the elevator.  But as the disgruntled fell away, there was left a quiet group of us who have come to appreciate the privilege to have the time and space free to dig deep into our shadow side.

At a point in this evolution of community, however, we stretched the definition of “health care” and open the doors to more “professionals,” eventually throwing them wide open to anyone who wanted to practice in a Zen tradition.  That, of course, meant reiterating the ground rules each evening; Thich Nhat Hanh called for deep patience in such times.  After all, he said, the airlines always go over the skills of clinching seat belts and finding the emergency exits each time you get on an airplane because even if it is your 100th flight, it’s always someone’s first.  So we gently repeated, every evening, the ways in which to practice with us.  And, Arana, for a while, became a magnet for people who believed wholeheartedly that the aspiration to find one’s true nature meant doing what came naturally.  About the time our evenings became a roundtable on levitation and license of all things sexual, I woke up to the shadow side of patience.

My reaction (and I take full responsibility for this) was to be even more wholehearted about practice.  By which I meant a strong adherence to “ritual,” thinly disguised as a means of order and control.  These shadow manifestations are fascinating.  Being wholehearted about practice slides so easily into an accreted view of how practice should be.  Being patient softens the boundaries so that no one knows the edge of practice.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

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meeting the demons

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Right Mindfulness is the last node of the Eightfold Path in our mandala of practice. I was reading a dharma sister’s publication in the new journal called Mindfulness where she wrote about her mindfulness practice and how it helped to deal with her husband’s illness and death.  I’ve never met (physically) Karen Hilsberg or, when he was alive, her husband, but connected with them deeply through correspondences for a short year before he died.  After his death, Karen and I continued our correspondence both as ordained members in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing and as mental health professionals.  Karen writes of the various practices that sustained her through the ordeal of managing the strain and eventual loss of her beloved partner as well as holding their children close through it all.  I hope you can access the article; it seems available to the public.  It is a rare piece of hard-hitting writing that manifests a deep mindfulness practice as Thich Nhat Hanh teaches without any of the white-washing or naiveté I often read in articles about personal journeys in mindfulness.

As I write this, I have Karen’s husband’s article in front of me; he had sent it along when he and I were discussing the challenges of bringing mindfulness practices into psychology.  He wrote:

One thing I dream of is a time when in the context of work, these practices will be so much a part of the institution that before a treatment planning meeting, the treatment team will take some mindful breaths together and set an intention prior to conducting the meeting.  This would help each person at the meeting to move beyond their own tendency to be on automatic pilot and to truly experience the individual as an individual, rather than seeing the purpose of the meeting as a task that must be accomplished.

I have kept his article on the shelf over my desk under a statue of Jizo Bodhisattva since I first received it.  It reminds me over and over again that many of us share this dream of moving past our autopilot and into a space that is beyond labels.  Although his dream addresses our view of the patient who is the focus of the treatment planning meeting, it applies equally – if not more – to each of us around the table who get caught in the auto-pilot of our professional identities.

In the personal realm, there are all these autopilot identities too.  The identity of well-being, recognition, and many others become entrenched as rights to which we feel entitled.  As I read through Karen’s article and looked into my own life, I could see the ways in which mindfulness practice tore away the need to have a limited experience of life.  Karen writes of diving deep into practice – the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings, the Four Noble Truths, the teachings of impermanence, relational self, and letting go – and it provided her the freedom to be with what was unfolding.  A dharma teacher who lead a day of mindfulness at our sangha described equanimity as freedom; when we can be with someone just the way they are in this moment, non-preferentially, non-judgementally, we give them the freedom to be.  Just be.  And in that freedom a hundred thousand miracles occur.

The precepts, engagement, and vision of our lives make up the practice of Mindfulness, a way of meeting the demons that visit regularly.  It folds into itself being both a node in the mandala of the Eightfold Path and the over-arching robe of liberation that we put on each moment.

I bow deeply to my dharma sister, Karen, and thank her for her wisdom and generosity in bringing her practice to all of us.  May the merit of her journey and her husband’s constant presence in our lives bring freedom from suffering to all beings.

Thank you for practising,

Genju