The 25th of this month sees the second Walk for Khuphuka – a most enjoyable walk in Richmond organised to raise money for the Khuphuka project,  a pioneering and successful HIV/AIDS initiative working in an impoverished part of rural South Africa.

Given that I now live in Glasgow I shan’t be able to make it but I shall be supporting it all the same.  It really was lovely in all senses last year and I imagine this year will be just the same.

If you would like to support the walk you can do this is a number of ways:

• Donate to the project via Justgiving
• Join the friendly throng on the walk itself!
• Find out more about the Khupukha project

Thank you.

After several years developing and training in fairly straight-up Theravadan, vipassana and insight meditation, I’m going on a formal intensive session in another tradition – Mahamudra, a particular style of practice within the Tibetan tradition.

It will be taught by a chap called Daniel Brown and will be at Moulin de Chaves, one of my most favourite places to practice and so I very much look forward to reporting back later in the month about my experiences.

I did get Daniel’s book recently but given that it’s pretty much the size of a doorstop and so I never got round to getting into it.  And so I go to the weeklong fresh and ignorant, aware that I’m ignorant and interested in changing that – one of my favorite conditions!

And given that this week I went to my first ever zen class, I’ve been reflecting quite a lot on the benefit we can gain from tapping the rich seams of all the great Buddhist traditions for learning.  I am however very grateful that I know one tradition very well since I feel that gives me the context from which to understand the rest.

Listen to a conversation I had with Tom from beingordinary.org while we were at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where we talk about what we’re learning from our respective social media projects – mine blogging, his podcasting – and assorted other lovely things.

I am delighted to say that Gaia House has now fully linked up with Dharmaseed so these talks are now online here.

The four I however would really like to point to are the last four that Rob gave – easily the most hardcore dhamma I’d heard at a retreat centre before, so i embed them here:

No Mind:

The subtlety of Dependent Origination:

Dependent Cessation and the Unconditioned:

The union of appearance and emptiness:

And if you get through any of that, do please let me know what you think.

I recently was asked to write a piece for the newspaper which formed the programme for the recent Hide&Seek weekender.  I think play and games is a really important part of meditation and this is what I wrote:

You probably can’t read that so I’ve included the text down here. You can also listen to me reading the first bit in an Audioboo (if you’re into that sort of thing)

“Sayadaw”, I begin – that being his monastic title – “Sayadaw, my meditation has become like a game. It feels a bit like I’m just playing” This is the point at which he sits bolt upright and starts laughing, so energetically that I can only join in. In his somewhat broken English he squeals:
“People think this meditation, this Buddhism is hard work. And yes sometimes it is, sometimes it has to be – you know that. But remember the point of it all. The purpose of this teaching is to come to the end of suffering. We stay aware at all times, watching our minds. And as we watch we learn about the mind. And what we learn is how to let go. And what we let go of is everything that stops us from being happy and free. And then we are free.”
Then in an instant his eyes went from an open smile to an equally energetic but piercing seriousness.
“When you play at meditation are you learning or just playing?”
“I’m learning Sayadaw”
“Good. Keep playing.”

Now let’s move from Burma to Japan and meet Ryokan, a Zen master and poet who was around at the turn of the 19th century. Epitomising the beautiful aesthetic of that Buddhist school, his writing is direct and often enigmatic. In one of his poems he speaks of a morning when some children asked him to join their games:

I carry my monk’s bowl and walk to the village
to beg for my daily meal.
The children spot me at the temple gate
and happily crowd around,
dragging at my arms till I stop.
I put my bowl on a white rock,
hang my bag on a branch.
First we braid grasses and play tug-of-war,
then we take turns singing and keeping a kick-ball in the air:
I kick the ball and they sing, they kick and I sing.
Time is forgotten, the hours fly.
People passing by point at me and laugh:
“Why are you acting like such a fool?”
I nod my head and don’t answer.
I could say something, but why?
Do you want to know what’s in my heart?
From the beginning of time: just this! just this!

For me this is a poem about freedom. And through it, I think that Ryokan has a lot to tell us about the qualities he has developed through his meditative practice and their relationship to play and playfulness.

Something about availability and wonder. We are often so fixed on achieving particular tasks and going particular things that we miss out on a wider sense of what is available to us. If Ryokan was stuck on getting his food in town then he certainly would not have made the time to play with the children but instead he took the risk of not getting any food at all, and made himself available to the opportunity that was being presented to him in that moment. At its heart, Buddhist meditation – or mindfulness-based meditation – is a practice of awareness, a training in opening our minds and our hearts to all that is happening. In this sense, play is an attitude – the readiness to be open to whatever might happen. Look at the world in this way and we can only see its wonder.

Something about the holy fool. It is interesting to see just as in 21st century Britain, in nineteenth century Japan, when so-called grown-ups play child-like games, they are seen as fools. Throughout all religious and spiritual traditions there is the appearance of what is known as the holy fool – the person who despite being incredibly wise and spiritually gifted – is seen as their society as frankly idiotic. Ryokan plays this role beautifully in his poem – for importantly he has no vanity with regards how he is seen – and just lets the bemused on-lookers think what they think. What is this monk doing playing with street-children? That’s not very good behaviour for someone of his position surely? Ryokan however knows that all his actions in the world are simple expressions of his training – and he’s so confident in his wisdom and understanding that it’s irrelevant whether anyone thinks he’s acting appropriately or not.

Something about freedom and the sense of self. The more you go into the deep end of meditation practice, the more you start exploring the sense of self – asking the big questions about identity, perception and the subtle mechanics of the mind. When I read Ryokan’s words I see a man who has understood himself completely. Never once does he assert himself or take a position which he’s then have to defend…I could say something, but why? And it’s this, his twin ability to fully abandon myself to the simplicity and joy of the game and not have to defend his way of being either to himself or to others that point to his freedom. What a way to live your life!

Due to its richness and diversity, summarising meditation is such a difficult task that I rarely do it. But when I do, I describe it as a stance – a way of standing in the world. We have a choice of how we stand in the world, a choice in how approach life. We can do so with a sense of self-centredness, fixity and limitation. Or we can stand in a way that is open, curious, alive to possibility and ready to be amazed at every turn.

Whichever stance we choose, all I ask is that we be aware of how we’re standing and ask ourselves with honesty and integrity if adjusting it in any way will result in our feeling more free.

I know how I want to stand. I want to stand like Ryokan. I want to stand playfully.

What have been your experiences of play and practice I wonder? Would love to know

Now as a practitioner, while I think the claims between scientific research confirming Dhammic teachings are too often overplayed, what is important is that as we look to deepen our understanding of core teachings such as non-self and emptiness, bringing similar ideas from different disciplines into our reflections can be of immense value.

So as I listened to the radiolab episode entitled Emergence I soon realised that what they were talking about was the scientific analogue of emptiness. And while emergence is a topic I’ve been interested in for a while since I first read Stephen Johnson’s book of the same name, this podcast is so well done that I found it articulate, clear and insightful.

Trust me. It beats a hell of a lot of some of the Dhamma talks I’ve heard on this topic over the years

It’s perhaps the question I most dislike being asked.  And the one that tells me that I’m at the wrong party.

For some reason or other, we have  a social convention that by asking this question, we give permission to be arbitrarily categorised by profession.  Given that I now enjoy what people call a “portfolio career”, even if I wanted to, I find this quite difficult to do and so in a fit of pique last year, got some deliberately obscure business cards made up.

However, when someone asks me the same question with regards meditation it’s a question that I really welcome.  And given that recently I’ve had quite a few people ask me about what my practice is, I thought I’d tell you what I say:

My practice has only two elements: silence and curiosity.  So if I’m not deepening my relationship with silence or asking a question – or both together – then I am not practising the Dhamma.

And with regards actual technique, in formal practice I do one of three things:

1. Full-body awareness - letting my attention settle into the silence that is body.  Using the whole body in combination with the breath provides a powerful balance of stability and vibrancy.
2. Investigation of body sensations – whenever sensations are strong, asking the question at ever deepening levels “how is the way I’m seeing this sensation affecting the actual way I’m experiencing it”.  And if the body is really quiet…
3. Resting with the sense of awareness itself - placing all the attention on the subtle sense of identification with awareness and asking the question “what does it feel like to take this sense of awareness as me and mine and what might it be to do otherwise?”

And when I say ask a question, it’s not necessarily cognitive questions, but instead a way of looking or lens with which to examine experience.

And when I’m not in formal practice, when I remember I just keep refreshing the intention to keep a posture of silence mixed with curiosity.  And the mix typically turns out to be 80% silence and 20% inquiry.  But how that happens I don’t really know…I think it’s just down to the momentum of my body-based mindfulness practice over the last few years.

And the reason I do that is so that I can know for myself what the Buddha knew.

So…what do you do?

It’s an area that I’m really looking to grow into and having some reflections on the topic was very welcome.   Given it was a while since I first heard the talk, to help remember the content – some of which I agree with, some of which I don’t – I decided to transcribe the talk.  Therefore below the video you will also see this very lightly edited transcript from Martin’s reflection.  So if you don’t have time for a half-hour video (which is rather good), I’d invite you to review the words.

And if you’re interested in this sort of thing, you can check out the rest of my own articles on Relationships.

[see below for transcript]

Everyone here has a sex life, a sense of intimacy and the way that moves in them and with others. That can be an interesting reflection to take on board.

There can be a kind of taboo around sexuality and of talking about sexuality. And because of that, something can feel very private around sexuality and yet there’s a line at which private becomes hidden or shameful in some way. And that includes the playing out of whatever we’ve inherited from our culture or our family.

With reference to Work Sex Money Dharma – when I talk bout sex as as in the title for our course here, really the context I want to talk about relationship. This morning we defined our dharma practice as an exploration of who we take ourselves to be – and so this reflection is about how this gets brought into the potent area of intimate relationship.

It is potent in terms of its capacity for beauty and wonder, for love and intimacy and for many extraordinary and exquisite heart qualities.

But at the same time, relationship also has potency and potential for all kinds of pain and struggle and heartbreak.

Everybody has struggled in some way. But maybe that’s a supposition? Maybe if there’s someone where who’s never had any troubles with relationships, never had any hurt…any confusion…any rough or unloving moment in their relationships, maybe they can raise your hand?

[some laughing – no hands raised]

So relationship is a ground for some of the most beautiful experiences – the most beautiful interpersonal experiences, some of the most beautiful ways of being with another human being. Yet it is also the ground for some of the ways with which with another human being we experience some of the most heartaches, the most confusion and the most pain.

Life really is relationship. We are always in relationship…in these three realms, relating to ourselves, relating to others and relating to a sense of life. Maybe more accurately we could say life is relationship in term to this basic presence, this most fundamental participation in life – what I’ve been calling basic presence this morning , relating with the sense of self that arises in it, the sense of other and the sense of world. And then there’s all the sense of negotiation, relationship of me-and-you and this-and-that and here-and-there and back-and-forth that seems to go on.

I was speaking this morning about identity as historical..looking at our working lives, our own history and how our conditioning impacts how we experience. That’s one thing when it only concerns ourselves, but with relationships there’s all the patterning, the defending, the stuff of my history that I bring…and then I bring that to another person! Who in turn has all their stuff and their history and their fears and their hopes and their projections and their …wow! No wonder it’s complicated, no wonder it get’s sticky! Plenty of places for what in Buddhist language we might call self-cherishing to arise – plenty of places for greed, hatred and delusion to rear its head.

And therefore plenty of opportunity to see ourselves. Though not always very glamourously.

There’s a kind of tragedy to the fact that it seems that the people we love the most, the people we hold most dear…seem to be the people we don’t mind treating the worst. People who we’re not so close to, we wouldn’t dare to let us see be so intolerant or whatever it might be. And of course what’s happening there is that the people we are closest to are the people we trust enough to let them see us in our less-than-finest hours. Others who we don’t trust so much, if we were behave badly they just wont put up with it.

But we somehow trust the people we love the most to put up with us. And there’s a kind of vulnerability there. Those with whom we’re in intimate relationship get to see us in ways that nobody else really does and that’s a fertile ground.

I spoke before about how everything is a mirror to what we bring and that our experience reflects however we’re meeting it. Nowhere is that more true than in our intimate relationships.

It’s unglamorous and we’d rather not acknowledge how our early family conditioning impacts our relationships. There’s some homespun wisdom that men are trying to marry their mother and women their father…but we really don’t often want to go there. We don’t want to look and see if the way we’re relating to our partner is the way we relate to our parent…it’s just not sexy. It’s not glamourous and it’s a reflection of ourselves we don’t want to have. We don’t want to acknowledge that we’re relating to life from a child-like place and intimate relationships are places where the neediness, our childish tantrum-ishness, all of bits we most like not to see ourselves seem to show up most clearly in intimate relationship.

That’s the territory and it’s kinda scary. And it’s fraught with difficulty.

And sooner or later, we may begin an intimate relationship and whatever the particular story or point you find yourself in personally, at some point – some weeks or some months, some years later – the capacity to keep presenting and keep posturing an endearing side to yourself runs out of steam.

And your capacity to see the traits of the beloved other in just an endearing light also runs out of steam. At the beginning the way he picks his nose was so cute, but after some time it’s not so cute – it’s disgusting or annoying. And it’s really interesting to see that change happen. Again this is the homespun idea of the honeymoon period in the relationship which at some point comes to an end…it just does.

And when it does, when the initial fluttery feeling whenever we see our partners and all the other stuff of falling in love, when that ends and it slows down, when the endearing becomes the irritating we tend to one of three things.

The first thing we do is bail out – we give up and get back on the merry-go-round. And for some that’s a kind of serial process, addicted to the honeymoon period and the fluttering feeling. That is what relationship ought to do for us right? Give us this kind of feeling of being in love with the very newness, the magic, the mystery of it, the endearing qualities of it. and when that starts to run out, we find ourselves full of doubt and panic and we split. I’m not suggesting that’s the only reason for bailing out, but sometimes it’s just that…we’re addicted to the rush and the flutter.

The second thing that people do is into comfortable dysfunction. The magic has gone a bit, the spark has gone a bit. And for various reasons we feel we should put up with it. We bought a house together. We’ve got children together. I could never find someone else. I don’t have the time or energy to get back in the dating game…whatever it might be.

So we stay in a relationship that sort of dies slowly from the inside. And whether you can recognise some of that in yourself or not , i’m sure you can recognise that in people you know. Where two people are living under the same roof in theory they are in relationship, but any actual relating seems to fizzle out. Even with some intention for that not to happen, even with a sense that that would be a terrible thing, it’s really surprising how many people get to some stage where there’s tons of unsaid stuff, and it’s not just unsaid but unsayable. Places I can’t go, things I can’t say, things I’m not prepared to talk about. And the more stuff stays unsaid the more it seems to be unsayable. Until there’s such a backlog that to bring any of it would to be to bring it all. And so a comfortable or (not very )comfortable dysfunction is what results.

The third option is that when we begin to actually work with one’s relating, on one’s relationship. Often we just want to work on the other person. Usually we’ve got all sorts of insights about our partners. About how they could and should improve and be different. About how if only they could accept to be our disciple we could give them all manner of spiritual instruction on how to be much better.

That’s not what I mean. What I mean is to actually work on the relationship. And specifically – rather than working on their side of the relationship on their behalf, actually work on what I’m bringing…the bit we tend to only have a limited amount of inspiration for. And yet here’s this place where we’re more vulnerable than with anyone else, more seen that with anyone else. when our fragilities and our patterning get more revealed than with anyone else with any other situation.

I remember one of my teachers giving me that as a piece of advice. “Listen to what your wife sees in you. Pay attention to what your wife tells you about you” Really?, I said, You want me to do that?! But when we do, we turn to face the bits of ourselves that don’t tend to get exposed anywhere else.

I think I read it in a book by M Scott Peck who talks about these three stages: “first you fall in love, then you fall out of love and then you begin the work of love”.

And of course that starts to bring to mind a whole bunch of reflections.

How am I in relationship? What am I bringing to relationship? Where there seems to be places of stickiness, struggle and misunderstanding, what am I contributing to those and how come? Who do I take myself to be? When I expect the other to change or be different, when I’m feeling frustrated or outraged by the other, what’s that really about? What’s really frustrating here?

If I just take she did this or she said that out of the equation a little bit (being careful not to dismiss the genuine feelings there), but if I just take the storyline, the detail and the drama out and I really explore and I ask wheat is really frustrating me here you might find some surprising answers. In a way any type of real inquiry into who we take ourselves to be involves going through a bunch of layers. And the first layer tends to always be the story. The layer of strong reactivity or strong emotional response: he did…, she said…, how could you…

The second layer tends to be the emotion. And it can be very helpful to name the emotion that’s there – I’m feeling really frustrated. There’s something much more honest in the naming and communication of that once we recognise it rather than going into you’re such a…

Next layer down is looking at how the feeling such as mad or frustrated is actually expressing in me. So that’s where ther baseline of presence that we’ve been cultivating can really come into play, allowing the energy of what’s happening to move through.

Next layer is normally the how come – not just the story – but the patterning. It is often the case that we tend to bring the same patterning to all kinds of story.

So one day it’s How could you say that to my friend? The next day it’s How could you have not called me to tell me about…and so on. So the similar emotional reactions – anger, mistrust, turn around insecurity…(choose your favourite!). That is revealed by the willingness to go down through the layers.

And so if we’re really willing to use our reactions and reactivity as the food for our self-inquiry, as the catalyst to see how we get caught, our relationship actually becomes a sangha.

Buddhism 101 tells us that relationships, like everything else are ultimately unsatisfying. But I don’t want to paint too bleak a picture, i’ve been in a relationship for nearly 20 years now and a very nourishing one. So I’m not talking about this stuff from a cynical , broken hearted, given-up type of place!

But I think we have a lot of cultural mythology, especially what I’ll call the Happy Ever After. So we might have practised a lot of dharma and we might be signed up to the Buddhist-ly correct view that relationship by itself cannot fundamentally make us happy but don’t underestimate the power of Happy Ever After. Since w’ve been tiny we’ve been read stories of Happy Ever After. And the catalyst for Happy Ever After usually is falling in love.

Princes and princesses and frogs and kisses and poisoned apples.

They normally start with some kind of princess who has some kind of problem. And they usually end up with Happy Ever After. And while we don’t necessarily consciously expect of our relationships to fully provide complete peace, fruitfulness and spaciousness in our lives but since we’ve been little (and maybe it’s more acute for women), we are patterned with the expectation of Happy Ever After.

So it’s a shock..maybe not consciously, but it’s shock that relationships are unsatisfying. And at the risk of sounding like a grumpy cynic, I could even say that relationships are predominantly unsatisfying and imperfect, punctuated by moments of exquisite near perfection – moments which might not even feel like near perfection – but actual perfection – before they take a downturn again into slight, medium or gross imperfection.

And part of the reason for that is around sex and orgasm. While some of the eastern contemplative traditions point to experience which are too subtle to be really called sensual (e.g. jhanas) in terms of normal sensual experience, it doensn’t come bigger or better than orgasm. For some chocolate seems to be not too far behind for most of us there’s no contest.

So basically in terms of everyday sensual experience, sex and the movement towards orgasm are pretty intense, pretty fantastic and can result in a whole sense of our body soaked in a sense of intimacy, communion. Pretty amazing. But it doesn’t last very long, even if you’re some super sexual adept, and the amount of time we spend in that part of our relationship, no matter how keen you are, it’s not a huge percentage of the time you’re involved with that person. There’s also washing up, and housework and negotiating about what we can afford this month and what we can’t.

But because of the mythology of Happy Ever After in a general sense coupled with the intensity and promise and intensity and wonder and bliss and communion in sex and orgasm – we tend to attach a huge amount of expectation to relationship. If only I could meet the perfect partner, then I’d be happy.

Even if we’ve done our fair share of dharma practice and we know the dangers of if only mantra when it comes to relationship still it happens…it’s ok I know it wont fix everything, but… if only!

So on the macro level of Happy Ever After and on the micro level of the experience of orgasm, that all gets extrapolated and that’s what we expect from relationship. Bliss, fulfilment, wonder and then the afterglow. And certainly those moment are human peaks of exquisiteness but as well as the lead-up, orgasm and the afterglow, there’s the rest of the day to get through.

So it tends to be when something goes wrong, as it will, when there’s some disagreement, some discord, it sets up a lot of doubt for us. When we have a little bit of doubt and discord in other relationships in our life, it doesn’t seem so threatening. But when it’s there in our intimate relationships, it’s a lot more threatening because there’s so much more – we seem to be subconsciously relating to the Happy Ever After mythology and what we wish for in terms of orgasm, some sort of surrendered, merged golden moment.

So that’s just some of the general material around how relationship gets us and how our sense of ourself, what we want, who we are, who our partners are and how we want them to be get pulled into the mix. And how therefore relationships have their potential for such beauty and their potential for anywhere where there is clinging and some residue in our system, a chance for it to get stimulated.

And a chance for it to get liberated.

You may have remembered me mention that I was involved in the production of a new course in London called Work Sex Money Dharma.  Taught by Martin Aylward, it was a week long session which explored how we can best include those areas of our lives (the W, S & M bits) into our spiritual practice.  This is of course especially important in some traditions – like vipassana – where we have a monastic inheritance – and therefore the traditional strategy was simply to put them to one side – a skilful strategy but a limited one.

Yours truly spent much of the course recording Martin’s talks and now many of those are now live on the Work Sex Money Dharma site so if you are interested in this material, I recommend you have a browse.  I took a great deal of footage so I will continue to add more to the Vimeo channel as time goes on.

As a taster, I embed here the talk which kicked off the course which ran as a two consecutive daylongs followed by evening sessions for a full week.

Do get in touch if you’d like to find out more about the course.  And breaking news for our friends in the US is that Martin is in conversation with many insight meditation communities about running a version in 2010 or 2011 with San Fransisco, LA and Seattle particularly interested so do check with your local group if you live in any of those areas.

That is the title of the latest post I’ve written for mindapples – read it here.