It’s now been ten years since I attended my first Buddhist meditation retreat. The topic of the six-day retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center was Opening the Doors of the Heart, and we spent the majority of that time in glorious silence, whether sitting on our cushions, walking mindfully through the Fall-crispy-grass on the hills, doing our daily chores, and yes, cracking open our hearts, bit by bit.
I’ve listened to it countless times, and each time different sections catch me. It’s fascinating and humbling to listen again now, another decade’s worth of Metta (lovingkindness) practice under my belt, and still feel as though I have everything yet to learn!
Though the Triratna Buddhist community is my current spiritual home, I continue to feel so much gratitude for all the teachers of the Insight tradition who started me down this path. In particular, I am deeply grateful to James Fox for introducing me to the concept of Metta, and for encouraging me to deepen my practice by attending a retreat.
Saddhu, James, for everything you’ve accomplished with the Prison Yoga Project, and Thank You for inspiring me, then and now!
Have you ever participated in an intimate class or group meeting that broke down in some way? What happened? How did your level of engagement shift as a result?
Maybe one participant spoke more than anyone else and you mentally “checked out” because you knew you’d never get a chance to contribute. Or maybe someone you really wanted to hear from kept getting interrupted, which made you angry, and you spent the rest of the session noticing how many times she got interrupted rather than hearing what anyone was actually saying. Did a group of people keep showing up late after breaks, making everyone wait? Did you become so hungry, or so uncomfortable from sitting still for so long, that you lost your ability to focus?
Group agreements can do a lot to prevent scenarios like these. By fostering a sense of psychological safety within groups, they can make it much easier for everyone to participate more fully, or even show up in the first place.
An example of group agreements from Visions Inc that the East Bay Meditation Center uses
Here are a few of topics around which group agreements can encourage open and intimate sharing among groups, especially in diverse groups comprised of people with a range of identities, or whose cultural, racial, gender, and/or class experiences (to name only a few!) may differ greatly:
Confidentiality
Schedule / showing up on time / timekeeping / what if you can’t make it
Listening / talking at the same time as others
Encouraging responses vs asking participants to receive each others’ contributions without responding or “fixing”
Assuming goodwill / distinguishing between impact and intent
Making space for all voices / permission to pass
Speaking for yourself / speaking on behalf of others / making generalizations
Addressing / identifying each other (eg nametags, sharing gender pronouns)
Side conversations / off-topic conversations
Use of technology / taking notes / photography
Personal attacks / value judgments
Availability of water and food
Body care: official “bio breaks” / people taking breaks when necessary
Accessibility / where to meet
If you’re the “holder” or facilitator of the group, it’s great to give participants the opportunity to co-create agreements prior to accepting them… though this is more practical for multi-day events when this process won’t take up too much of the allotted time! For shorter meetings with a new group, try setting aside even just a couple minutes to read out a prepared set of agreements, and asking people to acknowledge them with a quick show of hands.
As a participant, if you know there are certain group agreements that would help you feel safe or show up more fully, you might ask your facilitator before the event if they would be willing to address those topics as part of the intro to the session. If they are not willing to do so… well, then you have more information to help you decide whether or not that’s a meeting you want to attend!
I’d love to see examples of group agreements that you’ve found particularly helpful; please send any and all my way!
As of this week, we’ve been living in Auckland for three years.
The particular date we arrived — 5 November — is hard to miss because of two very interrelated factors:
It’s Guy Fawkes Day, a truly bizarre holiday wherein people in New Zealand (and other Commonwealth countries) celebrate, in various explosive ways, the anniversary of a guy trying to blow up Parliament with a bunch of dynamite; and
It’s completely legal for anyone to light fireworks from private property in Auckland, and oh do they ever, despite the inevitable fiery mayhem that ensues.
And so I’ve been joking since the day we arrived that the country sets off fireworks in celebration of our coming here.
Last year, on the two-year anniversary of our arrival, I wrote up some thoughts on pestestrianism, public health care, and paying income taxes… and forgot to share them. These days I have absolutely no idea what life is like back in the U.S. (and I doubt my experiences in the Bay Area Bubble were ever representative of what the entire country goes through!), so the intro feels even more relevant than ever.
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The longer we live here, the harder it is to know whether the things I notice are really reflections of differences between the U.S. or New Zealand, or whether they are simply reflections of how the world has changed in the last two years. More likely, the things I notice are reflections of how I have changed since moving here? Continue reading “Three years in New Zealand: some reflections”
Thank you, Jen, for sending me this video of Billy Collins reading his poem The Lanyard… on my mother’s birthday, and her mother’s birthday, no less!
Start at 0:45 for best effect:
My mother gave me life, and it was only because of her own late mother’s sacrifice that we both exist at all. In return, today I offer you both this blog post, knowing full well we’ll never be even.
I’ve experienced a particular magic that is very difficult to describe, and it happened to me regularly while surfing this spot at sunset, on days when there was just enough haze in the atmosphere to blend the pastel colors of sea and sky seamlessly into one another to such an extent that distinctions themselves felt meaningless… in fact the difference between me, bobbing gently amongst all that wonder, and the vast expanse itself seemed to disappear entirely.
This song — and even the lyrics, which I finally “got” after playing the song over and over on trips to and from the Buddhist Centre — evokes a similar feeling for me. The internets claim that the artist herself now lives and surfs in this same small town, so I like to imagine it’s her I captured in the photograph above exactly two years ago today.
pacific is bigger / than I ever knew / until I got in her / and the water it moved / yeah it moved me / and if I was frightened / out there on the shore / well I had good reasons / but I don’t anymore / yeah it moved me / there’s nowhere to go where the earth doesn’t quake / it moved me
…how do we make space for ourselves and hold being a trailblazer and everything else that comes with our work?
A (from hospitality activist and bartender, etc etc Ashtin Berry):
I’ve often said that self-care requires discipline, but it also requires acceptance. You can’t really care for yourself if you aren’t sitting in the awareness of what your body, mind, spirit needs. So holding space for myself right now looks like investigating my feelings in a deeper way and acknowledging things even if I don’t have words for it at the moment.
Full original below for additional inspiration, but first here’s my own (five years ago!) Ace Hotel mirror selfie, constant-companion fanny pack lurking in the background:
Huzzah for celebrating the awareness of what the body, mind, spirit needs, and to letting go of needing the right words for what you discover through that investigation!
In most of the spaces I inhabited in Northern California, I had the privilege of being surrounded by very well-trained advocates for racial, class, gender, and a number of other forms of diversity and inclusion. The workshops, classes, community, and work events I frequented were excellently facilitated by people adept at leading the group through the setting of shared agreements. Once we had collectively affirmed those agreements, the facilitators and participants could lovingly but firmly call out — or rather, call in — any behavior that breached those agreements.
Even in situations where there were no explicit agreements in place, such as social gatherings, there was always someone more hip than I was to such matters who was willing to say something when anyone’s bias showed. In the rare moments when I did find I wanted to raise my own voice, usually online, I had people who could help me adjust my language before posting anything, and back me up once my words were out there.
These scenarios felt very safe and very comfortable. I benefited from the work of others; I could fully show up because I knew that what I shared would usually be received and held respectfully by the facilitator or the group itself, or that at the very least, someone else would intervene if anyone failed to check their privilege or veered into prejudiced territory, consciously or otherwise. And I trusted that my own missteps would be skillfully reflected back to me, giving me the opportunity to raise my own levels of awareness.
Since then, I’ve incorporated it into just about every class I teach, and it’s become my go-to movement practice… so I figured it was about time I shared the love!
It’s quite accessible in that it is easy to practice anywhere, without a mat or specialized clothing. It’s also easily adjustable to fit any timeframe. I usually start with a version in which I hold each pose for two full breaths. Even if that’s all I have time for, my mindbodyheart feel so much better for it; even better if I have time to go through several rounds, timed with the breath.
I’m convinced that this sequence was exactly the loving kindness that I needed during a recent retreat that was very challenging, both physically and emotionally.
I recently spent 8 days at a retreat on the topic of the Brahma Viharas (also known as the Four Divine Abodes, or the Four Immeasurables in Buddhism), which are:
Metta = Loving Kindness / Goodwill;
Karuna = Compassion (…arises when we meet suffering with metta);
Mudita = Joy (…arises when we meet happiness, good fortune, or positive qualities with metta); and
Upekkha / Equanimity (…arises when we meet change or impermanence with metta).
We also covered the so-called “near enemies” of each brahma vihara, which can arise when we tend toward self-centeredness or see ourselves as separate from others:
Metta / Loving kindness can turn into a kind of possessive love or attachment to a particular path for them (eg going from genuinely wanting the best for someone, to believing you know specifically what is best for them);
Karuna / Compassion can turn into grief or overwhelm;
Mudita / Joy can turn into a sense of intoxication with one’s own or another’s joyful situation; and
Upekkha / Equanimity can turn into indifference or apathy.
The most powerful part of the retreat for me was a practice in which we were encouraged to use a specific brahma vihara to “lift up” each of the near enemies as they came up, in a particular sequence.
If you start to get too attached to a person or an outcome, compassion can help you remember that they are on their own journey;
If you’re getting overwhelmed with your own suffering (or someone else’s, or the suffering of the entire world), you can reflect on people’s positive qualities or the positive aspects of the situation;
If you become so intoxicated with someone else’s choices, positive qualities, or way of being that start wanting some aspect of their life for yourself, you can cultivate a sense of contentment with your own path;
If you find yourself becoming apathetic or nihilistic because you’re taking “accepting things as they are” to an extreme, a dose of loving kindness can rekindle your sense of care.
Here’s my best attempt at a diagram to describe this practice. May it serve those of us who would like to cultivate a bit more connectedness in a world full of forces that would like us to believe we are separate from each other.
Elizabeth Ü 