THE CREATIVE BUDDHIST NEWSLETTER

Dear Subscriber First Name,

There are little moments in life when you know you married the right person. I had one of those moments yesterday.

My wife went to the corner shop to pick up a few bits and came back with a gift for me, a squashed tin can. That’s odd, you might think, but not remarkable. Until I tell you that 4 days earlier I’d walked past the same tin can, sitting there squashed in the rain. I’d paused to pick it up, but it was wet and muddy and I had nothing to put it in.

Why this tin can? Is it the colour, the form, or the fact that it’s looking right at us?

The strap-line for my website is ‘wabi-sabi dharma for real life’. And wabi-sabi comes into everything I do, either explicitly or implicitly. So what is wabi-sabi? In short, it’s those moments of finding beauty and truth together in the midst of our everyday life. Here with the tin can, perhaps it’s the beauty and truth of impermanence.

Of course, it’s rather mysterious where that beauty lies. In the can? In the eye of the beholder? If it’s in the can, why is it that no one else picked it up? If it’s in the eye of the beholder, why this can and not the multitude of other cans we walk past each day?

The Dharma Bundle

In the Dharma Bundle this month, we’re exploring the Two Truths. The Persian poet Rumi says, “This transient world is a sign of the miracle of truth; but this same sign is a veil which hides the eternal truths.” I’m fascinated by the idea that the world is both concealing the truth from us and revealing the truth to us. In fact, that’s what wabi-sabi beauty is all about. You can read more about the Two Truths in the article below. To go deeper, why not join the Dharma Bundle where you’ll find videos, led meditations and more.

On my radar this week

Book: Jenny Odell’s Saving time - Have you noticed there’s a whole new genre? I’ll call it ‘productivity gets philosophical’. Its mission is to question the whole notion of ‘productivity’ and our relationship with time. The two masters of the genre are Oliver Burkeman and Jenny Odell. I’m not totally aligned with Jenny Odell’s views on life, but boy does she write a good book. Sometimes you buy a book and it’s basically 3 ideas, which could have been a decent article, padded out into a book. Not ‘Saving Time’, this book is packed with thought-provoking ideas and brilliantly written. Like her ‘How to do Nothing’, I’m sure it will become a classic.

Retreat: Nourishing life Retreat - A friend of mine, Andrew Flower, started the idea for this retreat and asked me if I would lead the meditation on it. He’s bringing together several holistic health practitioners to create a 5 day retreat designed to help people with serious or long-term health problems to improve their health and sense of well-being. I’ve been meeting with this beautiful and sincere bunch of people and know how much they want to create something that will not only help in the short term, but will have a long-lasting benefit in people’s lives. If you want to know more about the Nourishing Life retreat, you can drop me a line.

Film: Perfect Days- I’m putting this here as so many of you have made a point of writing to me, telling me I’d love it! I’m desperate to see Perfect Days but it’s only available in the Stockholm cinemas with Swedish subtitles. So, even though I’ve not seen it, I can pretty much guarantee that it’s great! (You all have such good taste).

Video: Guide to the Buddhist path - I’ve gotten to know Aryajit over the last couple of weeks as we are now working together in the Wabi-sabi Workplace. He’s making these amazing animated videos to illustrate all the essential Buddhist teachings. I’m quite a techie myself, but I have no idea how he makes these and am encouraging him to do some ‘behind the scenes’ videos too. Have a look at his Guide to The Buddhist Path series and sign up for his newsletter to find out more.

Diary extracts

Separating my inner creative from my inner critic

I’ve been writing a lot. I’ve never wanted to write or been interested in writing as a craft, but I guess I’ve always had something to say! Now I write these newsletters, blogs, scripts for little videos or meditations and I’ve even made a start on a book.

It’s time to recognise that most of what I do involves writing and that I need some help! I’ve been working my way through Deep Freewriting by Stephen Lloyd Webber, Oliver Burkeman recommended it in his newsletter.

You might know about ‘morning pages’, a kind of freewriting that you do first thing in the morning as a way of emptying your mind. The idea with morning pages is that you don’t look back at them, you are not writing anything to keep. But with ‘Deep Freewriting’ you are using the free writing method in your actual writing.

I’ve found some helpful pointers; separate your inner creative from your inner critic, or in other words, don’t edit while you are in a creative flow; write in order to find out what you want to say; write for long enough to get below the surface; also write when you only have a couple of minutes to spare. The book is a manual on how to make writing easy and enjoyable.

Realisations can only be understood backwards

A realisation recently came into focus. It’s that I now see, in a way that I haven’t before, that everything that’s happened in my life, everything I’ve done, couldn’t have been any other way. I mean, I’ve known that, in theory. I have understood, from a Buddhist perspective, that it is true, using a Buddhist kind of logic. But it’s like that realisation has landed in me.

Like most realisations, it’s experienced as an absence. In this case, an absence of guilt or regret, an absence of worry. There’s a sense of being cleaned out. Someone’s gone through with a broom.

Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” It’s the same with practice. It’s only in retrospect that we see something is different. And then, it’s so easy not to notice the change.

There’s a phenomenon that I call ‘the new normal’, whereby changes are so quickly adapted to that we forget how we were before. Take a moment to think back. Is there anything that no longer happens that used to occur regularly? Something you used to worry about that you don’t now? Or something that annoyed you and no longer does? Celebrate your hard-won freedoms, even if you’re not sure how you won them!

A quote I’m thinking about:

“The meaning of devotion is that again and again we trust that the moment is enough; not under prepared or over prepared, but available. This makes us very soft because we start to trust…There isn't anything to do except move into the situation.”

― James Low, The Mirror of Clear Meaning