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We begin our series ‘In the Shadows’ with a reflective piece, by Mo Henderson, which describes how  fear  can distort reality, and how the practice of meditation brings clarity.

There is a story of someone who walks along a path at night, they see a poisonous snake on the path and, feeling fearful, they turn and run away in the opposite direction. They return along the same path the next morning and find a coiled rope on the ground. In the darkness it was difficult to see reality, but in the light it became clear, it was a rope and not a snake.

For me, this story illustrates how the feeling of fear can manifest when reality is not clear, when it appeared to be a snake in the shadows of night the response was based on the emotion of fear. In a sense this is understandable, waiting around to find the truth may have been dangerous in the dark, if it was indeed a snake!

Perceptions of reality can be distorted by thoughts of pending danger at any time, even when we are not in a life threatening situation. When feeling in danger, the bodies natural stress reaction ‘fight or flight’ can kick in to help protect us, by boosting our strength in order to fight or run away.

Dwelling on things that may not be true and the resulting fear, worry and need to ‘escape’ from a situation can manifest in many ways, including, avoidance of certain people or situations, distractions such as addictions and preoccupation with ruminating thoughts. These things can help us function, however only serve to push unresolved issues further into the hidden depths of mind, rendering us ignorant to what truly needs to be done. When living in our own self created shadow like this, it can be difficult to be aware of our own personal needs and to distinguish them from the needs of others. The energy depleted by this ‘bottled up’ containment of powerful emotions can be exhausting and cause a person to project onto others what is within themselves. For example, blame, gossip, rejection, over exaggerating to appear ‘better’ than we judge ourselves to be and trying to please others to prove our worthiness. Life can then become governed by conditioned habit energy which can divide us from reality.

I believe no one is perfect in being able to always see reality for what it is in every moment of the day. For me, it takes a certain amount of stillness in daily life to do what’s best to do based on reality. Thoughts are good in terms of planning my day, however, if I find myself caught up in over thinking things, I need to question what I’m doing and why? Sometimes I feel ‘stuck’ and it’s usually because I’m too concerned about the thoughts of what has happened or will happen and all the while I can miss what is actually happening in reality. The stillness can bring back some relative harmony, then I can listen and observe how to be with my life and the lives of those around me.

Returning to avoidance and distraction, my particular tendency in the early days of learning to be still in sitting meditation was ‘ workaholism’. I was deeply grateful to learn this, as I was ignorant to this fact before the practice. I began to notice each time a discomforting thought arose, I would feel the need to get off my cushion and start working on something. Now I’m willing to be with uncomfortable thoughts and not feel the need to ‘run’. That’s not to say I feel great about it.

Being with discomfort and suffering in this way has allowed me to accept my own suffering, the mistakes I have made in the past, and to forgive any hurts experienced. I believe this acceptance is a form of love and that going on with learning to be still with one’s own suffering, manifests in being able to be with the suffering of others.

I have noticed accepting the pains of life in a deeper way can also bring space to see the natural joys of life. It feels as though there is still much to be known and to delve deeper into. I wish to keep trying to live in the world doing the best I can and trust this means being aware of the reality of each moment, responding to what comes with the best intentions and being vigilant enough to notice when any habit energy is taking me off course. I guess signs of my own shadows in terms of past loss, sadness, hurts and mistakes may crop up at any time and it’s how I accept and live with everything that truly matters.

I read somewhere these habit energies are like shadows, like thieves entering an empty house, eventually the shadows can’t cause trouble.

Mo Henderson

This week we begin a new series . We are inviting submissions of art, photography, poetry, and other writing on the theme of “In the Shadows”. Images should be sent in jpeg format and writing as a Word.doc. We can also work with Pages, if you are a Mac user. Please send your offerings to us by using the contact form, on the website.

By way of inspiration, here is a poem, by Mary Oliver, which is pertinent to the time in which we live and, as always with Oliver’s writing, ends with hope and wisdom.

 Shadows

by Mary Oliver

Everyone knows the great energies running amok cast
terrible shadows, that each of the so-called
senseless acts has its thread looping
back through the world and into a human heart.
And meanwhile
the gold-trimmed thunder
wanders the sky; the river
may be filling the cellars of the sleeping town.
Cyclone, fire, and their merry cousins
bring us to grief—but these are the hours
with the old wooden-god faces;
we lift them to our shoulders like so many
black coffins, we continue walking
into the future. I don’t mean
there are no bodies in the river,
or bones broken by the wind. I mean
everyone who has heard the lethal train-roar
of the tornado swears there was no mention ever
of any person, or reason—I mean
the waters rise without any plot upon
history, or even geography. Whatever
power of the earth rampages, we turn to it
dazed but anonymous eyes; whatever
the name of the catastrophe, it is never
the opposite of love.

In this week’s post, Mo Henderson explores a state of feeling lost and confused about the state of the world and how the practice of meditation, and being willing to face life as it is, has helped her to both understand and be ready for change when it comes.

People living today may think there never has been such a chaotic mess, such a threatening environment, and with many assumptions/predictions of doom and gloom. The world is a complex place and probably, in a relative sense, always has been. I admit to sometimes feeling lost about the best and least harmful way to live. The discomfort of not serving the world in big and meaningful ways can be overwhelming. Sadness at seeing other human beings struggling for survival in situations of war and poverty can lead to despair and hopelessness and it is easy to get caught up in confusion and indecision when trying to work out how to help.

No one knows what will happen in the future, even what will happen in the next moment! With my logical mind, I can try to discern what is good to do, given all the information, experience, and study available to me. However, I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to practice Zen meditation, just to sit still without trying to think, or not to think, has opened up a sense of being without needing to be over-concerned with deliberation about purpose and goals, particularly about things over which I have no control. Through sitting meditation I am learning to accept ‘not knowing’ with a minimum of assumptions and to see and experience what I may have otherwise missed.

In hindsight, there is sadness about this, especially when I recall past mistakes which I believe were governed by my narrow thoughts and predictions. What is important to me now is to simply ‘show up’ each day with an open mind, without any illusive purpose. This kind of ‘paying attention’ to what exists in life has helped me to hold what I think lightly and to be ready for it to be different.

In Buddhism, this is called ‘beginner’s mind’ to meet life as it is.

‘In beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,
but in the expert’s mind there are few’.

Shunryū Suzuki

This week, Karen Richards writes about her Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) in the second in the series Losing and Lost.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is the feeling of apprehension that one is either not in the know about or missing out on information, events, experiences, or life decisions that could make one’s life better. It was, according to Wikipedia, first identified by a marketing strategist, called Dan Herman, in 1996 and has since been exacerbated by the use of social media. But, the fear of missing or losing out is not a modern phenomenon, though it may have an acronym, now.

I have suffered from a fear of missing out since I was in my early teens. I remember being in awe of the different roads that it was possible to take in life and wanted to take them all!  There were so many subjects that one could study, craft skills that could be acquired, books to be read, and careers that could be had. It caused a sort of existential anxiety that I may die not having experienced all that could be experienced: that I may inadvertently take the wrong path and end up in a dead end, from which I could not escape. I was, passionate and enthusiastic, inquisitive about many things, had a capacity for hard work, and loved to be around interesting people but alongside this passionate enthusiasm was a deep sense of dissatisfaction and an underlying fear that by doing one thing, I was losing out on another.

This often led to me taking jobs that ultimately did not satisfy me and starting projects that I would later abandon, not through boredom but because of a nagging feeling that this was not ‘it’. I remember, at the age of nineteen, when I decided to leave nursing, before completing my training, the Head of the School of Nursing told me, “Nurse, you have the capability, just not the ‘stickability’. How right she was. Ironically, her words ‘stuck’ with me. They helped me to begin questioning why I was not satisfied. So, when I first encountered Buddhism, in my mid-twenties, I was ‘ripe’ to begin discovering, for myself, the root cause of my dissatisfaction, why suffering exists, and how to be still in the midst of it. It takes a lifetime to answer these questions but being willing to meet the fear, head-on is the beginning of understanding.

Like most of us, I have had many challenges in my life, not least of which has been the restrictions that come from being a carer for my invalid husband. As his illness and disability have progressed, both his world and mine have reduced, in the physical sense, to the extent that he is all but housebound and within the house, his world has been reduced to the few meters of space between his bed, the bathroom, and his chair, in the living room. As his carer, this has reduced my world, too. There have been times when that early existential fear of losing out on life has risen within me. The dreams and ambitions of my youth, are still there, in some measure or other. At times, I have been gripped by the claustrophobia of not being able to leave my house and simply walk as long as I wish to, jump on a train, or take a holiday. But this is a distorted view of reality.

Whilst any of these activities can be vehicles for training, they are in no way the goal. They are not the ultimate experience and cannot of themselves bring true satisfaction. The practice of meditation and Buddhist training provides the remedy for existential panic. The medicine for dissatisfaction is to meet life right where it is.

As the late Thich Nhat Hanh has said, ‘The way out is in’.  The reality of this is that no career, hobby, or visit to far-flung countries is as satisfying as the adventure experienced on the journey to meet the True self. The more I get to know myself, the wish to escape lessens and the present moment opens up and offers the True jewel.

This week, we begin a series of posts on the theme of Losing and Lost. Our first contributor is Chris Yeomans who writes about her lived experience of the slow loss that occurs when a partner has Alzheimer’s. It is both moving and relevant.

Alzheimer’s seems to me to be predominantly about loss. And so, to a lesser extent, is old age. I look at myself. I am not that young woman who lived a life decades ago, not the child that young woman once was. And yet of course there is a continuous thread in my brain, and in the brains of those who know me, which are the memories of some of those times. Selective of course. Defective certainly. But there is a certain consistency and some agreement with friends and family that they broadly represent a shared reality.

Dementia disrupts that thread. Memories are simply lost, never to be recovered. And with those memories also some recognition of patterns of behaviour. I behave in the way that I do because I have a memory of how I have behaved in similar situations, that behaviour born of genetics, circumstances, and conditioning. I can modify it to a very small extent, but I am unlikely to be able to change it completely.

The challenge of relating to someone with dementia is that those patterns no longer exist. The brain changes mean that the very person changes and seems no longer to be who they once were. That is loss of course. The loss of a person. Except that it is difficult to accept the grief of the loss because that person is still here. That body/mind continues to live a life, but the brain, which controls all things, has changed. The loved physical manifestation of that person does not now represent quite what it did. And that is a hard thing to get your head around.

I have changed too. I am not that young woman from way back. My body doesn’t do anything like the things it used to do. I am slow. I am stiff. I have lost youth and flexibility. My husband now looks like an old man in ways that he didn’t ten years ago. Change. Loss. The basics of human life.

Change is hard. I find myself caring for someone who is no longer the person that he used to be. That person has changed into someone that I wouldn’t, sometimes, necessarily, find it easy to be with or relate to. And so I have to deal all the time with the question of acceptance. And that too is quite tricky. In relationships, there are lines to be drawn. There are things we can accept and things that we challenge. But in a relationship with someone with an impaired brain, there is no point in trying to challenge, as there can be no learning or changing without memory. The person I live with has changed but is not yet a complete stranger. And even with increased mental impairment, that body will continue to remind me of the person who once engaged with me. It will be hard, I’m sure.

This week, we continue our series on Borders, Boundaries, and Barriers with a very informative and enlightening piece by Mo Henderson, in which she outlines the work of Doctors Without Borders and how we, too, can live without borders.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) which translates to Doctors Without Borders was founded in 1971 in Paris by a group of journalists and doctors. Today, it has grown into a worldwide movement of nearly 68,000 people. They provide medical assistance to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters, or exclusion from healthcare and are bound together by a charter guided by medical ethics and the principles of impartiality, independence, and neutrality. They are a non-profit, self-governed, member-based organisation and members agree to honour their charter principles, these include:

1  Providing assistance to populations in distress.

2 Helping victims of natural or man-made disasters and victims of armed conflict, irrespective of race, religion, creed or political convictions.

3 Having neutrality and impartiality in the name of universal medical ethics and the right to humanitarian assistance and claims to full and unhindered freedom in the exercise of its functions, while respecting their professional code of ethics and maintaining complete independence from all political, economic or religious powers.

4 Finally, as volunteers, members understand the risks and dangers of the missions they carry out and make no claim for themselves or their assigns for any form of compensation other than that which the association might be able to afford them.

I am deeply impressed by people who selflessly offer their service for others in this way, how do they move towards suffering, not knowing what to expect? Individually, they may have all kinds of reasons, but without their help, many would not survive.

Volunteering to go and help others you don’t know must be a particular kind of calling, and not everyone would deliberately seek such work. Those who choose to engage in humanitarian work in difficult conditions, such as war, famine, or natural catastrophe, and who consistently return to those conditions must be blessed by having cultivated specific virtues. For example, courage to take risks,  patience to be with difficult circumstances and the diligence to wholeheartedly be with the process, applying effort and hard work to protect the team and everyone in many different ways, while at the same time not abandoning the humanitarian principles illustrated in their charter.

The faith to do such work without knowing the outcome is essential to carrying on. Having the courage to continue this work is often supported by the reciprocal relationship, which survivors reflect through having their faith in humanity encouraged by experiencing the existence of human kindness, which seeks the good in people and being accepted despite their identity as allies, opponents, race, gender, religion or political convictions.

I never cease to be amazed when I see, on TV, acts of kindness within the most extreme struggles of war. People focusing wholeheartedly on rescue work, holding and hugging those who have lost loved ones and struggling to do the best they can for their families and friends, while all the time surrounded by the horrors of war.

In a sense this humanitarian example is comparable with what the Buddha taught, that suffering exists and there is a way of responding to it with practice in our daily life, the virtues described are not too far removed from the practice we as a community do our best to cultivate. We may not be called to travel to other countries and our daily life may not be so extreme, although relatively speaking we can experience wars of a different kind, where suffering can be created. With practice, our work could be viewed as becoming border less in a way that frees us to take risks, lessens the hold on grasping at identity and helps us to let go of the uncertainties of life. Having faith in the work that comes to us and making decisions to act, or not, needs courage and focus in order to do our best for all, not forgetting ourselves in this process. I don’t doubt the humanitarian work described is well supported by their organisation, educational training, and working teams. Similarly, the Three Treasures of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha are, in our order, an essential foundation in the cultivation of enlightened training.

Thank you to all the helpers, whether it is consciously known or not.
With Bows

We continue our theme of Borders, Boundaries, and Barriers, with a post from Anna Aysea, in which she talks about the borders, or lack of them, between self and others and how this is often experienced.

Walking into a room where there is a tense atmosphere, you can instantly feel the tension without anything being said. This is one of the ways our interconnectedness is manifested.

A newborn child has not yet developed a sense of a separate self and lacks the filters that come with it. A baby is highly sensitive and impressionable and is not yet able to differentiate between self and other. This changes during the process of socialization the child undergoes when growing up.

Due to a combination of predisposition and environmental factors, this high sensitivity can remain intact in adulthood. In that case, there are no filters in place and the emotions of others are experienced as the emotions of the self, that is, the emotions of others are experienced from the first-person perspective.

Up until around my mid-twenties, I believed that I was emotionally unstable. It was a surprise to discover that not all of the experienced emotions originated from this body-mind.

I used to have a recurring dream about doors. In the dream, I have locked all the doors of the house but somehow the locks don’t work and people can just walk in. They can even come in through the walls.

This borderless state where the feelings of others are experienced from the first-person perspective is confusing, to say the least. In the end, it doesn’t really matter where emotions like fear or anxiety are coming from. How you deal with them is the same in all cases: allowing the feelings to arise within the space of awareness, knowing that that space cannot be disturbed by whatever is arising within it.

When you start to notice a correlation between the arising of certain feelings and being in a particular situation, that insight gives you the freedom to walk away from these situations. The lack of filters as symbolized by the dream of the failing locks is less problematic by becoming more and more established in the space of awareness and the freedom that comes from gaining insight into particular situations.

This week, Karen Richards explores the reasons that we have borders and boundaries and what life would be like without them.

My neigbour brought me samosas and birthday cake, left over from a party. We chatted, by my open front door, on a warm September evening. I invited him in and he thanked me but did not cross the threshold.

Instead, we ‘put the world to rights’, on the doorstep. He asked after my husband’s health and I about that of his mother and father.; an exchange of pleasantries. sincerely meant, we turned our talk to food and family, hopes and fears.

He told me he dreamed of a community in which we all came together to pool our resources in a common space, with a commonly shared garden in which to grow things, to sit and take time to talk to one another.  I smiled and said I had the same vision. That, when I look out of the bedroom window, and see the little patchwork squares of garden, each one sectioned off by larch lap fence panels, I sometimes want to rush out and flatten those boundaries to make one great quilt of land; to say, ‘Hey, let’s share this space, arrange it with benches and a communal vegetable plot, flowers beds and a little firepit to sit around, fairy lights and a games area for the kids”. A place to talk and laugh and not be islands, sufficient only to ourselves but to enjoy our oneness and interdependence.

We basked in this possibility for a while, as if we had just discovered something new and achievable but, when I eventually thanked him again for the food and closed the door, I went once more to my bedroom window and gazed on the very different plots of land below me. It was a nice idea but perhaps an unobtainable ideal. For, without boundaries, my wild, cottage-style patch would creep out into next door’s neat, minimalist garden and my energetic lurcher dog would torment Ruby, the cockerpoo, that lives at number 4. Watching the children playing and digging in the dirt would, perhaps, be an idyll to some and an annoyance to others. Would we live in utopian harmony, or would we come to resent that we did not have a space to call our own, unique to us, to express ourselves on our own terms?

Across the globe, there are bigger patches of land, each with its own borders. The inhabitants of these patches mostly live in harmony with those on the other side of the fence and some, sadly, do not. Some share the same space but are so different from one another that finding common ground is difficult. Others see beyond the differences and try to make it work.

Borders and boundaries have their usefulness. There is a protective nature to them that provides us with the privacy and peace to be ourselves. At the same time, they can compound the notion that we are separate from one another, becoming a barrier to seeing life as it truly is and enjoying the fruits of our oneness with all life. It is a lifetime’s work to flatten our own fences and enjoy that oneness. Better to start sooner than later.

I hope you enjoy this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugrAo8wEPiI

This week, we begin a new series of posts on the theme of Borders, Boundaries, and Barriers. Our first post is by Chris Yeomans who writes about the dilemma of knowing when it is good to set boundaries and look to our own needs.

When I saw the headline in a Sunday supplement ‘Ten Ways to Improve Your Life’, I immediately turned to the article. I’m always up for ways of making things better.

The central advice seemed to be to learn to say no, or, as the author put it, to ‘focus on your non-negotiables.’

It sounds so easy. Ring-fence what is important to you and don’t allow others’ demands to impinge on those things. But the reality is that I struggle with this. I struggle to work out exactly what is important to me and whether it is worth making a fuss about. Is it more important to finish something I’m doing, or to go and help my husband sort out his computer muddles? Would it be good to cook something I like for dinner, even while knowing that other members of the family like it less?

Of course, what eventually happens is the build-up of resentment, which results in irritability or bad temper. It is all too easy to think ‘What’s good to do here?’ but to ignore the fact that meeting my own needs might be just as good to do as meeting the needs of other people.

Then there is “Do the next thing’ or ‘Do the work that comes to you.’ And this encouragement seems so often to be calling upon me to be endlessly unselfish and compassionate and to set my own needs and wishes aside. Because when I look at them closely, often what I want doesn’t really seem to matter that much. It doesn’t much matter what I eat, if my television programme is turned off or if I am interrupted in a task. In the big picture, none of it is really that important. Or is it?

So then we come to boundaries. I’m not sure that I’m terribly good at keeping my boundaries. I try so hard to be accepting, to be tolerant, to work on my ‘opinions’, to try not to have expectations. These are all good to do, of course. These are all fundamental to our practice.

But sometimes, perhaps I could reflect that, in order to be able to keep on giving out and doing things for others, I need occasionally to do things for myself. To feed my soul maybe. To give myself the strength to keep on keeping on. “Always going on beyond…’