Newsletter 25

Winter/Spring 2006

NEWS FROM THE STEERING GROUP

Welcome to Southern Insights winter/spring newsletter. It certainly is a winter to remember too. Driving down South about three weeks ago I took the chance to see what our standard retreat venue - Staveley Camp looked like under its blanket of snow. Picturesque certainly but it did remind me why we long ago decided to hold our Queens Birthday Retreats at the Governors Bay Vicarage! Even so it can be hard to summon the courage to go on retreat at the bleakest time of the year. But thanks to the gentle wisdom and warming energy that our teacher Jeremy Logan brings to these retreats this is always a rewarding experience for yogis.

Our next retreat will once again be at Staveley and will be a chance for a spring clean of our bodies and minds. Once again high recommendations for the upcoming retreat with international teacher Shaila Tromovitch. Shaila will also be speaking at the meditation group on the Wednesday evening prior to the retreat.

People are still asking for our retreat recipes, and you may have heard James Jamieson on National Radio raving to Kim Hill about our (now famous) Lemon Dhal. You never know just what you are going to take away from a retreat! We would like to encourage you, the sangha, to participate in this publication, so we have introduced a new feature - a section for your community notices.

This newsletter also has some great personal articles by yogis about their meditation practice and what lures them into going on retreats, and we would love to hear about your retreat experiences. And if you would like to write a book review or happen across any dharma-related articles or poetry that are suitable for publication please send them in.

Finally, wed like to draw your attention to two family-inclusive social events coming up in August and November see you there! Enjoy. If you would like to contribute something for the next newsletter please email it to angulijulie@gmail.com

An interviewer asked Mother Teresa what she says to God when she prays. "I don't say anything. I just listen." So the interviewer asked her what God says to her. "He doesn't say anything, said Mother Teresa. "He just listens." And before the astonished interviewer could press her further, she added, "And if you don't understand that, I can't explain it to you."

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SOCIAL EVENTS

Saturday 26th August Pot Luck family dinner - Please come and join the extended Sangha for a vegetarian pot luck dinner and games evening starting at 5.30pm Kids very welcome! Peterborough Housing Coop Community Room 173 Peterborough St.

Saturday 5th November Family and Friends Picnic - Bring a picnic to share and games to play! 12 noon, South Brighton Domain

Wednesday Evening Dharma Talks Every third Wednesday of the month teachings are offered on the practice of insight meditation. These are held at Ferndale school, 104 Merivale Lane, off Papanui Road). The evening, which includes a guided meditation, starts at 7.30pm and runs until 9.15pm. All are welcome.Donations are collected for the teacher and the hire of the room.

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SOUTHERN INSIGHT COMMUNITY NOTICE BOARD

This is a space in our newsletter for dharma related notices: looking for a sitting group to join in your area? Or a flatmate keen on sharing meditation practice? Or someone to share travel to a retreat centre? put your notice here to go out to the wider Southern Insight community. Newsletter items to be sent to angulijulie@gmail.com . Note newsletters go out three times a year (in August, November, April).

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COOKERY CORNER

LEMON DHAL (for ten people):

Fry onions and mustard seed, then add lentils and 7 C water, soy sauce, curry paste, black pepper.

Liquidise entire lemons (chopped first) in food processor add some of the remaining water to help liquidise fully.Add lemon mix and remainder of water to lentil mix.

Boil until the dhal thickens, stirring constantly (burns easily).Add tomato paste.Serve with papadoms, rice, mango chutney, yoghurt, steamed veges and lettuce salad.

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MY FIRST RETREAT

'A week without talking, reading or writing? You'll never do it, Christine.' That was my friend's opinion of how chatterbox, bookworm, scribbler me would cope with a long, silent meditation retreat.

Going on my first retreat (which was also my first introduction to meditation) I was somewhat apprehensive that they might be right. The talking wasn't a problem because I am as happy with my own company as I am with that of others. However that's because I mostly spend my many solitary hours reading, for work or for pleasure, and often both at once. I have been doing this for decades, so going without it was more of a worry to me. Could I really go cold turkey? And why would I want to, anyway? What good would it serve? How would I learn if I couldn't read, or talk? What was this knowledge that wasn't in books, or words, anyway?

I wasn't at all sure, but I was prepared to give it a go. Since my Mum always said ''If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing well'' I took just one book (I get nervous in places without books), and a small notepad. I didn't open the book, and the notepad was only used for writing a letter to the friend who first gave me the idea that meditation might be a worthwhile thing to do. The friend I met at the end of one of the most stressful years of my life, who left me with a palpable sense of peace. How did he do that? Could it have something to do with the fact that he had spent 11 years as a meditating monk?

So do thousands of other Thai men - it is part of their culture. It is not part of mine so would it work for a Kiwi sheila? As serendipity would have it, Southern Insight Meditation gave me the opportunity to find out just a few months after I met Pracha. Not that I had a clue that the ''Stillness in Action'' retreat I enrolled to go on would teach me the original and essential Vipassana meditation, since I had still to learn what this meant. It was sheer accident or was it? - that I came to the right people at the right time in my life.

The place for the retreat was Staveley, which I vaguely remembered from Bible Class camp days thirty years before. There were new buildings, but the 'wash your own dishes' drill was the same. So was the mountain beech wood, reverberating with bees making honeydew honey. On a path in that wood I did my first walking meditation, my first unfamiliar slow pacing to and fro along a six or seven metre length. As I walked, a weight I had been carrying in my heart for a long time fell away, as I came to realise how much of it I had constructed for myself, and how I could therefore let it go.

It was not fixed; I was not bound by it. Thus I experienced for the first time one of the most profound (and positive) effects of meditation. Sitting or walking in awareness, we see the parade of thoughts and feelings come into being and consciousness, and as we learn to simply watch them, without trying to embrace or avoid them, without turning them into imaginative narratives, but just knowing them for the transitory phenomena that they are, we learn how to distinguish illusion from reality. This is good in itself, and (in my case, at least) it is accompanied by a wonderfully light sense of freedom.

Now I have a photo of that path in the wood (taken on my most recent retreat there, in January 2006) above my computer, along with the words of an 11th century (Benedictine) monk - ''She is always intent on her goal: to rest in her wonder-place of freedom.'' It's a good reminder, a wake-up call, for the hours and days when I am more mindless than mindful. As I was on my first retreat and (truth be told) on most of them since then. When there is nothing to do but meditate, when one isn't 'free' to move away from what one dislikes and towards what one likes, an awful lot of time and effort goes into mental distractionary activity of the worst kind. If I had a dollar for every minute I have spent admiring other people's meditation shawls, and wondering where I could get one of my own (or latterly, one better than my own) my donations to the retreat leaders would be extravagantly generous.

But at this point in my meditation practice I measure success in minutes of mindfulness, not hours; and in practising regularly, if not always well. Over the five years since that first retreat I have experienced many benefits from meditation, and I know there are many to come.

A-nother yogi

You can search the whole world for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anyone in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
~ the Buddha

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The Joy of Mindfulness: Summer retreat 2006 with Finlay Gilmour

Perched at folding table surrounded by the detritus indicating final stages of moving house is not how I imagined preparing this piece, but procrastination and deadlines inevitably collide.

I could sit in the sun and eat another apple. Or would a banana be good? Maybe someones sent an email since I started this?

Last spring in this newsletter, a yogi (is that A.Yogi? Arthur?) quoted teacher Subhana, A retreat is a treat. That convincing little column was largely responsible for me finding myself unpacking the car on a blistering hot Sunday some months later at Stavely Camp.

Feeling somewhat dilettantish about my forays into meditation over a period of many years, it was challenging to keep the negative thoughts at bay, Maybe getting close to sixtyish is a bit late for all this for a cranky old bachelor accustomed to his own space!

Hmmm.

Some friendly faces, kind smiles, lubricated those first awkward hours, then suddenly its later, and Im walking out into the warm night with a mind of joyfulness, I hadnt expected LAUGHING to be a major part of the curriculum! Or is this so-called former monk in fact Clive James up to one of his tricks?

Happy! A palpable sense of peace in this still forest setting.

My beloved is the mountains,
solitary wooded valleys
strange islands,
silent music.
St John of the Cross.

This is the sole entry in the diary taken with the intention of keeping a daily record throughout the retreat, in its entirety:

Sat Feb 4 2006. 2.10pm*just completed my after lunch walk, on this final full retreat day, and with 20 minutes to go before yoga, with Annaliese (breathing! For me I expect), and I thought I must break the silence so to speak, to pick up my diary and write a few words.

The whole experience has been a great gift. Such a lovely forest spot, and blazing hot for the first few days, then cooler, some rain, its cooler and cloudy today. Hard work! Slogging away, lost in a sea of torpor! A bit of a breakthrough for a while yesterday, then today, following a suggestion of Finlays at last evenings dharma talk, I decided to devote todays practice to Dad, (my father died as a result of an accident a few years ago)- and REALLY work hard. I must never forget the loving joyfulness of this mornings meditations. Even if I have to hammer my head against a brick wall for the rest of the retreat, the experience brought back meditation for me so strongly, and lovingly. Its a funny thing, however good the experience, there is always the craving to move on `-Get away!! Its just part of the craving of becoming. Although, I couldnt bear to take myself out of meditation this morning. Funny how the body just looks after itself effortlessly at that point- I felt I could sit for hours!

This experience has just been lovely, good, and wholesome, with some other wonderful oddball characters of course. My big opportunity to take a hugely significant positive step in my life AND I got the recipe for LEMON DHAL.
A yogi 2

Two Giant Fat People
Hafiz

God
and I have become
like two giant fat people
living in a tiny
boat.

We
keep bumping into
each other
and
laughing.

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Seven Tips for Giving Up Gossip

By Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron , from Tricycle Summer 2006

  1. Recognise that gossip doesnt undo the situation youre talking about. It only puts in motion another situation based on negative feelings.
  2. Know that comparing yourself to others is useless. Everyone has his or her own talents. In this way, give up jealousy and the wish to put others down.
  3. Be aware of and transform your own thoughts, words, and deeds rather than commenting on those of others.
  4. Train your mind to see others' positive qualities and discuss them. This will make you much happier than gossiping ever could.
  5. Forgive, knowing that people do harmful things because they are unhappy. If you dont make someone in to an enemy, you dont want to gossip about them.
  6. Have a sense of humour about what you think, say, and do, and be able to laugh at all the silly things we sentient beings carry out in our attempt to be happy. If you see the humour in our human predicament, youll be more patient.
  7. Practice saying something kind to someone every day. Do this especially with people you dont like. It gets easier with practice and bears surprisingly good results.

A Vase
By Rabia

I am always holding a priceless vase in my hands.
If you asked me about the deeper truths
of the path and I told you
the answers,

it would be handing sacred relics to you.
But most have their hands tied
behind their
backs;

that is, most are not free of events their eyes have seen

and their ears have heard

and their bodies have felt.

Most cannot focus their abilities
in the present, and
might drop what
I said.

So Ill wait; I dont mind waiting until
your love for all
makes luminous
the now.

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THE COMMUNITY OF YOU

You think you're alone in that body of yours. Oh, but you're not alone, not by a long shot. You've got company. Not just a few guests, you've got a few BILLION guests. And I'm not talking about the few billion people on the planet - I'm talking about the few billion microscopic life forms that inhabit your very body. Do you feel like an independent, do-it-yourself kind of person? Well you may want to revise that idea as well, because the overwhelming majority of these critters are beneficial to your healthy existence, and many are vital. You are not alone.

I was fascinated to read about this in an Indian newspaper. The genesis was a book written in 1969 by Theodor Rosebury, "Life on Man." By the time we reach adulthood we may have an astonishing 50 TRILLION microbes (and 1,000 different species) in and on our body, gleefully inhabiting our darkest and most personal body-bits, where we wouldn't normally consider entertaining a crowd.

You've probably heard of the earth described as Gaia, as a sort of living organism, and not the individual bits and bobs that we typically think of. I always thought that was a stretch, but look at the parallels to our body and its microbes. Your armpit is a Gaia all of its own, whether you include the rest of your body or the rest of the planet. Up to an incredible 90% of the combined cells of this amalgam we call a body are bacteria. Our vision of our cherished self probably doesn't include this bacteria that make life possible. But shouldn't it? Theodor Rosebury put it, "All life is a single community." And gene experts at Genomic Research claim that we are not entirely human, but "truly symbiotic organisms, relying on one another for life itself."

Where is this "separate self" that we spend most of our lives defending? If we believe in a self, shouldn't we know where it begins and ends? I ate porridge this morning with a mango cut up in it. As of yesterday, I'd never met this mango before. Now, that mango is not separate from me - it is me. Yesterday it was clearly not me, and today it IS me. How does that work?
Dave Adair

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A TOUR OF THE LIBRARY

(these books are held by Southern Insight at Ferndale School,
Christchurch)

What the Buddha Taught
Walpola Rahula
A comprehensive and easy to understand compilation of the Buddhas
teachings.

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, the
Experience
of Insight
Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein
Excellent instruction for beginners and experienced alike,
thought-provoking
and inspiring.

Lovingkindness & A Heart as Wide as the World
Sharon Salzberg
Classic guides to the practice of lovingkindness from the accepted
western
expert.

The Fear Book, The Depression Book Cheri Huber
The Zen Path Through Depression
Philip Martin
For anyone currently struggling with life, these very readable and
immensely
helpful books will appeal.

The Faith to Doubt, Buddhism Beyond Beliefs, Verses from the Centre
Stephen Batchelor
Scholarly and refreshing wisdom from a controversial and unorthodox
teacher.

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Why I wake early

By Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows, of even, the
miserable and the crotchety

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light-
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch now how I start the day
In hapiness, in kindness.

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Wednesday Evening Dharma Talks

Every third Wednesday of the month teachings are offered on the practice of insight meditation.  These are held at Ferndale school, 104 Merivale Lane, off Papanui Road).  The evening, which includes a guided meditation, starts at 7.30pm and runs until 9.15pm.  Donations are collected for the teacher and the hire of the room. All are welcome.

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Booking procedures

Please phone Paul on 381 0444 for a retreat registration form.  The completed form and a deposit of $50.00 should be sent to 6 Trent Street, Christchurch.

Please make cheques payable to Southern Insight Meditation.  Stamped addressed envelopes are appreciated when booking.  Further information will be sent to you on receipt of your deposit.

Refunds of deposits.

The deposit for retreats is refundable up to the closing date of the retreat booked, less a $5.00 charge for administration costs.  Deposits cannot be refunded after the retreat closing date, and the money will be put into the Top-Up Fund.

Top-Up Fund

The top-up fund is for those who are unable to afford the cost of a retreat.  Southern Insight aims to make retreats as accessible as possible to all, consequently it is possible to pay less than the lower amount in the sliding scale for a retreat.  We encourage people to make use of this fund, which thanks to the generosity of others who attend our retreats, is currently in a healthy state.

Contact Addresses for Southern Insight

E-mail: southern.insight.meditation@xtra.co.nz

Post:16 Ward Street, Christchurch

Website:http://insight.orcon.net.nz

Useful phone numbers:

If you would like to ask about our retreats, sitting days, or would like some general information about the group and insight meditation (including lots of opportunities to help with our work) the following are phone numbers from the Steering group – all of whom would be happy to talk with you:

 

Meditation Group at Diamond Harbour
Tuesdays 7.30pm
Phone or email for directions: Christine 03 329 4067
christine.dann@clear.net.nz

God be in my head, and in my understanding.
God be in my eyes, and in my looking.
God be in my mouth, and in my speaking.
God be in my heart, and in my thinking.
God be at my end, and at my departing.

~ Sarum Primer

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TO RECIEVE THIS NEWSLETTER

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Write 'SUBSCRIBER' in the subject box.

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