This is the talk I wrote as an introduction for those taking part in the International Urban Retreat (www.theurbanretreat.org) at Bristol Buddhist Centre from Saturday 20-27 June 2009.

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
Things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen: people get hurt
Or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

William Stafford.

Even before I knew there was such a thing as an Urban Retreat, I wanted to do one. I wanted to live that way. To live, being in touch with the real thread of my life…. The golden thread that I found when I first glimpsed the Dharma over 25 years ago now and which I want to follow for the rest of my life, no matter what.

This is “life with full attention”… a way of living that is really, truly alive, aware, kind.

{This was why I spent six years working in a Wholefood Shop by a flyover in Croydon, but that – as they say – is another story…….}

The Urban Retreat is about Following the thread…

It’s not easy to follow this thread – a thread that we’ve all come into contact with, whether we’re aware of it or not… but it’s not difficult either. We simple have to practise mindfulness, to come back again and again to what is important and to re-establish a heart connection with that again and again. And our Urban Retreat is about exactly that – about saying “right, I’m going to take this week of my ordinary life and turn it into a retreat”… in a way it’s still ordinary, but in another way it’s extra-ordinary… and we could live like that all the time, if we chose, but it takes quite a bit of practice to do that… so it’s good to begin with a week, in company with other people here and across the world and just see what happens, if you really give yourself to your practice during this week. To really explore and practice mindfulness and see what happens


It could be a turning point in your life…

I was looking at the website of the other Centres who‘re running Urban Retreats the other night, and one of them was the Sheffield Buddhist Centre, which is where the idea of Urban Retreat in our movement first started. I was struck by the fact that they said…

“This is for some a turning point in their lives. You decide what you want to do to make the coming week a focus for practice while going about your usual routine. Particularly for those who find it difficult to get away on retreat, and who want to make their everyday life a crucible for change.”

I loved that. I love the idea that we can choose to make our everyday lives the context for the most extraordinary unfolding of our potential… if only we set up the conditions and stick with our intentions…

We connect with the “thread” when we glimpse the Dharma…

So, going back to the “thread” image… When I say “we’ve all come into contact with this thread”, what I mean is that we’ve had a glimpse of the Dharma which has affected not just our minds but our hearts as well and which has led us to some kind of action, to some kind of following…which has led us to do something – even if the something is simply chosing to come along to the Buddhist Centre for the first time and then to come back – like today, when we could have been shopping or mowing the lawn or tidying up our sock drawer….
There are many ways of approaching and describing mindfulness and, as this talk is short, I’m just going to draw out two which are my favourites this morning:

The first is to do with aesthetic appreciation

The second is to do with continuity of purpose.

There are posh Buddhist words for both these two and I like that. I like the fact that there is a root in the Buddhist tradition to which my threads of inspiration and practice connect.


Aesthetic Appreciation – seeing the “golden-ness of the thread”

Aesthetic appreciation is something we can practice – noticing things and becoming aware of their intrinsic beauty… There is a Sanskrit word, – vidya – which is sometimes translated as wisdom which has what I think of as a richer, more helpful translation, which is aesthetic appreciative understanding…. And the reason why this is relevant to us starting our Urban Retreat today is that aesthetic appreciation is something which is available right here, right now to us at ANY point… we simply need to remember that. Look around at any moment and you can find something to appreciate… it might be the way the sunlight comes through the window, and falls on the shrine at a particular time of day, it could be appreciating the sensation of washing your hands with soap in warm water, it could be the sudden sound of a blackbird. A few months ago I came out of my flat after meditating one morning and I was almost transfixed by the beauty of a pile of rusty old scaffolding on a truck outside our side gate…. All really ordinary things… things that are there around us all the time, tho’ we often don’t notice them. And to some extent we’ve probably all realised that these moments of aesthetic appreciation happen more often when we’ve been meditating – and especially if we’ve been meditating on retreat…. The dandelions are brighter after a few days on retreat… I’m sure you can bring to mind a moment when you suddenly really saw and appreciated the beauty of something utterly ordinary.

The thread of aesthetic appreciation can lead to wisdom…

And it’s very important not to underestimate the importance of these little moments of aesthetic appreciation which are mindfulness.. They are a tiny blossoming of awareness, they are the end of the golden thread which leads to wisdom, to aesthetic appreciative understanding of the world…. The poet, William Stafford wrote about this in relation to the art of writing… and what he said is very relevant to the practice of mindfulness. “He believed that whenever you set a detail down in language, it became the end of a thread… and every detail – the sound of the lawn mower, the memory of your father’s hands, a crack you once heard in lake ice, the jogger hurtling herself past your window – will lead to amazing riches.” [the poet Robert Bly, talking about Stafford and the golden thread]

The origin of Stafford’s thread image is back with the English poet, William Blake, who wrote the famous lines

I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

Now I know that talk of Heaven and Jerusalem makes it all sound very Christian and might put some people off, but the image of the golden thread also works brilliantly as a way of understanding how mindfulness can lead us to wisdom.

So I’ve talked about the importance of mindfulness in terms of aesthetic appreciation and how it’s something that comes from the utterly ordinary fabric of our every day existence. I suppose, to extend the image, I’m talking about us catching a glimpse of the glimmer of gold and being drawn towards it, being drawn into being present for that moment when we really see and appreciate the rusty scaffolding in the truck….

Continuity of Purpose – the “thread-ness of the thread”

The second aspect of mindfulness which I wanted to talk about is what I described as “continuity of purpose” or recollection. You could see this is as the “thread-ness” of the thread… there’s the gold-ness of the thread and then there’s the thread-ness… the fact that it leads somewhere, if you choose to follow it.

Bhante Sangharakshita talks about “continuity of purpose” in his book on the Noble Eightfold Path and the posh Sanskrit word for this aspect of mindfulness is samprajanya.. which does literally translate as “mindfulness of purpose” (and there’s another word for it, which is smrti or “recollection“). And I love this passage where he describes the opposite of samprajanya: [Vision and Transformation, p 133]

“Suppose, then, that you are writing a letter, an urgent letter that is imperative should go off by the next post. But as so often happens in modern life the telephone rings, and it is some friends of yours wanting a little chat. Before you know where you are you are involved in quite a lengthy conversation. You go on chatting maybe for half an our, and eventually, the conversation completed, you put down the phone. You have talked about so many things with your friend that you have quite forgotten about the letter, and you have talked for such a long while that you suddenly feel quite thirsty. So you wander into the kitchen and put the kettle on for a cup o tea. Waiting for the kettle to boil you hear a pleasant sound coming through the wall from next door, and realizing it is the radio you think you might as well listen to it. You therefore nip into the next room, switch on the radio, and start listening to the tune. F After that tune is finished there comes another, and you listen to that too. In this way more time passes, and of course you’ve forgotten all about your boiling kettle. Whilst you are in the midst of this daze, or trance-like state, there is a knock at the door. A friend has called to see you. Since you are glad to see him you make him welcome. The two of you sit down together for a chat, and in due course you offer him a cup of tea. You go into the kitchen and find it full of steam. Then you remember that you had put the kettle on some time ago, and that makes you remember your letter. But now it is too late. You have missed the post.”

Bhante says that he uses this example of un-mindfulness because we’re more familiar with un-mindfulness than we are with mindfulness… and it’s easy to see the threads that didn’t get followed in this example! This week is the opportunity to practise the opposite….

In his book “Know Your Mind” Bhante writes: “As a spiritual practice, recollection may be said to be about remembering what is really important, what life is really about and what one is really supposed to be doing. ‘Why am I here? What I am I doing this for?’ Recollection is often about waking up to the fact that one has strayed away from where one really wants to be.” (p108)

For myself, I know that I am happiest, most aware, most able to be present and to give of my best when I’m in touch with what’s most important to me, in terms of overall purpose, and at the same time when I‘m feeling very present, very “in my body“, aware of myself. There’s an almost physical sensation of energy coming together at such times.


Being Really Alive

There’s a great talk on the Urban Retreat website by Maitreyabandhu from the London Buddhist Centre – he was one of my very first teachers when I first got involved in 1993. His talk is called “Life with Full Attention” and he’s also written a book – we’ve got part of it as a free hand out for this retreat. I’d really recommend this talk, it’s only about half and hour and he manages to say a lot in it, in a very engaging way which I think is both deep and witty.

The main point he makes at the beginning is that mindfulness is about LIVING, it’s about being REALLY ALIVE, alive in your experience, not letting it all just drift past and then you’re dead. He says the whole of Buddhism is about moving from being less alive to being more alive, which I really loved. I loved it because it spoke to me of those moments we’ve all had, which are there all the time if we can only remember to set up the conditions to become aware of them – to meditate, to slow down a bit, to remember to breathe, to become aware of our bodies, to let go of the millions of things which distract us from being present….

I’m always quoting this Mary Oliver poem, which I know is a favourite of Jvalamalini’s too, and I’m not going to to resist the opportunity to quote it again here (because, after all “non-repetition is the canker of the spiritual life”!)

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver

Conclusion

And that brings me right back to why I feel so passionately about things like being on this Urban Retreat, because we can do it, right here, right now. We can help ourselves and each other in very do-able, practical ways to become more and more alive and aware.

We’ve got a whole week.

We’ve got a plan.

We’ve got each other

We’ve got a whole host of resources

All we need to do is to begin!

We’re going to have a 20-minute teabreak next, so you can make a start right there are and then… become aware of your body as you get up and moving about, noticing your breathing. When you get your tea, see if you can really notice drinking it and enjoy it….

Then we’ll gather in the reception room for a practical workshop to start to identify what we can actually do to start to live “Life with full attention” – we can look at what prevents us being mindful, as well as what helps and hopefully, by the end of it, you’ll start to have to some ideas for specific things you might undertake to do (or NOT to do!) during the next week on retreat together…..