THE CREATIVE BUDDHIST NEWSLETTER

Dear Subscriber First Name,

Many of you have been on this mailing list for years, and I tend to write as if writing to old friends. But today I thought I’d write to those of you who’ve just signed up recently. Perhaps you are wondering what this newsletter is all about!

I’m Vajradarshini and I run a project called ‘Red Ladder Studio’. If I had to give you an elevator pitch about what I do, it would go like this:

Red Ladder Studio is about bringing Buddhism to life. We bring the teachings to life by understanding them deeply and making them our own, by making them real and relatable. Then we bring those teachings into our everyday lives, into our work and our relationships. Most of us can’t spend all our time on retreat, but then we don’t have to. Each day is full of opportunities to practice. Red Ladder Studio is here to help you make your everyday life your practice.

In my youth, I spent many years living in retreat centres and spiritual communities and gained a lot. But the life I live now offers me as many, if not more, chances to practice. I live with my wife in Stockholm where I have two bonus sons aged 20 and 18. Living in another country, living with kids, sustaining a long-term relationship, keeping up connections with friends and family, earning a living and trying to stay healthy as I age… all of these are little goldmines for practice. I’m sure you have your own list!

If you stick around, I hope Red Ladder Studio can help you make the most of the opportunities for practice in your own life. And if you want to take that practice deeper, consider signing up for the Dharma Bundles below.

The Dharma Bundle

Openness, clarity and sensitivity in everyday life

The new Dharma Bundle has just started and this time it’s super practical, with micro practices that you can weave into your everyday life.

It would be amazing to spend our lives on retreat, or so I sometimes think. But, in reality, some of the best conditions for practice are right here in the messiness of our day to day lives. All we need to do is remember to practice. That’s what the new Dharma Bundle is all about.

Openness, clarity and sensitivity are three inseparable qualities of mind that are always present, they are what we are in the deepest sense, we just have to remember to look for them. Over the next few weeks the Dharma Bundle with help you to do just that.

The Dharma Bundle is a ‘bundle’ of dharma resources, thoughtfully made and beautifully packaged. Short, illustrated Dharma videos and audio talks. Audio meditations and reflections. Creative assignments.

On my radar this week

Podcast: Mindfulness of Death and Dying - Kamalashila is dying. It’s not often you feel you can say that of someone, out loud and without softening the statement. But this is what Kamalashila himself wants us to know. To know and to face. Kamalashila is a friend and a well loved Dharma teacher in Triratna, the order to which I belong. In this candid interview, Mindfulness of Death and Dying, he talks about his life, his death and his relationship with Triratna.

Art Exhibition: Marina Abramovic Retrospective - Late last year, I considered making a trip to the UK just to see this retrospective, but I decided I couldn’t really justify it. So I was happily surprised to see it had moved on to Amsterdam. I only really understood her work from a Dharmic perspective when I heard her interviewed in the Talk Art podcast and it was one of the few podcasts I actually sat down and made notes on. You might not make it to Amsterdam, but if you come on retreat with me in November, I promise to bring along my ‘The Marina Abramovic Method - Instruction Cards to Reboot Your Life’ and we can try out some of her crazy wisdom.

Fiction: Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Gilead’ and ‘Housekeeping’ - I’m reading fiction again. I’d gone right off it. A friend of mine, a writer and lover of fiction, once said, ‘You like reading manuals, don’t you?’ Well, not exactly manuals, but I got what she meant. Books that are explicitly teaching me something. Fiction, of course, teaches you something more elusive: empathy.

Talking with another friend in Amsterdam, she explained how you can’t read fiction in the same way that you read non-fiction. With nonfiction, we’ve developed this technique of ‘scanning the page to extract what we need’. With fiction, this doesn’t work, you have to read every word. So I’ve read every word of Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Gilead’ and almost finished her ‘Housekeeping’. Hit reply and let me know your favourite fiction, I’ve got some catching up to do.

Dharma book: ‘Awake, It’s Your Turn’ by Angelo DiLullo - My morning reading is Angelo DiLullo’s ‘Awake: It’s your turn’. I’m not quite finished with it but the chapters on thoughts, beliefs and emotions are incredibly insightful as well as being helpful in a very down to earth way. Lots of simple pointers and ways of questioning what you think and believe. It’s the sort of book that you want to spend an uninterrupted month with!

Diary extracts:

The innocence of sensory pleasure

I wake up hot on a summer’s night, turn my pillow over and rest my head against the cool side. Bliss! ‘I’ll miss this when I’m gone’, I think. Though perhaps heaven is the eternally cool pillow?

What if it’s the small things that turn out to be the highlights of our lives? Not the big, anticipated, longed for things.

What would they be for you? The smell of bed sheets straight off the washing line, especially if they got caught in a shower of rain. Paddling in the sea after a long hot walk or, conversely, lowering yourself into a hot bath on a wintry day. Listening to the birds sing. Watching the sky change when a storm is coming. Taking a little salt into the greenhouse and eating a warm tomato off the vine.

Some Buddhist texts say we should be ‘guarding the gates of the senses’. But I would argue that most sense pleasure is innocent - perhaps we can even think of it as a safe refuge, a refuge from thinking. Now thoughts, on the other hand, that’s where all the trouble begins!

Making space for anger and sadness

One of the biggest changes I’ve noticed in the last few years of practice is how differently my anger manifests. Some people just don’t do anger. For example, Swedish people. And of course Buddhists. So it’s been interesting to be an angry Buddhist married to a Swede!

My anger used to be colder and last for a lot longer. I could nurse a grievance for weeks. Now it’s more like a flamethrower, quick to fire up, hot, and then gone. Learning how to express it in a way that doesn’t do too much harm takes practice. I try to fully take responsibility for it, naming it, ‘I’m so angry right now’, and containing it. I find it doesn’t help to say, ‘I’m not angry with you’, because I usually am angry with someone or something. But it’s still my anger.

Angelo DiLullo talks of anger as being the guardian of our personal boundaries. When I’m angry, it’s often over something that I really care about. Do we understand that felt anger often does less harm than suppressed anger? Suppressed anger becomes violence. And this violence can take many forms, from wanting to control others to ignoring them. In a podcast with the Christian teacher Ilia Delio, she points out that our obsession with violence, the news stories we love to consume, the murder mysteries we entertain ourselves with, is down to our own suppressed violence.

Sadness too has its place, and when suppressed becomes depression. I tend to think sadness is much more acceptable than anger, but is it? A good friend posted a picture on Instagram in which she wasn’t smiling. In fact, she said she thought she looked sad. I thought she looked amazing. It’s a radical act sometimes, especially as a woman, not to smile.

Have you made enough space for anger and sadness in your life and practice?

A quote I’m thinking about:

“By opening to your actual experience, rather than simply trying to correct or ignore it, you may discoveries that bring about spontaneous change.”

― Rigdzin Shikpo in Openness, Clarity and Sensitivity