Chair's letter May 2021 - Gratitude and 25 years of the NBC

Dear Sangha
I hope to write fairly regular updates, sharing a bit more of my personal practice and my role as Chair at the Nottingham Buddhist centre over the coming months. Please feel free to get in contact with me on chair@nottinghambuddhistcentre.org with any responses.

A week ago I returned from a solitary retreat at Taraloka retreat centre on the border between Wales and Shropshire. It is a very beautiful place and I was fortunate to live there for 10 months in 2013, so it was wonderful to return and especially after our travel being so restricted for the past year. I was also very glad to be sharing the space with Fran from our Sangha, who was doing a solitary retreat at the same time, in the next building. Although we only passed once or twice on a walk during the week, and just said a quick hello when we arrived, it was meaningful to know we were sharing the space that week, both engaging with our practice in those surroundings.

While I was on retreat, I was in contact with a lot of gratitude - waves of it at times, people and memories flooding my mind, meeting the positive emotion I’d been building up on the retreat and leaving me feeling particularly grateful and fortunate for many things in my life. Gratitude is a wonderful emotion in that way, it is expansive and grows with just a little effort. Many of you will have experienced the practice of rejoicing in merits, where we rejoice in each others’ good qualities. These sessions seem to take on an energy and momentum of their own. It reminds me of this wonderful explanation of why we can trust awareness, from Dhammarati, in Dayajoti’s paper:

“I asked Dhammarati why it was that if you apply bare awareness to an unskilful state it diminishes it, whereas if you apply it to a skilful state, it increases it. He explained that this is because an unskilful state is always of the nature of aversion, of resisting experience: so if you apply awareness, you are eroding the resistance which underpins that state. Whereas a skilful state is of the nature of awareness; so that if you apply more awareness, it increases. So we can always trust awareness to take us deeper into skilful mental states; it is naturally progressive.” (Dayajoti, Entering and Deepening in Dhyana v7 March 2017)

I also know that a number of you in the Sangha have encountered and practiced this idea in the form of gratitude diaries - recording daily a list of the things you are grateful for during that day. I often find that once I start, one thing leads to another and it is easy for my mind to open up and see through a lens of gratitude.

I had a few wonderful walks at Taraloka and it was during one walk that I first spotted the seeds of gratitude in my experience - I felt extremely fortunate to have the freedom, health and other conditions in my life which allowed me to be slowly walking down a beautiful canal, with constant birdsong all around and benefitting from the retreat conditions at Taraloka. This was probably heightened by the fact that it was only my third trip out of Nottingham in the past year and of course the first since the lockdown restrictions had eased. Inevitably, when we acknowledge our own good fortune, there is the potential to feel guilt or shame that we have these conditions and others don’t. But in Buddhism the quality of gratitude is encouraged to counteract the unhelpful emotion of guilt and also as a positive quality to develop in it’s own right. It might be that we are also moved into action, as we recognise our own fortunate conditions and position and can make skilful choices and take action from that place.

Once I was in contact with this quality, I began to see more things around me through the gratitude lens - the beautiful grounds at Taraloka, maintained by the community and many volunteers, the new Earth-Sky garden being completed by the builders who have worked with the vision of people at Taraloka to create a beautiful space, the people in my life, friends, family, teachers, who have given me so much in so many ways over the years. I was particularly reflecting on my Dharma life, with such gratitude to all those who have shared their experience, time, energy and much more with me and others over the years. It brought to my mind the fact that the 12th May this year marked 25 years of the Nottingham Buddhist Centre being open. So many people have been part of creating this space and sharing it openly to the people of Nottingham. So much love and care has gone into creating and sustaining the Sangha and the physical building, too many people to name! Do come along to our Sangha night on Weds 19th where we will have some special guests and together will celebrate and mark the 25th Anniversary.

Naturally this gratitude for the Dharma in my life then also grows to take in all those conditions that have led to these people being in a position to create the Nottingham Buddhist centre, including Bhante Sangharakshita for founding the movement, his teachers and so on, all the way back to the Buddha deciding to teach and share his awakened experience for the benefit of the world - the great turning of the wheel of the Dharma.

I did a short gratitude walk at the end of my retreat - walking the grounds of Taraloka, grateful to the land and trees, the people who had maintained it, reflecting on the food I had eaten and the many, many conditions and people needed to bring that into being and in that way, a web of gratitude and interconnection grows. I felt so fortunate and blessed. I also felt inspired to act - to continue working with my own mind and heart and to act as far as possible to create and support the conditions for others to undertake this practice of engaging with our minds and hearts.

With Metta and Gratitude to you all, as we share our lives on this Dharma path,
Kusaladevi
Chair, Nottingham Buddhist centre