Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte takes us again into the lives and practices of members of the Triratna Buddhist Order. Here Lokabhandhu shares and#8220;My Life, Work and Practiceand#8221; from the series of short talks given for the and#8220;Triratna (FWBO) International Urban Retreat of 2009. In his talk he reviews his daily meditation practice, the challenges thrown up by working on his own at home, and his fascination with other spiritual teachers and paths.
Lokabandhu lives in Glastonbury, UK, where he works for the Triratna Buddhist Communityand#8217;s and#8216;Development Teamand#8217;.
Join us for the 2011 International Urban Retreat: www.theurbanretreat.org
[Music] Dharma Vites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you, and happy listening. Hello, my name is Le Corbendu and I'm going to be talking for a few minutes about my life and practice because I'm one of the people participating in the upcoming FWBO Urban Retreat. I've been ordained as a member of the Western Buddhist Order for about 19 years now. I've been very happy with that and worked for the FWBO pretty much all of that time and never felt any special desire to go elsewhere. Actually, I've done many different things over the last 19 years, but pretty much all for the and within the FWBO. At the moment, I live in a small town in Somerset, England. I live in the town of Glastonbury and I've lived here the last two years very happily. I'll say a bit more about that further on. My work is full-time working for the FWBO. I work in a small team called the FWBO Development Team and my special work is running various websites that we have. I do FWBO news, I do a resource website for the people running FWBO centres and I do internet fundraising. I'm very fortunate. I could live pretty much anywhere in the world, but I've chosen to come and live here in Glastonbury, England. There's three things I want to talk about. One is my daily practice, just to let you know what I do. One is a little bit about why I chose to live in Glastonbury and one is something on the kind of challenges I work with in my practice and maybe the opportunities that come up for me as well. So I'll start off with my daily practice. I'm very similar to many of us, I imagine. I get up in the morning. It's not always easy, but I get up sooner or later. Go downstairs, have a cup of coffee and then go and meditate. I personally love to meditate outside, so I always do that. I've got a small meditation platform in the garden and I sit there first thing in the morning. I love it because I get the sound of the birds, the touch of the breeze and just a sense of space that comes from being outside. It's not entirely pleasant because next door to us, the garden, the people next door have six enormous dogs and so you get the scent of strong dog shit wafting over the wall quite often in the mornings. It's a funny sort of way I find that feeds into my practice and the general territory of reflecting on the unsatisfactoriness of Sanxara, that kind of thing. But basically I love meditating in the open air. What I do specifically is sit myself down and then chance to myself the refuges and precepts, including the positive precepts and also a few vows that I've always done pretty much ever since I got ordained, just my aspirations to practice for the benefit of all. Then I go on to my meditation. I do a kind of blend and I suspect a lot of us, you know, who haven't got our own personal formulae in one way or another. I do a little blend of some mindfulness, some metabolic and then my sadhana or visualization practice and I move on between those three kind of as and when I feel ready to. And I do the mindfulness in the meta pretty much just as we are taught in the movement, although moving between the stages may be more flexibly, I don't know. The sadhana that I do is Vajrasattva and I do that almost entirely by visualizing the blue sky, that kind of sense of infinite space and perspective and then reciting the mantra and just trying to connect with what you might call the energy of Vajrasattva, but also visualizing his Vajra and his bell. Those are two very rich symbols for me. So then I finish my meditation practice in the mornings by reciting again to myself the Transference of Merit and Self-Surrender from the 74 Puja and then again a final few more personal verses I wrote a long time ago. So I've done that formula for years now, but it pretty much just continues to suit me. It just sets me up for the day, connects me with what matters to me and then on I go and lead the rest of my day. I'm very fortunate in my day because as I said I work for the movement and that gives me enormous flexibility in how I work. I can work any time of the day or night, I can work any day of the week or weekend and if necessary I can travel and work anywhere in the world as long as it's got internet access. So that gives me enormous flexibility which I very much love, but it also presents me with certain challenges that I have to kind of take my practice into if you see what I mean. So one challenge is that it's difficult to know when to stop. There's no clear boundaries in my work and I need to make the boundaries if I'm not going to be perpetually half working or perpetually half on holiday. Anyway, before I want to talk about that I want to talk a little bit about me and Glastonbury and why I chose to come and live here. Glastonbury is unusual in many ways, but for one not so unusual thing, it just doesn't have enough WBO centre. So when I came here I was leaving the Sangha so to speak and coming to live where there wasn't a Sangha. And I must say I did that very consciously for a couple of reasons, partly because I knew it would give me the flexibility if I wanted to start my own group and in fact that's what I've done and now we do actually have a nice little Sangha down here. The second thing was I wanted a kind of space in my life to go out there and just meet other people leading other lives and other spiritual paths in other ways. And Glastonbury is unique in that it's absolutely full of people leading spiritual paths of every shape and size you could imagine. My personal image for the town is like a nose ark, a kind of nose ark of spirituality. There's just two, a couple of people of every persuasion you could imagine. And I've always had the love of just kind of dipping my toe into other paths and other practices just to see how people do it. It's not that I want to leave the FWA or leave Buddhism, I'm just constantly curious and I feel there's so much we can learn from each other and kind of we've all got our strengths and all got our weaknesses. And if you do it right you can just enrich the Sangha by bringing things back into it. So I'll talk a little bit now about how I work with the kind of challenges my lifestyle and work throw up. I've already mentioned one which is the need to kind of set my own boundaries because they don't come automatically with my life from work. Another one is it's very much up to me what I do day by day and so I find I need to concentrate quite a lot in the mornings on just mindfulness of purpose. What exactly am I setting out to do today? And if I didn't do that nobody does it and if I don't do it then the days just get frittered away kind of tidying paper clips or clicking on emails or whatever. So mindfulness of purpose is very important for me. Obviously interruptions come in like they do in any job but the practice there is to notice them, attend to them and then come back to my purpose once they've been dealt with. So second challenge comes up for me slightly differently is the whole business of travelling. I moved to Glastonbury in order to consciously get involved in the local community as I've already mentioned but through my work I'm always travelling every week or every two weeks I'm away. And I have found that really painful to be constantly uprooting myself from a community where I'm starting to put down roots. And that's felt like a koan to me. It's felt like a real challenge in my whole life with no easy answers except to somehow transcend it onto a higher level. It's not really possible not to travel and it's not really possible to pretend I don't mind travelling. And it's slowly getting easier over time maybe as I feel more established in Glastonbury and it doesn't matter whether I'm here or not. But one practice I found very helpful in that is just remembering that my entire life is my choice. So maybe in a sense I don't have a choice to go off to this particular meeting but in a wider picture I do have a choice that I chose this lifestyle, this job of work and this place to live and it's just part of the package. So I call that maintaining what you might call a point of freedom. I think that's one of Benty's phrases. And that stands for me very good stead as I'm forced to do things in a way I just don't want to do. In some sense I have chosen them. So the third thing I find is an awful lot of work is on the computer and on computer it's very easy to get absorbed in it and then difficult to come out of it and pay attention to people. So an important part of my practice is making sure I always make time for people. And very often people being who they are sort of turn up unexpectedly and you could easily experience them as interruptions. But my practice is to not ever treat people as interruptions but treat people as who really matters which I sort of know but just kind of making that a real knowing in the moment when you could get into it. When you could get irritated through an interruption but actually they're your friends or they need something from you and it's much much better to respond. So that's grown for me as I've been here longer in Glastonbury, got more and more friends, started a group, got a small sangha and quite a rich social life. So it's my 10 minutes, I better finish. Just to say I feel consistently fulfilled and grateful and even blessed in my life here in Glastonbury and in my work for the FWBO. I take the light in the movement, I take the light in Glastonbury and I just take the light in the rich possibilities afforded us by the Darima. Male beings be well, male beings be happy, this is like a bandhu over and out. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music] [music] [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
