Thursday, February 17, 2011

A Week at Padmaloka

Last week I was on retreat at Padmaloka, the retreat centre near Norwich in East England where I lived and worked between 1994 and 2000. I have been back several times since I moved to Berlin and my retreat this time was as ever a joy. There was plenty of meditation and discussion on the topic of the Imagination, raised by a paper by Subhuti, recently circulated among members of the Triratna Order entitled Re-Imagining the Buddha. During the week I also managed to keep up my training schedule and avoided getting ill, with the help of Master Lam's Chi Kung 'cold prevention strategy', which I learnt from his book, The Way of Energy, from which I learnt chi kung several years ago, and was the source of inspiration to practice it over many years. Since learning this form of chi kung incidentally, I stopped having the regular problems with my back, from which I had suffered over many years, probably on account of simply becoming more aware of my body and its movements than I had been before.

Since arriving back home I have had a very full round of meetings and appointments. There has been some excitement at Buddhistisches Tor around the arrival of a film crew from ARD who have been making a documentary for showing in the autumn. While leading the meditation on Sangha evening on Tuesday, which was filmed, I was very aware of the opportunity that unusual experiences give us to experience our responses. Such occasions prevent us from falling into our habitual ways of being and so we more clearly experience the tendencies of the mind, usually tending towards one of the extremes of aversion or desire. Apprently they have been awarded prizes for other documentaries, for example one called "Gut sein auf Probe - Ein Egoist engagiert sich" (Good on test - an egoist commits himself).


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