Satya Robyn reflects on a talk given at Buddhafield Festival about personal needs for appreciation, Embodied Relational Therapy, gratitude practice, and the Nembutsu spiritual tradition. The monologue weaves together personal anecdote, therapeutic insight, and spiritual reflection including readings from Paul Knitter and a Zen poem.
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It's Casper's Podcast. This is the 5th time I've tried to record this today. The first 4, the perfectionist part of me did not think were good enough, and the 5th one I forgot to press record on, so— oh, I guess that makes this the 6th time I've tried to record it. Okay, well, maths was never my strong point. Today I've been thinking about needs, and in particular, my need to be appreciated in a very particular way. Or I suppose I'm talking about that as if it's still present, and I guess it might be, but I'm thinking of a need that revealed itself to me last weekend. Last weekend I was at Buddhafield Festival. Which takes place in the Blackdown Hills in Somerset. It was gorgeous weather, too hot at times. There were beautiful people there, there was music, there was workshops, there were lots of good talks, there were campfires, there was gorgeous food, and there was my emotional process around giving my own talk in the big tent. I was in the big tent for the first time. So I was extra nervous. I assumed it was just because it was the big tent. Actually, I thought that sometime on Friday morning I'd worked out what the nerves were because I went and I rewrote my talk at again. I got it condensed onto one index card and then I felt better. I thought, "Oh, okay, this last draft of my talk has given me a couple of extra ideas. I've got those down on an index card, just a few inches by a few inches. Now I feel fine. Must be— this must be the part of the process that needed to happen. That's what my nerves were telling me. But they came back later. And I did the talk. And I really didn't know whether it had gone well or not. I was hypervigilant around the number of people that were there. People said that it went well, I received nice comments, but somehow that just wasn't landing with me, and I was in a funny old mood. And later, maybe even the next day or two days later, I realized that part of me had had a very particular fantasy about how my talk was going to be received. This fantasy had been living just on the edge of my awareness, in that strange place between conscious thought and subconscious thought, or conscious thoughts and dreams maybe. So I didn't really recognize it had been going on until whatever it was that nudged it into my conscious mind. And this was a fantasy that very specific people would be at my talk and would give me very specific compliments about it. And these were people with decades of Dharma experience. And if I'd thought about this before the talk, I could have said to myself, well, Caspita, there's about 20 other things happening on site at least that they could be doing at the time your talk is on. Not only that, most of them are here because they have work to do, and most of them don't go to the talks anyway because they're aimed at festivalgoers. They're not aimed at senior Dharma practitioners. And then I might have felt better, but I didn't tell myself that because I didn't know I'd got this very specific fantasy. Still, I was able to talk myself through it. And on the way out of the festival, somebody stopped me and said thank you for my talk. And suddenly, for the first time, I really felt that land in my heart. I think I'd been fairly gracious when other people had commented before, but this one I was like, "Oh, I guess that was a good talk. I guess it was a good thing to do, to deliver that talk." I guess it went well. And in working through that fantasy and exposing the fantasy, allowed me to receive what some part of me had been desperate to receive. So there's a certain irony in this story, as there often is in this kind of, uh, mini awakening. The past couple of years I've been studying Embodied Relational Therapy, which is a therapy training that draws on the bodywork of Reich, and it draws on some of the Mindell's Process work. It was created by Nick Totton and some other people, but he, he's written a lot of the theory for it. Currently being taught by Alison Priestman Jane Johnson and Stephen, whose last name suddenly escapes me. Apologies, Stephen, I'll add it in the comments. Anyway, it's a very good course. I've really appreciated all the tuition. One of the things Reich talks about, which has been developed by this course, is character. And character is the idea that we hold our body in particular positions depending on, you could say, depending on particular wounds that we've received in our personal history. And we can see that bodies and minds are intimately connected. When somebody's hunched over and shuffling around, we know they're— we guess they're in a different emotional state to somebody who's puffed up and looking everybody in the eye. And one of the character positions is the oral position, and this really relates strongly to the story I've just told. So oral position is to do with the experience of getting your needs met, of being nourished, of taking in sustenance. And in the developmental model, it suggested it's to do with attunement by a caregiver around feeding. I'm slightly skeptical of the developmental model, but it is certainly true that we can be wounded around having our needs met. And a wound in this area leads to either a sort of clamping down of the jaw— crunch, close the gate, don't want to take any more in— No, I don't want any of your food. It's not good enough. I'm only going to feed myself. The world isn't good enough. Or it can lead to a, oh, maybe this will be the thing that feeds me. Maybe this will be the thing that feeds me. Maybe this chocolate bar will be the one that finally makes me happy. Maybe that piece of cake will finally be the one that makes me happy. Maybe that glass of wine, maybe those pair of shoes. Whatever it is. How often we flip— we, I'm including myself in this, I've definitely got oral character tendencies, which is a strange way of putting it, I suppose. We can flip between the two of these. In Nick Totten and book on character, which I think is called Reiki and Bodywork, and I've lent it to somebody so I can't check the reference, which he wrote with his then wife. He describes the oral position as someone who works through this material as going from perhaps being a thin, miserable person to a happy person who appreciates life with a nice round belly. And my belly is certainly nice and round at the moment, whereas I used to be a bit thin and miserable, but I haven't completely processed all of my material in this area. It was certainly triggered at the festival. So there's the oral denying, "No, I don't want any of that." And there's the oral yearning, "Please, please, sir, please, sir, can I have some more?" usually followed by disappointment. So what helps? Well, what helps me was just noticing it, but I think there are other things that help. The first is a gratitude practice, connecting with the knowledge and awareness and experience that we are already supported. Right now, as I'm speaking into a microphone that someone has put together, someone's made the components for, it's charged by electricity that comes from wind farms and solar panels and hydroelectricity. I don't know the exact mix, but I'm pleased that we're on a green energy plan here at the temple. And I'm sitting in the temple in a building that was created 200 years ago by strangers' hands and cared for by generations of owners and tradespeople. I'm sustained by the food I had at lunchtime, which includes the first lettuce from our garden that Satya planted and natural processes allowed to flourish, beetroot from the organic veg box from the Fold Farm. So thanks to Will and his group of volunteers over there. Thanks to Laura who dropped the box off here last week. And actually, if I enumerate the things that support me and that I've received and that allow me to be present here, the list is endless. That gives me an experience and knowledge and awareness of being supported that And when I really sit in that, I don't need to go chasing other things. It begins to undermine either that belief that the world isn't good enough, and conversely that I'm not good enough, or that I need to look for very specific things to support me. Because actually I've got plenty. There is plenty in the present moment. There's enough in the present moment. I am enough in the present moment. I don't need to do anything differently. I don't need the world to be different. Of course, there are times when that genuinely isn't true, but it's true right now. And in my spiritual practice, Sometimes I receive a gift of the awareness that I don't need to do anything differently, that I'm enough just as I am, that I'm already fed enough just as I am. If I'm meditating and my mind settles, I might have a profound sense of being enough. I might have a profound sense of not needing to do anything, that it's okay just to be as I am in the moment, that it's okay to experience deep cravings and not have them met. It's possible to find a place to rest in that experience that is spacious. That is somewhat at peace. The spiritual practice of my Buddhist school is Nembutsu, remembering the Buddha. And this practice is a somewhat mystical practice. It's about connecting with the presence of the Buddha that is available right now in this moment. Oh, I can't tell you the mechanics of that exactly. Different traditions talk about it in different ways. I do know that when, uh, Sarah Burke tried to talk about it at Butterfield, she began by saying, 'You can't really put this into words.' I do know that the, the Tao Te Ching says the Tao that can be described is not the true Tao. I do know that Thomas Aquinas, at least I think it was him, said that all of the words that he'd written throughout his career amounted to a heap of straw, because he realized that the divine that God, to use his language, couldn't be pinned down, couldn't be described in the way that he'd been attempting to do in his theology or throughout his life. What supports us is bigger than our small minds. There is an experience of being settled that I have when I meditate, maybe when I'm chanting. Of being connected to something much bigger than myself. Some people would simply say being connected to the whole world or the whole universe. Some people might say being connected to God. I might say the Buddha. Certainly something other than my ordinary experience. That allows me to feel at peace and that I don't need to do anything else, that I don't need to try and manipulate the world to get my needs met, that actually, uh, everything's okay, that I'm okay. I guess this is what my talk was about at Buddhafield to some degree, or not to some degree, is what my talk was about, that we don't need to do anything, we don't need strategies, we don't need manipulation, we don't need to try and engineer a sense of okayness. And ironically, it's often when we stop doing those things, or when they stop working, that we catch a glimpse of something beyond our small selves that can feed and nourish us. I've been reading Paul Knitter's book Without Buddha, I couldn't be a Christian. And he talks about one of the versions of God that he speaks about is interconnectedness. And what he means by that is availability to relationship to the whole world, that in meditation or in prayer When the small self drops away, we can feel like we are in relationship with thousands of things, with whatever comes before us. Not just in relationship, but we can feel fond of whatever comes before us. And it's not just that we are reaching out to make a connection with the world, but that The world is reaching out to make a connection with us. We are already supported by physical processes, by psychological processes, by spiritual processes. We are already enough. And it's hard to know that, it's hard to trust it. Some parts of me take it for granted, some parts of me deeply experience that, some parts of me get me to record this podcast many, many, many times, not just for the sake of doing a good job, which is a good reason, but for the sake of manipulating your response, which is not a good reason. The poem that I based my Buddhafield talk on was the first— was a poem written by the first Zen abbess of Japan, after her enlightenment. My whole life I've been trying to hold it all together. Suddenly it's fallen apart, this broken bucket. Nowhere for the water, nowhere for the moon. So that's a little teaser for the Buddhafield talk, which is available on YouTube, and I will put a link to it on the website, um, but the summary is that we don't need to fix ourselves. The moonlight is already shining on us. We are broken buckets and we're beautiful just as we are.
