Rainforest Mind: Gifts, transactions and why it’s hard to stay grateful

It's Rainforest Mind with me, Casper Thomson. Oh, I wasn't sure what I was going to talk about today, but then inspired by a chapter in Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which was recommended to me by Stephen Thame, and a conversation last night at the dinner table where Ian was asking me some very straightforward questions that I couldn't understand because it was the end of the week and I was exhausted. I thought I might talk a little bit about the difference between transactions and gifts. Transaction is you've got some money in your pocket, you go to the shop, You think, "Oh, I want that, I can afford it." You buy it, you take it home, and it's yours. A gift, obviously, is when you receive something and there's no obvious exchange, and yet there is some kind of exchange that happens in a gift. In the book, Robin Wall Kimmerer recounts having a dream about going to a marketplace, and she says in the dream the marketplace has become a gift economy, and she notices that because everything is being given as a gift, she's much more careful about what she takes. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, just what I need, bearing in mind that there will be other people along later on who will also be given these gifts. And of course, normally when we go to the shops, it's simply, how much money have I got in my pocket? What do I want to buy? That, that, that. I've worked hard for this money, I'm entitled to it. 'Now I've got it, it's mine, I can do what I like with it.' Partly I was thinking about this even before the conversation at dinner, actually, as I was making the meal for the community each week. We take it in turns, more or less, to make a meal once a week for the community, and last night I was cooking. And when I was deciding how much rice to cook, remembering that I often do just enough, and Satya Robyn was saying, "Oh, people eat more, put some more in," I was reflecting on this, how easy it is at the end of a meal just to throw the waste food away. Because we've already paid for it, therefore we don't need to worry about taking care of it so much. Like, we've already— the cost, yeah, it's the cost, isn't it? When we pay for something with money, it's like, oh, that's, that's all the cost of the food, that's all the cost of the item, we don't need to consider any other costs. Because we're told this is the price of it. And yet the reality is the cost is much greater, and the responsibility is much greater. And it's easier to tune into that when you have a sense of receiving a gift. And there are some Buddhist practices that support us in becoming more aware of this. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer talks about opening the cupboard doors and saying thank you to the jam and thank you to the beans and thank you to the this and thank you to the that. Just plugging into that sense of, oh, look at all these things I've received. Occasionally in our Buddhist practice sessions here, we do a practice called Nikan, where we use 3 prompts: What have I received? What have I offered? And what trouble has my existence caused? Often just looking at 24 hours, say. And actually, even spending time with the first question reveals then unending chain of things that we receive. It's pretty obvious, I suppose, if you, if you really start contemplating a meal, how many different processes, how many different people, how many different sentient beings and plants are involved in bringing that meal to your plate. Even just a cup of tea and a piece of toast. There's the baker, there's the farmer, there's the years of choosing the right sort of wheat to get the right sort of flour. There's the whole natural process that gave rise to the earth that allows the wheat to grow. There's the tea pickers, the fermenters, the baggers, the packagers, the drivers, the shopkeepers, and again behind that a whole host, an unending number of cycles in the natural world that give rise to tea plants that include connection to pollinators, of course, to insects. And so on and so forth. The plate itself, with clay that's been dug from the earth and shaped on a potter's wheel, or poured into a slip mold, glazed, painted and glazed, fired, delivered to the shops. And I guess in this mix there's also something about an environmental cost that we're becoming more aware of that isn't taken into consideration. It's not factored into the, the price that we pay at the till, the damage that's done to the earth when we're mining components for electronics or buying food that's been sprayed with pesticide that is helping the pollinator populations to collapse. And we're taught that when you've handed over your money, you've paid for the cost of the item, and somehow all of that consciousness of that line of processes is cut off, whereas in a gift economy it becomes much more available again. There's another aspect to all of this as well, difference between the transaction economy and the gift economy. Oh, here comes the cat. When I pay for a plumber or a builder or any sort of service, once I hand the money over, I let go of it. I don't worry about what they're going to spend it on. When somebody makes a donation to the temple, when they make a gift of money, I do feel a responsibility of how that money is spent. I'm more aware of the sense of responsibility that arrives in an item, or even a donation of cash, when it arrives as a gift. And the same is true of items, of course. The plate that we received from our grandmother is much more precious than the one we bought from Marks Spencer's, or one that's been handed down through the generations. We're much more aware of not wanting to slip and break it, whereas the plates from M&S Home Well, we could just go and buy another one. So there's a whole sense of caretaking that arises in a gift economy that seems missing in a transaction economy. And when I think of the Buddha's own life, he lived in a gift economy. He created a gift economy. He didn't pay for anything, but neither did he charge. For anything. Teachings were offered freely to anybody who'd got the capacity to come and listen to them. Anyone who could get there was welcome, and some of those people, the wealthier individuals, might offer a place to stay or might offer food for the Buddha and all his disciples. And of course, famously, monks and nuns would take their alms bowls out to receive donations of food to keep them, um, to keep them alive. And I'm sure that when you receive food placed in a bowl, there is much more a sense of one, gratitude because there's something about the unearned nature of the gift. And two, that feeling of responsibility— I'm going to really appreciate this, and maybe I'm going to pay it forward somehow. And it's unearned not in the sense that you don't offer a gift back, either to the person who's feeding you or to other people, offer a gift forward, but unearned in the sense that it isn't an open-and-shut case. You give me this, I've given you that, we're all square now. There's this constant movement of generosity. I'm also thinking of Shen Yan, who stayed with us for a few months. Um, now you've stayed with us for a couple of weeks as a gift. You know, we were able to do that to support his practice as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. And then he transitioned into being a resident here. We weren't able to support him long-term financially because I guess that's part of the compromise of being a temple in the West. We don't live in a gift economy, so that we live in a mixed economy. I can't hand I can't give a Buddhist teaching to the electricity company. I can't give them a basket of plums from the garden. So it's a mixed economy. But part of Shen Yin's practice as a monk was to stand with his alms bowl. He spent many years wandering in the way that the early Buddhist monks wandered, with his arms bowl and with a few possessions. And if you want to hear him talk about that, head over to the Amida Mandala Buddhist Temple YouTube channel, and he's given a talk about it which I'd really recommend. Anyway, this is perhaps less well-formed structurally than some of the other podcast episodes that I've given, but I just wanted to, to share and think about— and I'm just talking as I'm going, you know, I haven't got a list of bullet points that I want to share— about the difference between this ordinary world that we live in where everything is, you give me that and I'll give you this in return. There's a great loss in that. And, you know, as I say, it's necessary. We're embedded in that world. We have to, to some degree, we have to meet that. But even in those transactions, we can bring an awareness of the fact that actually what we're receiving is more than the value of what we're paying for. That's just how it is as dependent creatures. And when I'm thinking in that way, I make sure, for example, there aren't any— there isn't any food waste. All the leftovers get used up because there's a sense of responsibility, a sense of wanting to take care of what I've received. That's at the end of that chain of all those processes that we listed earlier. So I think sometimes it's good to give gifts, and sometimes we're forced into transactions, but we can still aim to keep an awareness of the gift that we're receiving and not not fall into thinking, or maybe practice, practice doing it a bit less, falling into thinking, oh, I've paid for this with money, so my responsibility ends. Actually, when we take receipt of something, our responsibility is just beginning. I'm also remembering Suzuki Roshi. I remember reading that he used to talk about borrowing things. So I'm just borrowing the space. I'm just— everything that I use, I'm lending from the universe. And someone said, even your spectacles? Because of course the prescription was just for him. He said, yes, yes, even these I'm just borrowing for a while. And of course At some point, everything we own is given away. When our body ends, everything we have has to return back into the world somehow. There's not an end point to that chain. That's what the transactional model implies, that there is an end point to that chain, and that we can forget about what happens afterwards, but there's not an end point. We are a link in the chain of gifts, in the chain of borrowing. So we have a responsibility to take care of what we receive, being mindful that at some point we'll be returning it, we'll be passing it forward. And can we pass it forward in a way that respects the thing itself, the processes that lead to the thing itself, the environmental cost of what we've received. Well, we probably can't do it all the time because we live in a system where that is continually undermined, but I trust that we can begin to move more in that direction, maybe by making time to practice the first prompt of Naikan, what have I— and just simply listing what 'What have I received in the last 24 hours?' Maybe just taking a moment before eating a meal to really reflect on where all of this stuff has come from. Introducing these pauses for thanks into our daily life. Now I want to spend a few minutes thinking about why it's so difficult to dwell in that state of gratitude. It's very easy to talk about, but it's harder to manage in reality. And even those practices which nudge us in that direction fail to transform us into beings that are just grateful all the time. A lot of my work is with individuals, so let's think about this from an individual point of view, and then I want to think about it from a collective point of view. So we might think about greed as a kind of compulsion, sort of compulsive behavior, the longing for more. And we can see pretty clearly that when we're experiencing gratitude, we feel satisfied, we feel like we've got enough. When we're experiencing greed, we're not in touch with that feeling of enough. And of course, there are many people around the world who don't have enough, but in my own life, my material needs are met. They're much more than met. And yet I still experience myself falling into greed, which is a kind of madness. That's how it appears from the outside. I've got all this amazing stuff, why is there that craving for more nice things? It's not so much objects for me, but, you know, more nice food, for example. Why is that still around? Well, this kind of compulsive behavior is generally the mind-body system's way of keeping itself safe. And what is it keeping itself safe from? Keeping itself safe from feeling some pain, some hurt. That the compulsive part fears will be overwhelming, so it steps in to, to distract us, to get our attention away from the painful feelings, to fill us up with something that isn't that hurt. This sort of compulsive behavior is reactive. There's some trigger in the outside world that pushes a button in us that takes us back to our childhood, even on a, you know, a less than conscious level. It keys into some feelings of rejection or abandonment or shame that we haven't— we weren't able to process at the time, and we still haven't processed. And then the compulsive behavior kicks in. Driving us to, in this example, to greed. Compulsive behaviors, of course, can also drive us in the opposite direction. They can create distance, they can create a collapse in the system, they can create— or whatever the opposite of greed is— wanting to push things away. And over time, those compulsive behaviors can turn into regular behaviors. They can become Instead of becoming reactive, they just become an ordinary way that the system keeps itself safe. I know there's triggers out there and I don't want to let you near them, so I'm going to continually engage in some low-level or high-level greed just to make sure that you're not really, uh, exposed to anything that might be too triggering. And I think the essential trauma, the sort of existential trauma that we all carry. As I peel back the layers of support of myself, support my clients to peel back their own layers and trace back what these— what is it this compulsive behavior is afraid will happen if it doesn't kick in? We find our ways to those moments of trauma, and they are all about separation, about lack of relationship. If a child experiences something horrible and there's someone there to support them, to hear them, to, to listen to their experience, that generally isn't the kind of trauma that gets stuck in in the mind-body system and needs processing later. If something happens and there isn't that space, that's when it gets lodged in the system. It can be something quite small, can be something quite big. Everybody I speak to— clients, therapists, friends— we've all had some experience of this trauma of separation on some level, even if it's just as simple as bringing back a drawing from school and wanting it to be stuck on the fridge and it not getting stuck on the fridge. So there's that existential trauma of separation that is very powerful, that we weren't able to process as children because we didn't have the capacity, that we weren't supported by the people around us to process. So the these compulsive behaviors come in as a way of avoiding having to do that, of having to feel that pain, because they don't trust that healing is possible. So that's on an individual level, but we're all carrying around some wound of that kind in this society. We've all got that trauma of separation. I think there's a collective trauma of separation, and I think you can trace it back through the generations, from our move from small tribal, uh, groups when we were gathering our food in the forests and jungles, to when we became settled when we transitioned into farming. And over time, farming becomes industrialized. That separation increases. We're more separate from the natural processes of the world. We're more separate from each other because, in some ways, because we're embedded in much larger tribal groups, in much larger societies. So it's impossible to know everybody, you know, we're thrust in— my school had, what, 600, 300 people, 600 people, I can't remember, a lot of people, too many to know anyway. Workplaces might have hundreds or thousands of people. So we're constantly out of intimacy in a way that we would have been connected to other human beings and non-human animals and our environment many, many, many generations ago. You can see this if you just walk down the street, particularly in a city where it's busy, and notice how nobody's connecting with each other. We're habituated to separation now. So as well as that collective trauma, there's also collective greed, of course, because as a society we haven't quite grasped the idea that healing is possible. Instead, we will drive ourselves into getting more and more stuff. And healing is possible, but it's hard because coming back into relationship means meeting the parts of ourselves that were wounded. So intimacy becomes frightening because it means becoming vulnerable, and it means potentially feeling some of the hurt and pain that is unprocessed from our own lives, which is why healing spaces are so important. Whether it's a one-to-one therapy space, whether it's like the listening circle that we're going to uh, have here in the temple this evening, where we sit in a circle and pass a stone like a talking stick. Those kind of supportive structures that enable us to make connections in a way that isn't overwhelming for our systems. And of course, from a spiritual practice point of view, this is where your other power, or your higher power becomes really essential, because we experiment with trusting. And of course, you know, you, you might, uh, you might have an idea of a transcendental higher power or an imminent other power like the natural world rising to meet you that feels like a place of safety. But that idea of experimenting with that there being something, someone, someplace that is completely trustworthy, completely safe, we can start to make a real connection, a real sense of intimacy in our spiritual practice, in our prayer life, in our meditation practice. And that begins to undermine that fear. Begins to undermine that shame, begins to undermine that inner critic. It allows us to experiment with feeling connected, begins to bridge the gap of that traumatic separation, so we can take it out into our lives and start making connections with people. Hopefully that gives you some sense, and it's perhaps a bit theoretical, I apologize for that, but gives you some sense of why it is so difficult to stay in that place of gratitude, because we're all carrying around these wounds of separation and we're all trying to deal with them in these, uh these dysfunctional ways, and also shows, hopefully, the importance of finding places where we can meet each other safely, with kindness, with love, I suppose. As we feel loved, we relax, and then it's easier to feel gratitude. So I guess if you want to take this forward, there's a few things to keep in mind. There's those almost mindfulness practices that we talked about at the beginning, saying thank you to the world. There's the practice of finding a safe space of other people to connect to. There's the practice of experimenting with some kind of other power or higher power. And there's also a place for finding healing and healers, whether that's skilled psychotherapists or engaging in traditional plant-based medicine, like one of my friends did before Christmas. That allow us to meet ourselves and heal those wounds. And all of these things together can support us to come back into that place of gratitude that, as a collective, we've strayed away from. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode. Remember, you can subscribe on Stitcher, iStew, iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts from. Do leave us a review. Um, what else? If you're interested in my therapy practice, take a look at my website, www.casparthompson.co.uk. That's K-A-S-P-A THOMPSON. I see clients face-to-face in Malvern in Worcestershire, but from all over the world via the magic of modern technology. Thanks again for listening, and I look forward to speaking to you again on another edition of Rainforest Mind.