No news here
The Creative Buddhist Sunday Supplement
Hello you,
The Sunday Supplement usually starts with something topical. Wondering what to say this week, my mind goes to the Israel-Hamas war. Surely I should say something about that? But no, this is not the place for news.
I’ve stopped looking on Instagram, because frankly it’s doing my head in. I watch people’s stories and it goes from 4000 children dead, to funny cat videos, then back to the war, then to a cool wardrobe renovation and again back to death and destruction. It’s enough to make you feel psychotic.
Neil Postman called it the ‘Now this..." phenomena, in his excellent book ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’. Writing 40 years ago, he was warning about the danger of consuming serious news from the same source as we get our entertainment. In 1985, that was TV. Now things are so much worse. Almost all my news not only comes from the same places I get my entertainment, but much of it is packaged as entertainment, with the ‘Now this... ‘ vibe being very strong.
It’s not just social media, I feel the same way about BBC radio news, ‘... and now let’s go to a man who received 5 identical birthday cards.’ Or the Guardian Newspaper, ‘... and now, how to make the perfect bread and butter pudding.’ What on earth is this doing to us?
So no, there will be no news in the Sunday Supplement.
The Creative Buddhist
I’ve just taken the paywall off the post on improvisation above, hope you enjoy. You can check out the mending workshop with a free 7-day subscription.
Podcast - Aging and Longevity Reimagined: Is Mindfulness the Secret? There are some real insights in this interview with Ellen Langer. She studies the relationship between the body and mind, but, as she continually corrects the interviewer, insists there is no body and mind. There is just one thing, one phenomena, bodymind.
Book - The Master and his Emissary: I started reading Iain McGilchrist’s book, subtitled ‘The divided brain and the making of the western world’, a few months ago and then gave up! My attention span isn’t what it used to be and the book is a daunting 500 pages. On this second attempt I’m a quarter of the way through and it’s brilliant. Wish me luck.
Toolkit - Leaving Social Media Toolkit: I downloaded Amelia Hruby’s free tool kit for getting off social media this week. It includes a list of 100 ways to share your work and life off social media, it’s such a fun list. I wanted to do almost all of them but started with writing my ‘fan letters’. I wrote to her thanking her for the list and got a super friendly reply. Then wrote to the author of Improv Wisdom, which I’d written about last week, who was so happy to hear her work was being used on Buddhist retreats. And there are 99 more things to do!
Retreats - A heads up for next year: I’d love to see some of you on a real live retreat next year, bookings are open!
The Here and Now Mountain
A retreat on the 10 Fetters - April, Rivendell UK
A Modest Awakening
A wabi-sabi retreat - June, The Netherlands
Everyone is an Artist
A creative Dharma retreat for women - November, Rivendell UK
Find all the details at Red Ladder Studio
A quote I’m thinking about from the podcast above, for those times when you’re feeling annoyed with someone:
“How did that make sense from their perspective?”
- Ellen Langer
Share the Sunday Supplement with someone who might enjoy it!
Sending some love your way,
Vajradarshini
P.S. Thanks to all of you that contributed to last week’s crowd sourced Sunday Supplement, I got some great tips. Save up yours for the next one.
This Week’s Tip - Commute to work, even if you work from home:
I’ve started commuting to work. My wife brings me coffee in bed and I read my big fat book (see above) for a while then I head off to work. I walk around the block a couple of times, to get the light in my eyes, good for your circadian rhythm. Then come in and settle down at my desk. I aim for around sunrise which this week is 7.30ish. On the shortest day it will be 8.43 and the sun will set again at 14.48, making the day just over 6 hours long!
Yes I totally agree about the madness of social media and the form and bite-size shock aspect of the mainstream news, but I don’t think cutting off and pushing the horror aside is a good response either...maybe having real live thoughtful conversations with people who are affected by whatever is happening is the answer? For example I supervise a jewish therapist who works in an orthodox jewish organisation and has been beside herself about the violence and polarisation, and a muslim woman whose 90 year old ill mother felt compelled to go on her first ever protest March over what’s unfolding, and talking with them both at length about the underlying need to not react from hatred but find compassion for all life felt helpful both to them and to me. We also talked about potentially helpful images and metaphors in response to horror and violence on a sangha day yesterday in the form of the clashing cymbals of Amoghasiddhi’s Shang-Shang birds, which amongst other things symbolise the lightning-quick integration of opposites to bring about a startlingly new perspective. As for news, I’ve given up on the BBC but still find Channel 4 news quite worthwhile - and there is this quite inspiring publication too: https://www.positive.news/about/
I also wonder… if there was separation between the light and the dark in the media whether we would just choose not to engage with the dark at all? And how much of our response to the discomfort of harrowing sorrow sat side by side with shallow insignificance of cat memes is because we don’t want to hold that both of those things can exist at the same time? For me, I think the speed at which i move between the two extremes is the problem. It doesn’t allow space for things to really land.