Books

BOOKS IN PROGRESS

I presently have five books in process. The first, Storm-Weathering and Sustainable Happiness, is nearing completion.

Storm-Weathering and sustainable happiness

Meditations for our Inner and Outer climate

Meditation is a precious jewel, an invaluable resource, for bad times and good times. The future we're heading into looks less comfortable than what we’ve been familiar with. Recession, climate change, peak oil... we’ll need resources to keep us steady and positive, and vision and inspiration, to create a sustainable life that’s better than what we have now. After all, who really wants to go on suffering the stresses of ‘modern’ life? 

In this workbook we practise meditation for two main purposes. First: to develop our resources of peace, happiness, strength, courage, hope, constructiveness; to deal kindly with despair hopelessness anger frustration and fear, and transform them to strength too. This is storm-weathering and sustainable happiness, for our inner climate. If you don’t want to include the second purpose, you can use this book just for this.

The second purpose, for those who want to work with it, goes like this: to create sustainable lifestyle, we need inner changes: are there other ways of being happy, beyond materialism and oil? what's most important to us in our life? what do we most value?  Living in accordance with what really counts, is what makes us happy. We need to build community, and develop vision about how our future might look, to sustain us, and be deeply satisfying. This is storm-weathering and sustainable happiness, for our outer climate. When we’ve delved within and discovered what we most value, we can build our sustainable communities based on that. 

This is a workbook, with guided meditations, based on Tibetan Buddhist tradition. You don't have to be buddhist to do them - you only need to love Nature. They're couched in imagery from Nature, because Nature speaks to just about everyone. 

It's a workbook because through meditation we embody our experience - not just think about things. We learn the skills of being in our strength, developing love, dealing with pain and confusion in a compassionate way. We treat ourself, and other people, more kindly, and experience directly our relationship to world and Nature. 

The meditations use Nature imagery, for the same two purposes. First, it’s a simple quick easy way to reach our heart. I and my friends and students have found it can work as deeply as the traditional forms and imagery of the meditations. The methods are the same.

Second, we need to connect with Nature, to develop a lifestyle in harmony with her. We need to feel our connection in our guts and heart, not just as an idea. 

As our inner climate transforms, we have a new basis for our outer life. The two go together. 

Our mind can become like a clear still pool, whose surface calmly reflects the goings-on of the world. When I sit by a pool in the NZ rain forest, I’m filled with love, for the beauty and magic of Nature, the vibrant life force that shines in the water, trees, rocks, mosses. When my mind feels like that in meditation, there’s bliss, like the texture of that limpid water, shining like the life force itself.  In this way, meditating on imagery from nature evokes our love, our feeling for the mystery and preciousness of life.

Nature evokes every conceivable feeling within us: rainstorms, shaggy cliffs, fields of flowers blooming in the desert, heat waves. It also evokes feelings when we see animals eating each other’s young, birds squabbling like irascible bad-tempered humans do; terns on the wing trying to grab each other’s catch and make off with it. Nature isn’t all a bed of roses - even roses have thorns, and wilt and die. 

Yet mother nature embraces all this in her great ecosystem, where everything lives completely interdependent with everything else - including humans. Light and dark are all included. If you’re a small creature near the bottom of the food chain, you have thousands of babies, so after the birds have eaten most of them, enough still survive. Food chains are only a part of the system. Plants and creatures cooperate and help each other in a myriad ways, from trees providing fruit and safe places for birds to nest, to cleaner fish that eat the bugs from the teeth of fearsome predators. There’s a whole ecosystem of tiny bugs in healthy soil, providing nutrition for plants, and being fed by them.

Meditating on nature imagery helps us in so many ways: from imagining a calm pool to help us find peace, to embracing and working with the dark and difficult in our own life, to the ecosystems that provide the models for how we can live in harmony with nature.