Following the dharma in the 21st century

“In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

This evening at the Ipswich and Colchester Young Person’s Buddhist Group, we each presented two items of creativity which meant something to us – perhaps they inspired us, motiviated us to make a change, made us think more deeply or simply resonated with us.

It took me quite a long time to figure out what I was going to present, after all I am about as creative as a blank sheet of paper. Music has always been a part of my life and at difficult times I’ve always tended to turn to music, whether to find someone who feels the same as me, or to take out my feelings on something, escape from the world, or to relax.

I spent a couple of weeks collecting various pieces of music that meant something to me and actually ended up with half a dozen tracks. I really struggled to figure out how to present them, but then suddely with something of a surge of emotion, I realised what I needed to do.

In my late teens my dad left my mum unexpectedly – the first any of us knew about it was when I got home from school and found three letters, one to me, my sister and my mum. I won’t elaborate too much on the details but we were all distraught and I felt such a weight of responsibility to have to tell my sister and my mum what had happened when they got home from school and work respectively, such pain seeing and feeling their responses, that I can never forget. Unfortunatey this also coincided with my long term boyfriend of about 3 years deciding that when I went away on my gap year for 4 months, he couldn’t bear the separation and he left me too. And I left my mum, who I was very close to, and my younger sister, and went out to Nepal for 4 months.

Initially I felt an absolute torrent of emotions ranging from rage to anger, fear to loneliness, sorrow to guilt. Much of my feelings and emotions were very much self-centred, but at the time all I had that wasn’t rejecting me, which I could rely on, wasmyself. I wrote some pretty shameful letters to several members of my family who seemed to be taking great pleasure in telling me how childish I was being by not speaking to my dad, how I should grow up and move on, how it was for the best, and so forth. At the time, I was almost blinded by a veil of self-preservation and just didn’t want to see any other view than my own.

Some time later, I listened to a song that my dad used to play by Mike and the Mechanics, and it really made me consider the impermenance of all things, and the futility of the fear, hate, rage, anger and guilt that I was feeling when life is potentially so short, and the feelings were really down to my own attachment and my unwillingness to see the world from any other perspective than my own. At this point I started to consider why I was feeling so strongly, what WAS this emotion ….. and I started to look more deeply into Buddhism, impermenance, ego and the self.

In some ways, this started me on my journey, but it was only just the start. Going back over this tonight and creating this video/movie made me realise just how much emotion and feeling I have “boxed up” over the years and not dealt with, just how strongly I feel ashamed of the way I acted all those years ago, and a real sorrow at the hurt and pain that I caused in acting in such a selfish and unkind manner.

So, feeling quite stirred up and quite emotional tonight, but lots of things to work with.

Here is the video:

Young person’s group – creativity that means something to me from Ruth Cheesley on Vimeo.