Glenn Thode
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Thanks for this essay question!
This first direct interaction with a single fellow student was in a way something I looked forward to and also dreaded. Mixed feelings like this always give me ‘stage fright’, which I felt going into the break out room. While I teach law at the university in Groningen, and understand the great benefits of peer teaching, giving instruction to a fellow student, who is also knowledgeable about what the instruction is about, still somehow creates a sense of insecurity. My partner and me had a lovely first talk about getting to the breakout room together and having to do the exercise. My partner was really open in how she felt and this was a great relief to me, as I was feeling somewhat similar. This created space to embrace the discomfort together.
As we agreed my partner would go first, I was happy to experience how meditating shortly before giving instruction actually helps to sharpen my awareness to both the physical technique of posture and breathing and the non-physical technique of working with the mind, awareness and attention. By arriving at the moment of offering instruction with this preparation, I noticed that my mind was not busy anymore with concerns about posture and attention and this allowed me to also incorporate the element of attitude, having a gentleness to bringing the attention back to the breath and an uplifting demeanor. My partner and I also discussed something she said she may have left out of the instruction and felt it not appropriate to introduce this while we were already meditating. While we were already quite some minutes into the session I was guiding, I introduced some instructions to allow us both to experience how helpful or disruptive this may be for us. I felt very relieved to have the space to have a fellow student to be able to experiment together safely.
My experience offering instruction in this course and sharing our experiences, first in the breakout room and afterwards collectively with Susan and all fellow students were very humbling and enable me to have a little bit more understanding of what a meditation teacher does and does not. The dread is mostly gone now. I really look forward to our following steps!
Dear Erin,
Thanks for this clear summary of your experience instructing me 🙂 Going back to my experience, I can share that I really enjoyed getting the instructions in the calm, serene and warm way in which you communicated it with me. I was also feeling quite nervous because of the first time interacting in this direct way with a fellow student. But, your way of guiding me through this first experience really calmed me and allowed for a lovely meditation session. And… also allowed me to take my role in returning the guidance feeling more centered. I’m happy to read how your experience was and particularly the way how you became aware you might have been doing this to a degree already without realizing it.Dear Andrew,
Thanks for articulating your experience in a way which comes across to me as quite accurate. How you describe worrying about leaving something out which is important but is not obvious is an example of this accuracy to me. And then the release in trusting the dancer after the basic moves are in. Lovely.Dear Kat,
Your experience partially coincides with mine. Thanks for expressing it in such clear language and sequence, making it somehow also a testament to my experience and maybe our shared experience as sangha members. The unease is very recognizable and also the support entering meditation together offers. I like the ‘easy peasy’ expression and words like ‘tethering the mind to the breath’! Thanks for sharing.Ankur, many thanks for sharing these beautiful words that have taken me to my roots also, connected to the wilderness which is in some way our cradle.
Thank you Virginia,
Reading your essay made me reflect if it is possible for mother/grandmother to have also colored my lineage. I’ve grown up being raised mostly by my mother and grandmothers, who were all very stable and trustworthy beacons of morality and integrity in my life. You mentioned being blessed with motherhood and grandmotherhood, and this blessing I recognize from the perspective of a son and grandson. Many thanks.Dear Octavio,
The aspect of learning and discovering is familiar to me and I recognize the place you seem to give the learning; not an external value or recognition by others, but for what this helps you to discover within yourself. Thanks for you share!Dear MaryBeth,
The discription you use for your ancestral connection also fits with my sense of connection or lineage. The gratitude, I hope to be permitted to join you in this gratitude. Thanks!This essay to me represents a complex challenge. A lineage evokes the concept of a line in my mind. The challenge is I cannot seem to see a definitive ‘line’ to align my lineage with. But I do see a collection of lines or strings, which together make a thicker line, which looks more like a rope. Interestingly to me, at both ends of this rope I do see singular lines, one connecting to a ‘source’ and one to ‘me’. I will do my best to describe where I sense this investigation of lineage takes me.
I was born on an island in the Caribbean, Bonaire, and as such I resonate or identify with Islandness. Deep within me, even as a child, I felt connected to nature around me, which on my birth Island was always very close and intimate. Much later in life, I was approached by a small group of inhabitants of my birthplace who imprinted on me that I was part of their community, which they call ‘walkers of the wilderness’, who are intimate with nature, the elements and the spiritual world. They and me, have a holistic and animistic outlook to everything around us.
My parents and me moved to Aruba when I was still very young. I was raised there in a Christian society which was very open to other traditions. From my father’s side, with protestant and sephardic jewish lineages in my mother’s family. My father relates to Amerindian, African and German ethnicity. In some way, this has influenced and attuned my sensitivities to the lineage holders from these societies.
Later in life, I noticed that somehow I was very influenced in my pre-teen and post-teen years by Japanese cultural and spiritual factors, without me being very aware of this origin. But I had a natural tendency to connect. I did different types of martial arts, always sticking with the Japanese ones Judo, Kyokushin and Kendo. At the time, I did not see the ‘line’ of these being Japanese, but I was aligning my aesthetics to Japanese Zen.
Much later in life, I was mid 30’s, I noticed one of my friends becoming more peaceful and radiant. I asked him what he was doing and he pointed me towards Shambhala. He lent me the book The Sacred Path of the Warrior. When I started reading this and followed the meditation guidance contained in that book, I came home. I finally got to an environment where everything which was being described resonated with my own mindscape. I was offered a very helpful way to give words to what I was experiencing and ‘seeing’ in my mind. It was as if I was known. This triggered an enormous change in my attitude, helping me to rest and come to peace in my mind.
A few year later, when I was working in Bonaire, I was invited to go to India, to a retreat with the name Call of the Time. Here I met a Zen master, who shared books and the concept of Koans with me. I reconnected to Zen buddhism tradition through the Zen master and the koans. Later when I was traveling between Aruba and Bonaire, a gentleman approached me. He was a Tao master. I connected to this Tao lineage from Taiwan and was initiated as a Tao-chin.
Returning to Aruba to work, I continued to apply to my best abilities the Tao and the Shambhala teachings in my work and daily life. I did not have any formal training or initiation in buddhism and am now contemplating to do so. I did however notice a very beneficial effect from the meditation in the Shambhala tradition. This has brought me to this class.To bring this essay back to the essay instruction: I can sense a single thread, a source from which the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Amerindian shamans, Rabi’s and many wise sages have gained inspiration and wisdom, turning each into a line which come together to form a rope. This rope eventually finds its way to a collective single thread again, connecting to my lineage, from which I sense inspiration, direction. In this lineage, I notice that for me the most present influences or colors, are the lines of Buddha, Lao Tzu and Amerindians.
Many thanks for offering this amazing metaphor of a frantic ball in a pinball machine and how this may serve for reflections.
Thanks Mary, your story of both you and your late husband is very familiar to both my personal story and the stories of so many around me. I very much liked your reflection on finding it ironic how hopeful and optimistic your late husband was. It made me chuckle. Thanks also for reflecting on grounding.
This story is a momentary construct of fragments and bits of memory combined with reflections of how I’m experiencing my life at the moment. My memories from early life start at me being very young and marveling at our existence and particularly the magical intertwined-ness of everything. Living was part of a very powerful manifestation of something that was immaterial and full of drive and energy. It was larger than anything imaginable. Then came my first experiences with eternalism. Questions I had with this magical experience where answered in Christian religious terms. Somehow these questions did not sit well with me. This happened somewhere around my 7th year. My parents sent me to catechesis and I was expected to echo the catholic teachings without further investigation and explanation. I was very inquisitive and read the bible texts myself and based on that, asked many questions. The answer to my questions was to pray. When this did not seem to answer my questions, I started to question the praying, the teachings and the whole religious movement. Around this time I was also experiencing family members passing away. And my questioning started to include the sense of living. I had a tendency to reject what I was being told about heaven, hell and earth. This may have been when I started embracing the notion that we can’t make sense of our being and existence. What difference does it make how we try to explain things? This combined with me reading and learning more about theories like evolution made me reject the eternalism offered to me and lean to the almost complete opposite view. I do have a tendency to be digital in my thought processes.
Experiencing the passing of family members caused by incurable diseases made me commit and focus on studying medicine. I eventually entered medical school at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. In Nijmegen I was exposed to ideas about both eternalism, our current experiences are all part of a big and unchanging plan, and nihilism… our existence is all the result of a cosmic coincidence. To me, during this phase of my life, this strengthened my belief in the theorie of coincidence. But I also started to read buddhist and taoist texts and talk to those who embrace this in their lives. At that moment, I rejected this based on rationalizations of not being ‘proven’ by the scientific methods and concluded all this to be of no value to my understanding of existence and life.
Shortly after my 20’s, I met a girl who had very strong fundamental beliefs about creation as the result of a universal, maybe Godly love. The effect this had on her being at peace and having an unbreakable moral compass had an effect on how I viewed the more nihilistic point of view. I reconnected with the sense of our magical existence I experienced in my youth. Without knowing what I was doing, I started to ‘re-configure’ my belief foundations and structures and arrived at what may be seen as a more ‘middle way’. To me, it seems to be a shift from a phase I was in from my 7th year, in which I mostly tried to wrap my mind around my experiences with ‘logic’, my thinking and thought patterns, towards including my heart and senses and feelings beyond brainy thinking. In this proces of reconfiguration, I also started to experience some sort of ‘flashy’ moments of complete connectedness and awareness which are very hard to describe rationally. These experience brought me to embrace everything around me in a more inclusive manner as I could sense the ‘sameness’ better than the ‘separateness’. To me, this made me arrive to a place of awareness beyond logical thoughts and explanations, to direct connectedness with being… Today I embrace the buddhist approach and the taoist views to living and interacting. The sense is I am dwelling in a universal limitless ‘space’ where I feel at home.
Hello Everybody,
Born in November 1965 on Bonaire, a small island in the Caribbean, which at that time was the part of the country known as The Netherlands Antilles. My parents named me Glenn. We moved from Bonaire to live in Aruba, where I grew up mostly. In my late teens I relocated to The Netherlands to study medicine, but after 3 years of study I dropped out and returned to Aruba to help a friend set up a Windsurf business. That was 1988, when that sport started to boom. I grew up in a Catholic / Protestant family within a multicultural society with multi-spirituality, particularly impregnated with African / American indigenous belief patterns. Asian beliefs are also influential in my life. At this moment I live in Groningen, The Netherlands, where I teach and research at the University of Groningen.
Being able to participate in this course and meet you all is a true blessing! During our first session I experienced how practicing and learning together is a powerfully magical way to connect and generate merit. I look forward to continue on this path with you all and am thankful to the Open Hearth Project and Susan for the space and the guidance.
Supporting discovery instead of filling a cup with teachings is a beautiful aspect of learning which we may explore both in our thinking, experience and practice. Thank you Jo, for sharing your particular light with which you illuminate these qualities of our discovery.
Thank you Elizabeth, for reminding me about the difference in caring for someone and taking care of someone and how this may impact the interaction between student and teacher. Also, to make a conscious choice and having the will or willingness to practice or enter the path of meditation as one of the markers for the tool of choosing.
