Engaging With Mental Illness

"The Buddha said if you want to care for me you should care for the sick".



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Martin Luther King and Thich Nhat Hanh

Martin Luther King said in 1967: ‘Before you finish eating breakfast, you’ve depended on more than half the world.’ Dr King was making a philosophical point with moral consequences. ‘We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,’ he said. Therefore ‘whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.’ That’s an argument for solidarity with people who are suffering or persecuted, wherever they may be.

Dr King probably had Christian sources for these ideas, but earlier in 1967 he nominated Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk who campaigned against the Vietnam War, for the Nobel Peace Prize. Thich Nhat Hanh spoke constantly about the interconnectedness of the human condition, drawing on Indra’s Net, a traditional Buddhist image of life. The net is infinite in dimensions and has a jewel at each intersection which reflects all the others. At every point we see endless reflections showing the net’s infinite scope.



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Andrew Strauss, Compassion and the Buddha

Lords was awash with red yesterday on the second day of the Ashes Test Match. Red caps, red shirts and even red adverts marked the Ruth Strauss Foundation, which, as we’ve heard, former England captain Andrew Strauss has established to commemorate his wife, who died of lung cancer. As well as raising money for research, Strauss wants to encourage openness about death and grief, especially among men.

Finding a measured response to suffering is one of the fundamental challenges that Buddhism identifies. The Buddha, himself, is a balanced figure who exemplifies compassionate gentleness but is also tough and heroic, abandoning comfort to confront life in its unvarnished truth. And his teachings suggest that the key to balanced emotional awareness is distinguishing different kinds of emotions.................



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Mindfulness and the Environment

I've included this piece by Professor Tina Beattie because of the reference to picking up and disposing of just one piece of litter a day as in our Daily Mindfulness Exercise.

(Professor Beattie is the Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Roehampton in London and Director of the Digby Stuart Research Centre for Religion, Society and Human Flourishing.)

Sixty years ago the Thames was declared biologically dead. Today it’s one of the cleanest urban rivers in the world. I live on a houseboat on the tidal Thames and I swim in the river throughout the year, surrounded by the plop and splash of leaping fish and gazed upon by curious grebes, swans, herons and coots. Colonies of seals are breeding in the Thames estuary, and porpoises have been spotted as far upstream as Richmond. This transformation needed policy change and laws to control industrial pollution, but it’s sustained by armies of volunteers who gather litter and keep records of the river’s wildlife and ecology.

The Today programme is listened to by over 7 million people every week. Imagine the impact we would have on our environment if every one of us picked up just one piece of litter a day, and resolved to avoid buying anything plastic one day a week. Such small changes won’t save the ecosystem, but they can be potent reminders of how, just because we can’t do everything, there’s no excuse for not doing anything. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”




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Vesak and Mental Health Week

Vishvapani offers the story of Kisagotami as a model for how we might respond to others’ mental
health struggles – something Prince William has done, referring to his own experience. But it goes further. Kisagotami's dead child represents the painful truths that we can neither face nor let go in all our fragile, impermanent, interconnected lives. Recognising her child’s death didn't just restore Kisagotami’s sanity. It connected her to others, prompting an insight into the human condition that was the Buddha’s real message.

The story ends as Kisagotami returns to the Buddha, bows and says: ‘The work of the mustard seed is done.’



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The Loss of Biodiversity

Something important is happening when scientists start talking about the good life. In principle at least, science has left discussion of values to religion and the arts. But in the ecological crisis, the long-held distinction between facts and values is breaking down. The environment is seen as a vast feedback system that’s being reshaped by human behaviour. Our individual actions are magnified on a planetary scale and reflected back to us as environmental change.

That connection between actions and consequences is the heart of ethics, but it’s not the role of scientists to tell us what our values should be. So where can we find an alternative idea of the good life? And what social narrative offers an environmentally sustainable understanding of what makes us happy?




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Global warming

Everyone wants to be happy; but when we look for happiness in immediate pleasures or prioritise our own interests over others, we turn happiness into an object that we think we can grasp. But Buddhism suggests that the grasping mentality is itself an important part of what makes us unhappy. If that’s true of individuals, it’s also true of society. In either case the alternative is fostering the conditions that support our long term wellbeing.

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager, is admirably impatient and rightly demands that we recognise climate change as a crisis that requires urgent action. But acting in ways that are effective in the long term means recognising that we need to think freshly and think big..................

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American poet Mary Oliver by Vishvapani

Many British people, even those who read poetry, might not have heard of the American poet Mary Oliver, who died on Thursday aged 83. But in the US she was loaded with honours and won a wide readership for poems expressing a distinctively modern kind of spirituality.

Her most famous poem is The Summer Day, which starts with the ancient religious question, ‘Who Made the world?’ Then the poet gazes at a grasshopper that’s landed in her palm as she walks through the fields, and reflects that the answer lies in engaging with what’s before her with care and curiosity. ’I don't know exactly what a prayer is,’ she says. ‘I do know how to pay attention’...........................



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The Space Race and Our Precious Earth by Jasvir Singh

This is likely to be an important year when it comes to the environment, be it by managing the impact of climate change, increasing the use of renewable energies, or reducing our reliance on single-use plastics. We have a short window of opportunity to change our own direction of travel when it comes to how we treat the world, and we should make the most of it whilst we still can.

As we enter this new Space Age with wonder and excitement, I believe that we would do well to keep at the front of our minds the precious and unique world we live on. After all, it’s still the only one we truly know.......................



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