The Middle Way

By Kim Allen, Heartwood Journal, BIN, 2013

 

Catherine McGee is a teacher at Gaia House in England, the sister Insight institution to IMS and Spirit Rock. She is currently involved with the Earth Initiative being put forth by Buddhist teachers in the Insight and other traditions. She shared her perspectives on the Middle Way, new faces of Awakening, and the deepening network of international Insight practitioners. Heartwood connected with her via Skype and email.

 

Heartwood: You are a teacher at Gaia House. Many readers are more familiar with IMS and Spirit Rock, and less so with the sister institution in England. Could you explain the connection between these institutions and the teachers who founded them?

 

Catherine McGee: The founding teachers of Gaia House were Christina Feldman and Christopher Titmuss. They are peers with Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg and were all practicing in Asia around the same time. Christina and Christopher began teaching in India, and after some years they came to the UK and established Gaia House, 30 years ago.

 

At Gaia House, the major Theravada influences have come from various Thai forest monastic traditions, as Christopher had been a monk with Ajahn Buddhadasa and Ajahn Dhammadaro in Thailand. The Gaia House Dharma culture also included a significant Mahayana perspective: Christina had practiced with the Tibetan teacher Geshe Rabten, and Stephen and Martine Batchelor (who soon joined as guiding teachers) had studied and practiced within Tibetan and Zen traditions. In the beginning I think it would be fair to say that Gaia House was known for taking a somewhat iconoclastic approach. For example, for the first years there were no Buddha images, and practitioners did not necessarily identify themselves as Buddhist, although there was still a great respect for the Buddha’s teachings.  

 

We have also developed a relationship with the Ajahn Chah lineage. For instance, Ajahn Sucitto and others come regularly to teach, and we are delighted that a member of the Bhikkhuni sangha will come in 2015. That is very much in line with Gaia House's culture.

 

HW: What role does Gaia House play relative to the urban sanghas that people attend for regular practice?

 

CMcG: Things have evolved a bit differently in Europe than what you have in the US right now. But to give a brief overview: About 25 years ago, teachers from Gaia House encouraged students to set up sitting groups so that students could be in touch outside of retreat, and these have continued. Also, around 1997, practitioners in London asked if teachers from Gaia House could come and teach a daylong or a weekend. This idea spread, such that teachers from Gaia House began regularly going to various places, such as London, Cardiff, Sheffield, Oxford, Cambridge etc – quite a few.

 

Gaia House teachers have mostly not become Resident or Local Guiding Teachers of community sanghas, as occurs in some North American groups. Here in the UK the Insight scene isn’t as large as in North America; we have fewer teachers. Also, there has not been a training program equivalent to the Community Dharma Leader program at Spirit Rock. It is inspiring to see the reach of the urban sanghas in the USA, and perhaps at some point we can move in that direction.

 

HW: What inspires you about teaching? What areas of the Dharma are most prevalent in your teaching right now?

 

CMcG: What inspires me about teaching is the privilege of witnessing the unfolding process. Seeing a person develop into more authenticity and freedom.

 

As for the Dharma, what I'm really interested in is the Middle Way between all extremes, and the integration of qualities that can sometimes seem like opposites. A particular interest for me is the integration of clear seeing and sensitivity: Sometimes one can see clearly but lack sensitivity or be sensitive without the objectivity to handle it skillfully. Both qualities are necessary for transformation. Sitting in the Middle Way where we can see "this is not me, not mine, not myself" and at the same time be intimate and utterly sensitive to the phenomena. We can say: "It may not be me and mine, but it's not other than me and mine either."

 

This is the way to handle the sankharas – the "programming" that we live with. Through the centers of body, speech, and mind, we learn to handle the sankharas more skillfully. Being right there with the body, intimate with the energetics of the life force – that is actually where the seeing occurs, where we can soften and widen around the sankharas, and where they can begin to self-liberate.

 

Other potent pairs include love and power, or serenity and aliveness. As Rumi says, "Sitting at the threshold where the two worlds meet."

 

HW: How would you describe care for the environment from a Dharma perspective? Some teachers bring up the second precept or all of sila, others frame it more in terms of interdependence – what resonates most for you at this time?

 

CMcG: What resonates most for me at the moment are the radical implications of not-self. We are inclined to want to conceive of ourselves in relation to the environment. The Buddha talks about this in the sutta called The Root of All Things (MN 1): The untrained mind always conceives of oneself in relationship to something, and here he uses the four elements to illustrate this. For example: one conceives oneself as "earth" or oneself in earth, oneself as apart from earth, or earth as "mine." Even with the idea of "me caring for the environment," we might still be conceiving of ourselves as separate in relation to the environment. As if there is "me" and there is "the environment."

 

I am interested in exploring the Dharma of knowing that we are not separate from the environment: the environmental crisis is not me, not mine, not myself, but neither is it other than me and mine. Where does that leave us?  Here we might find the Middle Way. The intimate encounter where what moves us to respond is our love and wisdom in balance. Practicing with this perspective asks us to see where we take birth as self and thereby conceive of other, as in "I" and "the environment."

 

Conceiving of self in relation to the environmental crisis will likely leave us feeling helpless or striving too hard. I can see for myself that if I push myself into becoming ("I must be someone who does something to save the world!") or shrink into non-becoming ("get me out of here!") – both are dukkha. The climate crisis can lead us to awaken simply because "I" as a separate self has to open up here – we have to meet this together. This, for me, is a lived expression of understanding not-self.

 

I am interested in the image of Awakening we may be consciously or unconsciously carrying, and how this may need to broaden. In our Theravadan heritage, certain aspects of Awakening seem to be emphasized, such as the beautiful qualities of calm, equanimity, and spaciousness. I think we need to consider whether our ideas of Awakening fully include passion and action too. We certainly need grounding and wisdom to inform our sensitivity, action, and passion. But imagine what might be possible if we put passionate action and silent contemplation together.

 

Thich Nhat Hanh said the next Buddha will be the Sangha. I wonder what that might mean if it were true. We have a different set of causes and conditions to work with than existed in the pre-industrial world of 500 BCE. Awakening is Awakening, but how it manifests as a response that is intelligent and attuned may look different. Perhaps today, one way that “com-passion” may be understood is as Sangha working together with passion to express our collective Awakening.

 

HW: Beautiful, thank you. To move into some of those particular responses, you are currently involved in organizing the Insight teacher community for Earth Care Week at the beginning of Oct. What will happen during that week and in the lead-up to it?

 

CMcG: At the International Vipassana Teachers' meeting in June, a large number of those present committed to participating in Earth Care Week, which will be Oct 1-7. I've been part of a team with Mary Grace Orr and Gil Fronsdal to get ECW going, along with One Earth Sangha who will be hosting the event and providing a place for discussion and sharing ideas and inspirations. (Ed: see http://www.oneearthsangha.org/articles/earth-care-week/). These could be Dharma talks, events, service projects, discussions, etc. The idea is for people to co-create these things over the time between now and October at a local level and for this week to serve as a springboard for our earth care throughout the year.

 

There is also another response, which is likely to be called the Buddhist Environmental Initiative, being developed by a group of Dharma teachers. It will include a number of practice orientations and commitments for our body, speech, and mind that express our Buddhist undertaking to live in harmony with the environment. We hope that many Buddhists might feel inspired to join in with this. When this is ready, it will be available via One Earth Sangha, who are acting as a hub for Green Earth Sanghas anywhere to meet and share resources and actions.

 

I hope the effect of all of this is to encourage people to enter into the engagement through whatever doorway speaks to their heart. It may be environmental justice, species preservation, or capping atmospheric warming. Whatever lights each of our fires is welcome and will help us move forward.

 

Beyond Earth Care Week, there are a number of other initiatives from the international teachers meeting that are in the process of being developed, including a group looking at social narrative and climate change, as well as a group considering how to support social resilience in the face of the social impact of climate change.

 

HW: Yes, it seems that Earth Care Week and other collaborations are helping to tie together the Insight community in a greater way right now. How do you see this at present, and how might these connections and collaborations evolve in the future?

 

All this linking-up between different sanghas and countries within our network really lights up my heart! I feel that what is happening across the Insight community, such as BIN and the Earth Care initiatives, has been there in potential, just waiting to blossom.

 

It seems to me that as we open to the human-caused devastation on the planet, we are asked to realize that this is a breach in the boundless heart, which comes from our believing ourselves to be separate. If we wish to move in the direction of healing, we are asked to meet all the breaches in the boundless heart, all the ways "self" and "other" has been built up to create and maintain privilege for some over others. The boundless heart becomes more available as we let go of clinging to the sense of a separate self.  

 

This is indeed a vast undertaking: to hold everything in our heart and respond from the understanding that everything is included and nothing can be left out. All beings, all arenas of suffering, and all of the Earth. It asks us to take the seat of the Middle Way – where the script has not previously been written, where life arises fresh, awake, responsive, intelligent and humble. What joy and real meaning to know that we do this for each other, and with each other.

 

You ask how these connections might evolve. I don’t know, but if indeed the next Buddha is the Sangha, maybe this tying together is a small part of that vision. Here, Sangha means all sincere beings who have a path of ethics, wholeness and wisdom (sila, samadhi, pañña). Our small Insight Network could be part of contributing to this human cooperation and Awakening in response to many levels of suffering on this planet.