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Meditation, Interbeing & Emotional Upskilling with Suzie Brown
958 Plays25 days ago
Friends! Here’s a D&M (Dharma & Meditation) conversation I recorded with mindfulness meditation teacher and founder of Australian Parents for Climate Action Suzie Brown while visiting Narara Eco Village last week.
If you’ve ever felt anxious, unsure how to process difficult/obstinate emotions, or sad for no reason, this episode will provide ample tools for stilling the mind and relating to yourself – and the world – with kindness.
On that note, I start the ep with an emo travel diary entry, and how a snaggy creek helped me see my internal struggles in a whole new light.
IN THIS CONVO
🕊️ When you feel sad for no reason despite the trappings of success
🕊️ Can we *really* choose happiness?
🕊️ The pleasant/unpleasant emotional pinball machine
🕊️ The magic of noticing
🕊️ Name it to tame it
🕊️ Kindfulness
🕊️ How to establish a non-militant meditation habit
🕊️ Rejigging negativity bias
🕊️ The R.A.I.N practice for difficult emotions
🕊️ Dharma + ecodharma explained
🕊️ How interbeing can solve the polycrisis
🕊️ Long Shower Syndrome
🕊️ Resource guilt
🕊️ Parents for Climate!
🧙♀️ LINKY POOS
Weekly online (by donation) Sky Sangha Meditation gathering
Australian Parents for Climate Action!
Give Suzie a hoy at hello@suziebrown.au
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Riskillians' Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
race scallia
00:00:06
Speaker
Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned into Riskillians, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that'll help us stay afloat if our modern systems
Travel Tales and Emotional Impact
00:00:18
Speaker
don't.
00:00:18
Speaker
I am gratefully recording in the back of a van near a river flanked by casuarinas and yellow robins in Gringai country in the Hunter Valley. Jordan and i have been travelling for nearly a month now, and i don't know if this happens to any of you, but sometimes hitting the road can hit hard emotionally.
00:00:38
Speaker
Wherever you go, there you are, as they say, and when I'm travelling, there's a lot more of me to encounter, given the lack of cats or chickens or ferments or dirty saucepans demanding my attention.
Struggles with Mental Clutter
00:00:50
Speaker
So, to be honest, I've felt kind of bogged down by invisible personal clutter, in stark contrast to the rugged scenery and wheeling birds around me which seem so wild and so free.
00:01:02
Speaker
I've been wrestling with so many different things in my mind. Work, money, health, motivation, contribution, childhood wounds, generalised doom and gloom, and the very sophisticated subconscious strategies that stop me from writing a book.
00:01:17
Speaker
But the biggest struggle of all, the final boss, is the struggle with struggle itself. I always get to this point of imagining how much time and energy I'd have if I wasn't constantly navigating an invisible obstacle course of my own making.
Learning from Nature
00:01:32
Speaker
Because after all, i have it pretty damn good. And this is what I was mulling on while sitting on the banks of a creek at dusk with ducks when I noticed a sign about snags.
00:01:45
Speaker
As part of a remediation program, the sign explained, woody material like logs and branches were being placed back into the creek to improve the health of the ecosystem. These so-called snags provide habitat for fish and other aquatic critters, perches for birds, and they host algae and invertebrates which support the food web and in turn improve the quality of the water.
00:02:09
Speaker
Far from deleterious, bits of woody crap create dynamic flows of bubbly, oxygenated water, as well as deep, still pools where baby fish and turtles and nudists can hang out.
00:02:22
Speaker
But in the past, humans have systematically dredged rivers of debris, seeing this debris as an impediment to boating and fishing and agriculture and aesthetics, rather than an essential part of the ecosystem.
00:02:36
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Removing snags is a major cause of erosion, turbid water, and loss of biodiversity. To a river, obstructions are essential. And I wondered, and am actively wondering as I record this, whether the solution to my struggles isn't so much a solution, but a new way of seeing, a deep learning from the creek, from nature.
Guest Introduction: Susie Brown
00:03:00
Speaker
Could mental barriers like the logs in the creek be welcomed as part of a healthy personal ecosystem? places to rest a while, deepen into, and resist the rushing madness of modern life.
00:03:13
Speaker
I'm working on accepting rather than clearing away the parts of myself that feel like big, awkward hindrances, as per the Creek's recommendation, just in case these obstructions are meant to be there.
00:03:25
Speaker
You know that I always try and keep it personal on this podcast, because the personal realm is where we all live, and I believe where change starts – So when we visited Narara Ecovillage last week, which is an intentional community on the central coast, I jumped at the chance to record a conversation with Susie Brown, who calls Narara Ecovillage home.
00:03:46
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And Susie is not only an environmental activist and co-founder of Australian Parents for Climate Action, but also a mindfulness meditation and dharma teacher too.
Connecting Buddhism and Climate Crisis
00:03:56
Speaker
So if you, like me, have ever felt anxious or unsure how to process difficult emotions or sad for no reason, this episode will give you a whole bunch of tools for stilling the mind and relating to yourself with kindness.
00:04:11
Speaker
What is so great about Susie is that she connects the Dharma, or the teachings of the Buddha, to our current planetary predicament, highlighting how concepts of non-self and inter-being a key to loving and tending and defending the world that is impossible to separate from ourselves.
00:04:30
Speaker
So before we saunter into this really beautiful conversation, i have a couple of announcements. One is that, thanks to the community of sensational humans who support Reskilliance on Patreon, I've started winding back my freelance writing work, which is my bread and butter.
00:04:48
Speaker
The freelance writing is something that I've done for over 10 years, And whilst I really enjoy it, it feels like a bit of a security blanket. And of course, we all need a level of security. But for me, this tightrope between writing and speaking for others and speaking for myself and on behalf of the more than human world has really become increasingly wobbly.
00:05:10
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And I've known for a while that something needs to change. So with that a little bit of extra income from Patreon, there's a net there. There's a thing I can fall into and fall back on.
Patreon Gratitude and Advice
00:05:21
Speaker
And I'm so excited and grateful and daunted at the prospect of taking my own work a little bit more seriously. So that is an elaborate thank you to everyone on Patreon who's pledged a bit each month to fund the show and also prove that we don't need to sell each other's precious attention to advertisers in order to survive.
00:05:39
Speaker
So if you want to be part of the Patreon community supporting Riskillians, we're at patreon.com forward slash Riskillians. And please don't sign up using the Patreon app. on your phone because it siphons off a 30% fee, greedy little buggers.
00:05:54
Speaker
So go through a browser on your phone or your laptop. A very special thank you to the new patrons of the show, Sarah, Hannah, Bessie, Laurie and Jess. Laurie actually came to one of George's New Peasant screenings, that was the one in Sydney, and bought us a delicious ginger kombucha for our travels, which is just next level patronage. Thank you so much, Laurie.
00:06:15
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And I also want to give a shout out to listener James. Hey, James. It sounds as though you have a lot of people who love the pants off you and reckon you're on the right path. And they wanted you to know that publicly.
Susie's Journey to Mindfulness
00:06:26
Speaker
Alrighty, let's get into meditation, into being and upskilling your emotional toolkit with Dharma teacher, Susie Brown.
00:06:36
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For me, in in my 20s, in that sort of search for the right path and meaning in life, I think, I remember being deeply unhappy in yeah ah yeah my late 20s. I was quite anxious.
00:06:52
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And really, even though I had a good job and um was contributing you know to environmental problems, work and on the face of it you know all was great but I felt unhappy for no reason that's kind of the way the way I call it because had all this privilege and everything was fine but I really was unhappy and I at the time and got quite burnt out from the environmental work because really what I tried was to find my meaning and identity through work and that I was going to save the planet single-handedly and so I just threw myself into my job and worked and worked and you know with environmental work it's like
00:07:36
Speaker
how long is a piece of string? Like the work is endless. um And so I just wore myself out trying to succeed and make change in a really just inevitably a challenging environment. So with the burnout, you know, I um and i had to change, like I was forced to do something different. So apart from traveling to India again, um i went to a meditation retreat.
00:08:03
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A friend suggested, oh, I think you might get a lot out of this. So I went on a seven-day silent retreat. And yeah, i realized there that that the unhappiness is a choice.
00:08:16
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you you know, I didn't have to be unhappy. i could choose to notice the beauty and joy around me and choose to not get sort of caught up by the pain and the stress of inevitable pain and stress.
00:08:31
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And yeah, so just through that meditation retreat, and then I continued on meditating and learning about the Buddhist Dharma, that really turned me around to be able to be you know less anxious and happier and ah more and more happy oh brilliant there's so many juicy tangents that I'm contemplating where to go which one to go down but I'm reminded of an incident a little thing that happened to me quite recently that I think encapsulates a question that I have for you Susie which is um
00:09:04
Speaker
It's a bit random, but I was at this middle of nowhere property buying some chickens off a poultry breeder. She's got the best chickens in town, but she is quite the eccentric woman in the middle of the bush. And she's got a pack of giant polar bear sized Marema dogs that greets you at the gate.
00:09:21
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And I'd never been there before. And she literally shouted to towards the car as we arrived. Don't get out. Don't move. The dogs have you surrounded. So eventually I got out of the car and she was like, just move very slowly and...
00:09:34
Speaker
um this is just them getting to know you and it'll be all good in a minute but one of them was just looking at me kind of askance and maybe he growled there was some kind of antagonistic behavior coming from this one particular dog towards me and this woman looked at me and she was like you've got something going on you know you've got something going on inside of you and I bristled and I felt really defensive and i was like not you know The dog's not discerning some dark part of me, are they? like what What if my soul is just in tatters? What is this dog sniffing on me? And i suppose I'm thinking of that moment because it it gave me pause to wonder about my psyche and my state of mind and a field that maybe was emitting and this dog could perceive.
00:10:19
Speaker
Maybe it was just a really aggressive dog and wanted me to to get the hell out of his land, his kingdom. But... I wonder, Susie, you've mentioned that you had you're experiencing anxiety and you could make that choice to reorient yourself to you know the beauty and the gratitude and the happiness that you were missing in your life. And i just have this constant question around,
00:10:41
Speaker
Am I just fixed the way that I am? you know Am I just this stressed out because of my genetics, because of whatever internal scripts I've got going on? Am I that person who's going to scare dogs who can perceive those invisible things?
00:10:57
Speaker
Or is there hope is there hope for me? how How flexible and how malleable is my my mind and my presence? like I feel like i believe two things at once, which is that we're infinitely malleable and we're just like a river of consciousness that is constantly kind of flowing and changing.
00:11:15
Speaker
And that also I can easily feel like a victim of my genes or my... early trauma or whatever so I put that to you as someone who is obviously very well versed in the psyche and all of those spaces like how much change is possible and do you think that dog might um lick my hand next time I see them if I start meditating
00:11:35
Speaker
Yeah, wow. Definitely your description of a sort of river of consciousness is
Modern Living and Mental Health
00:11:43
Speaker
apt. I love that. And yes, of course, we're conditioned by our genes and our childhood and the experiences that we have.
00:11:54
Speaker
um And that, you know, we we have a kind of temperament that we're born with. But all of that actually is malleable and there's science to to prove it. You know, the neuroplasticity is the sort of most recent exploration into that, showing how much you can change through practices like meditation.
00:12:16
Speaker
And, you know, there's lots of things like meditation, obviously, and and that changing the way, the habits of mind. So, yeah, you can change the habit of your mind, To go from noticing what's wrong all the time and the problem to noticing what's right and the yeah what you're grateful for or what's beautiful or the joy around you.
00:12:37
Speaker
But it does take practice, so it's not easy depending on how strong those pathways, neural pathways are. So that's sort of from a scientific point of view.
00:12:48
Speaker
It's up to us to want to be happy or to open, you know, to open to different a different way of being. Our culture, the sort of particularly Western capitalist culture, is so negative, like the negativity bias is so strong in the media, in the messages that we see, and the kind of excitement of conflict and, you know, problems and...
00:13:12
Speaker
Wars and all ah all of that exposure. It's very hard. You know, you really have to make a huge effort to get out of that um mindset that we we get from the you know a lot of the cultural messages around us.
00:13:25
Speaker
And then, you know, everyone has different family upbringing, childhood and so on. And then, yeah, if you're sort of genetic, like I'm genetically predisposed to anxiety. So that's in my family lineage.
00:13:39
Speaker
And so I've had to work with work with that for, you know, 25 years and generally very successfully at at being able to free myself from from that, you know heavy anxiety and to be able to like it's still it's it's still there but it's okay like I'm okay to sometimes feel anxious and to have these unpleasant feelings because I know that there's beautiful fern outside this window that I'm looking at and I can tune into that yeah so you absolutely have a choice and can shift the way you experience life and then yeah the what what you're putting out into the
00:14:20
Speaker
dogs or the people around you that dog really shook me up it's like wow who am i really yeah yeah and i think animals absolutely pick up on some more subtle um energies um or emotions or help the way our health is they they do pick up on that for sure yeah Yeah, it feels tragic to me that I know that mental health is a massive crisis and it can feel very complicated, like complicated terrain to understand what's going on for this person and how can we tend to that. But within this crisis,
00:15:00
Speaker
context that is fundamentally at odds with our primal, um for want of a better word, bodies and and basic primary needs. I mean, that's how I feel. There's just a fundamental schism between a lot of the habits we have as modern humans and the the environment that we find ourselves in. Like we can go I'm sure, for days and days and days, maybe weeks, maybe years, without actually making contact with the earth in a city in a city environment. You can just walk walk on concrete. you're not hearing birdsong or you're not sitting in circle you're eating strange foods that the body doesn't recognize and it's like is it any wonder that we feel this latent like simmering background anxiety and that feels tragic to me that it's at once something that's so complicated and it's such a struggle for so many and then there could be this simple antidote which is
00:15:53
Speaker
Living in alignment with our ancestral template, but how how hard is it to bridge that that gap? And so I wonder in your life, what practices do you have to to keep your body feeling like it's safe and in in context?
00:16:08
Speaker
Yeah, that's so important. And yeah as you say about the anxiety and depression of crisis or epidemic that we we find our community in, especially younger people, and it's just tragic that almost like the younger you are, the more likely you are to have anxiety and depression now.
00:16:29
Speaker
I see that that's, yeah, due to this way of living that's so out of whack from what is soothing to the nervous system, what is grounding and connecting to the earth for us, to that sense of connection and being part of everything as we actually are, is lost by the way people are mostly living. So on their phone, on their device, most of the day, like,
00:16:59
Speaker
eight, ten twelve hours a day lot of young people are just staring at a phone or a computer completely disconnected to the from the the world, the physical world around them from the weather, from the trees, from the sounds.
Mindfulness Practices and Emotional Regulation
00:17:14
Speaker
yeah And then the food, like, it just shocks me still how much, you know, the fast food chains, for example, are in the area I live, it's huge. Like, that's what young people are into. And, and you know, I could go on, but, yeah, we we know that this is a problem these are problems, but...
00:17:34
Speaker
ah yeah, the complexity is in how to address it, like how do we change those forces, which are largely coming from, you know, the big corporations that want to make money out of that. So i think that's really where the problem lies is greed amongst those big companies that have figured out so well how to manipulate and capture our attention.
00:17:58
Speaker
Yeah, so i often think like my generation, so I'm Generation right? and gen x we so i didn't have devices when i was growing up think we got a computer when i was in high school but you know it was like a green and black screen it was like really basic so yeah growing up like that as opposed to how young teenagers are growing up now is just so incredibly different And it's changing, it has changed people's whole nervous system and neural pathways to, yeah, feel disconnected, lonely, isolated.
00:18:36
Speaker
It's sort of obvious to me why why and how this has come about. I'm so sorry, your question though was about practices to um counter that. For me, obviously, getting outside into nature and just understanding even just sitting on the grass or on the ground that in itself is enough in a way like there's a hill a slope out the back of my house because we're in a valley here so i just go up the slope and just sit there looking at the view on the grass especially if I'm unwell like that really makes a difference I think they call it earthing there's a bit of research into that
00:19:18
Speaker
yeah and then we have forest as you know a beautiful forest around here so i try and walk in there or go to the dam we've got a dam seems like a not good enough word it's more like a lake um so i swim in there as in oh well half a year as much as i can go to the beach And then being in an eco village, of course, there's endless opportunity to connect with people in an authentic way.
00:19:49
Speaker
So sitting in, we all have, we have all sorts of different ways to connect, but I do dancing. so it's called Dancing in the Dark. We do just free movement to music an hour one hour every wednesday night so i do that and tuesday nights we have a meditation group so i spend about 45 minutes meditating with a group in a circle just silently and then we do a lot of weeding and gardening together that's gardening for me is a real connection like that's very important to me yeah and then with meditation and mindfulness practice
00:20:26
Speaker
I'm fortunate that that's my job so I get to reconnect by teaching most days of the week and even online like I teach often on Zoom or online even meditating with other people in that way is really connecting and grounding and gives you the chance to let go of the busy crazy thoughts the the impressions and pressures from the outside world and just be present so practicing that awareness so mindfulness awareness of
00:21:00
Speaker
what's all those negative influences or pressures be it media or technology or crappy food or whatever we're not going to notice that that's happening to us unless we have the mindfulness to see it so i think that's fundamental fundamentally and underpins everything What is this magical power of noticing? Because I'm noticing that simply noticing shifts things. It's like it it's lubricating for these hard places that I find myself. Like it actually, it's like the ultimate undoing. I'm not doing anything but observing or noticing or or illuminating and then magically observing.
00:21:42
Speaker
I've got room to to move again. So i don't know, can you explain that? Yeah. How that works? Yeah. So generally with our experience, so be it emotions or thoughts or whatever's happening,
00:21:58
Speaker
We're in this push-pull relationship with everything, mostly, and that's kind of the default kind of autopilot is to, oh, there's an unpleasant emotion, I'm going to get rid of that.
00:22:10
Speaker
Oh, there's a pleasant feeling, I want more of that. We get knocked around or pushed around by these, you know, that we call it the pleasant and the unpleasant feelings in sort of Buddhist speak.
00:22:23
Speaker
And... we're not aware that we're doing it so we we're sort of like ah ah a ball in a pinball machine you know bouncing around from experience to experience without consciously choosing what we want to do um and until we bring this noticing that you described so beautifully and we can see ah I'm reacting to that. That person said something and now I've, you know, they criticise, I felt criticised so now I'm feeling, you know, bad inside. I might be feeling shame or hurt or something and then that's how I'm relating to the rest of my day, you know, to the next person I speak to.
00:23:04
Speaker
And we don't realise we're doing that until we slow down and notice. ah okay I feel hurt okay feel shame and then simply by so there's a phrase Dan Siegel coined the phrase is name it to tame it and name it to tame it means yeah if you name it ah hurt hurt you're You're taming it in the sense that you calm it down, not controlling it, but more just calming it down because you're shining the light of compassion on it rather than trying to get rid of it, you know. And anything that we battle with actually grows and gets stronger and we get in a constant battle and that's where tension, anxiety, stress, that's where it comes from, battling with how we're feeling and and what's happening.
00:23:54
Speaker
And so, yeah just by... naming it and then being kind kindness is key with mindfulness some people call it kindfulness because yeah bringing kindness with it is crucial to softening everything the yeah I love that your smile is just like so radiant and I'm wondering how many minutes a day I would need to meditate to smile like that yeah
00:24:27
Speaker
The first first thing I thought when I met you this morning was what a radiant smile you had. Well, isn't that just like the ultimate, again, tragedy of not recognising what we already have? Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
00:24:40
Speaker
yeah No, you definitely radiate a real ah joy as well. Thank you. Well, I suppose more to the point, what does your practice look like day to day meditation wise? Yeah.
00:24:53
Speaker
Yeah, so I am a bit of a sporadic meditator. I'm not one of those highly disciplined people who's like up every morning, 45 minutes silent meditation or, you know, morning and night.
00:25:07
Speaker
I'm really not a morning person. I struggle. I feel pretty average in the morning. um So i meditate in the evening and, yeah, take meditation.
00:25:18
Speaker
whatever time usually about i am for 25 minutes in the evening and just sit and meditate the way to try and get a habit is to find a um another habit thing that happens every day and tie it to that yeah so my the thing i tied my meditation habit to is my daughter going to bed so i've got a 12 year old beautiful daughter and So she goes to bed, I meditate.
00:25:43
Speaker
So that's my way of doing a daily practice. So that's like formal meditation, but informally walking outside,
00:25:54
Speaker
opening the senses to the sounds the beauty around whatever's around me i mean i just do that as a matter of course i think now but that was a practice that i cultivated and then probably the other most powerful thing for me and i think helps many people is this working with your thoughts with mindfulness so most people have a negativity bias in their brain and to notice what's a problem what what's wrong and part of that is the what's called the inner critic which comes out um whenever you know something goes wrong or you make a mistake or anything you feel embarrassed or shamed the the thoughts the horrible things we say to ourselves in our own mind is just full on
00:26:46
Speaker
So working with that with kindness of like, oh, there's that voice again, trying to help me to fix whatever's gone wrong here. um That's all it's trying to do. And just letting go ah the inner critic.
00:27:00
Speaker
So everyone has different thought habits. Some people have a really strong inner critic and others not so much. For me, I also have worries because of the anxiety, the conditioning of my childhood taught me to worry. My mother was is a big worrier, so I learned to worry good at that.
00:27:20
Speaker
And so I have to notice that during the day, oh, there's a worry, I'm just going to let that one go and just come back to the present Yeah, so that's an all-day kind of practice.
00:27:34
Speaker
Yes, the noticing has really helped me, as I mentioned and as we're speaking about, but I'm curious to know if there are ways of discharging or processing some feelings that I do notice. So I'm doing the noticing. it's like, ooh, noticing that my heart is racing or I'm feeling disgruntled.
00:27:55
Speaker
then I don't really know what to do with that because I'm still feeling like I need to act on that or I want someone to, you know, have sympathy for me because I felt that way or there's like this next step that I haven't been too successful in moving through. Like the letting go, are there tips and tricks you can offer for that part of the process?
00:28:15
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah you highlight something there in your question um about how we feel is up to us We can't look outwards to other people to fix our emotional state.
00:28:31
Speaker
and even though yes other people what they do and say affects us and and you know we feel angry or ah joyful or whatever in response to what people do and say and how they are sure but once we're feeling something we can't expect others to fix how we're feeling or or even to look for external ways to um to fix it yes you can do things that sort of externally that can cheer you up so you could watch a funny tv show or ring ring a friend who's really an uplifting friend yeah definitely there's can be wise or useful things like that but in the end we need to be able to practice with our own emotions and and learn how to be skillful with our emotions so there's a process have you heard of RAIN meditation or RAIN practice so this is ah practice it's an acronym r-a-i-n
00:29:31
Speaker
um So I actually just guided this morning with a group that I teach and we did a RAIN meditation on difficult emotions. So if you're feeling fear or anxiety or grief or anger or hurt or shame, any of those sorts of sort of unpleasant, difficult feelings, ah we did this process where R stands for recognise, oh, okay, I'm feeling anger is here or shame or hurt is here.
00:30:00
Speaker
then A stands for allowing us, allow it to be here, which is a crucial step because we want to get rid of feelings like that because they feel bad. So it seems parrot like a paradox, but actually allowing it to be here is a huge part of that freedom, being able to be free of it because you're not battling it.
00:30:22
Speaker
So allow, okay, fear, fear is here, anger is here, just let it be there. And then eye stands for investigate and it's in the body. So where is it in the the body? Where do I feel it?
00:30:34
Speaker
And you go like with your sort of inner mindfulness, go to that sensations in the body and just... let the thoughts go the story you know the whole story we have about usually about big emotions he said this i said this all of that story just let it go and be with the feeling in the body and to kind of track it in where is it in the belly is it the chest or where is it and what's it like is it tingling or is it um hot cold all those sorts of sensations
00:31:09
Speaker
So track it, that process, and then N stands for nurture, which means like soothe it. So you can put a hand over the part of the body where you feel it and just hold it in a way that's compassionate and kind, sort of like ah you know a parent or a grandparent might hold a child that's upset. You can just hold it in that soothing way and that calm calms the nervous system.
00:31:38
Speaker
So yeah, and that's a approach that's a meditation you can do. There's plenty of guided meditations online you can find if you search rain meditation. Tara Brack is famous for that particular meditation.
00:31:52
Speaker
um But you can do it in the moment. so you get triggered by a conflict with someone for example ah you know a few minutes later they've gone but you're feeling all churned up and really you know on it on high alert and awful so you can do the RAIN process in the moment like ah okay hurt hurt is here and and go through that process allow it to be here feel it in the body and nurture it thank
Eco-dharma and Environmental Awareness
00:32:22
Speaker
you so much that's such a valuable tool
00:32:27
Speaker
I'm wondering if you can help unpack a couple of terms that I've always been a little bit foggy on. One is dharma. And then I've read amongst your your writings and offerings the word eco-dharma, which I was very curious about. So would you be able to speak to those two terms?
00:32:45
Speaker
Sure. Well, big, big questions. But yeah, I mean, well, dharma, to be simple, keep it simple, is the buddha's teachings it's this it's the teachings it's the way of seeing or way of understanding um everything in buddhism there's the three jewels buddha dharma sangha and the uh sangha is community uh our spiritual community and then dharma is the teachings and then buddha is the buddha as in the the
00:33:18
Speaker
person but actually it's more this buddha nature that's in all of us that we can all be awakened and you know free from suffering so that's what that represents um So we're not sort of praying to a god or a Buddha in that or a person. It's more recognising in yourself you the Buddha nature but that's here. So the Dharma is really the teachings and the understanding of what the Buddha taught.
00:33:45
Speaker
Yeah, your question of eco-Dharma. so That's a yeah more recent kind of a term, actually, ah a writer, teacher in the US called David Loy coined that term, as far as I know, has a book called Eco Dhamma.
00:34:01
Speaker
And it's about how the Buddha's buddha's teachings can inform the people way well the environmental crisis I guess simply put simply but the way that we relate to nature or in environment and you know I'm putting inverted commas around environment because often in you know western society it's like there's us people here and there's the environment out there and yeah that's not reality that's not how it is where where we are the environment and everything is the environment and nature anyway in terms of what the buddhist teachings have to say about the environmental kind of crisis or the way we relate to the natural or the non-human world
00:34:51
Speaker
Probably the biggest teaching in there that's so crucial is this sort non-separation and this the the word interbeing was coined by Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, who was an incredible teacher and his whole lineage teach teach so much wisdom about the how we relate to nature and the world.
00:35:19
Speaker
But interbeing is a fantastic word because it... it you know we are interrelating to everything with everything people nature cars the sky like everything um all the time and we just don't realize that interrelation and interconnection of everything and so yeah buddhist practice is a pathway to realizing that so through yeah it sounds lofty but through meditation through being present you actually can connect with everything through in this moment when we are stuck in thoughts or caught up in our emotions we are taken away from that interconnection or that presence yeah so when we're present
00:36:08
Speaker
we can realize that interconnection. um And then to take it it a bit further, the the teaching the Buddha taught, the word is anatta, not self.
00:36:23
Speaker
and So the selflessness, that the self is kind of construct. And so this this is what interbeing is all about, that I am not actually separate to you or to to that tree out there or to to the rain falling from the sky.
00:36:39
Speaker
Like everything is interconnected. And in that interconnection, I realized that actually my body is just made up of the rain falling from the sky, the water in my body and the the heat in my body.
00:36:52
Speaker
The warmth is actually from the sun and you know the food that was grown that I ate and that's giving me heat energy. um And yeah, the same with, you know, the minerals in my body that are from the earth.
00:37:06
Speaker
The air that I breathe, of course, is probably the easiest to feel um that it's the wind blowing through those trees and around the whole earth and it's gone through every person's lungs and every animal's lungs and yeah, that I'm breathing right now.
00:37:24
Speaker
Anyway, so that sort of um sense of I'm not separate from anything. That's the understanding of not self or selflessness that is ah one of the most fundamental Buddhist teachings.
00:37:37
Speaker
But when you realize that, it's like, Well, cutting that forest down is like cutting down myself. You know I'm part of that forest. And so it's a fundamental understanding we need in order to care for the planet and stop trashing, you know, the oceans and the mountains and the forests and everything else and stop killing people in other countries.
00:38:01
Speaker
How would you if you realised and felt that i I'm them, they're me and, yeah, there's not a separation? so it has a lot to offer the buddha dharma has a lot to offer yeah beautiful yeah on this on these travels we've been on the road for maybe nearly a month now and we've been noticing something called long shower syndrome we've been suffering from long shower syndrome which is we're dislocated and disconnected and
00:38:33
Speaker
feeling deprived perhaps of of of cleanliness and opportunities to indulge ourselves so we get in a random shower at a caravan park and shower for maybe three times a length of of time that I would normally have a shower at home and i'm I'm someone who very much believes in like you know in and out shower not to be high and mighty but just because water is you know I feel the preciousness, but I'm wondering about at home how much I participate in those life life ways around me and life support systems and ah very strong feeling of connection to you know our local waterways and catchments and then travelling around and experiencing a severance that has allowed me to take full toll of the amenities without necessarily embodying my values.
00:39:24
Speaker
So there is... something that I feel profoundly and see in my actions and in the actions of others where we don't have a participatory relationship with our place that then allows us to extract and without realizing the ramifications for us and the creatures around us in the wider world. So I wonder, Susie, based on yeah that beautiful explanation of interbeing and eco-dharma and that philosophy of non non-self and complete union with the with the world,
00:39:56
Speaker
ah like being aware of that is that enough or like do we then bed it into our bones by composting and pulling you know sowing carrots and harvesting things and noticing you know the health of the river because we're drinking from it and like how do you how do you bed that in such a great question yes funny you say that about the showers because um you sound like you might be from victoria yeah Is there a Victorian tone or affectation? No, no, no. your... The drought consciousness. Drought consciousness. That's all it was. I was like, do we have an accent? We may do, but no, it was just purely the drought consciousness because I grew up in Melbourne and have been in Victoria most of my life. And now here I am in a place with almost double the rainfall of where I was. So I was down on the Bellarine Peninsula before we moved here to Narara.
00:40:53
Speaker
um which yeah is a very dry area. So we've more than doubled the rainfall here. And there's no shortage of water. Like at the moment, we've last week it rained for five days without stopping. It's too much water.
00:41:07
Speaker
So that's influenced my attitude to water. Like I used to be really, like you so you described, much more conscious and you know a bit obsessive about saving water. But now I'm like, but there's too much water here.
00:41:21
Speaker
you know We have rainwater tanks, entirely rainwater fed in our house. And that's a classic Victorian thing to do, have lots of rainwater storage. um And it's overflowing, like I've got too much water.
00:41:34
Speaker
So anyway, i think that... Being conscious of the place where you are and the the environmental, natural situation, yeah, is really important. And responding to, yeah, the climate and the water and the understanding where's where's north, even something as simple as that.
00:41:56
Speaker
does Do people know where north is, wherever they are? And the the sun, like our house is designed entirely around where the sun comes from. And with blinds and curtains and all these eaves and everything where we always know what the sun is up to because that's how we manage the temperature of the house.
00:42:16
Speaker
It's a basically passive solar house. So those kinds of things get you in tune with the place where you are. And I'm suspecting that most people are not very in tune with things like that, you know, like the the climate and the sun and the moon and the water. Where do people know where their water supply even comes from? i don't know. Often they probably don't. but So I think that's something we can do better.
00:42:44
Speaker
Yeah. But I wanted to to pick up on something, maybe a deeper aspect of this, which is about consumption and our consumption of resources.
00:42:56
Speaker
So you and and I, I'm guessing, are similarly very aware of the resources that we consume. And, you know, many people who ah you know care about the environment are highly aware of yeah water or energy or the material like the things we buy and the the what's involved. and And I, in my work at ACF, that's what I worked on, a program called Green Home, which was all about sustainable living. So the understanding the impact of what you consume and the things you buy and your travel, transport, all of those things.
00:43:34
Speaker
and how you could minimise, like what changes you can you make to really minimise your footprint. If you have that consciousness, you can become hyper aware of it to the point where it's it's almost obsessive. I know my husband and I get, yeah, can be quite obsessive about just not consuming that or minimising that in these minuscule ways. It becomes almost like, yeah. So what I've noticed is there's quite a bit of guilt there amongst that and that those of us who are aware of our impact and trying to minimize our eco footprint and all of that when we consume like there's often a lot of guilt like if we get on an airplane like that's full on you know i feel awful about flying yeah whereas someone who's not aware of that doesn't even care like they don't it's just so interesting the psychology around yeah about this there's no right and wrong no
00:44:32
Speaker
black and white right and wrong about this and so if you have a long shower you know there's no it's not a right and wrong thing to me to my mind that we need to give ourselves some slack and and not beat ourselves up about these kinds of things if you do already have that consciousness you're doing your best is kind of what I'm trying to say Yeah, no, that's a really good point. And we're definitely, most of us are in a context where we have to actively resist or reshape our behaviours, which I think compassionately looking at myself as just a human animal, we're not really designed, I don't think, to have to make these high order decisions about what we consume and how, you know, the quantity and that to me feels like a product of, you know,
00:45:21
Speaker
the times that we're living in and us trying to disentangle ourselves or find a new way of being um but fundamentally creatures in a habitat are responsive and are reciprocal in their in their you know in their waste and in their consumption because i think it's just all part of participating Well, there are just so many different things that I could ask you and we haven't even touched on your work, Parents for Climate.
Activism and Mindfulness Integration
00:45:49
Speaker
um So I just want to acknowledge, put a little air hyperlink for people to follow that tangent if they so desire. I mean, maybe if you just wanted to give us a little little snippet of Parents for Climate, but I have one kind of closing question that I'd like to put to you.
00:46:05
Speaker
Sure, thanks. um Yeah, so having worked for various environment groups over the years, ah jury it was actually during, just before COVID, when you might remember the school strike for climate, so all those demonstrations happening with all the young people coming out into the streets.
00:46:26
Speaker
I went to one of those um down in Melbourne and was just struck how I mean it was incredible all these young people but there were no really young people like your toddlers and babies and small children um and parent obviously parents and I was there as a parent but I realized there was no kind of group or or way of parents getting active on climate and getting their voice out there. So I decided to start the group. So that's yeah where Parents for Climate came from and it's going strong. I think we're up to seven years now.
00:47:03
Speaker
About 22,000 parents around the country have gotten involved and um lots of local groups, people like in-person local groups. So we have one here on the central coast that I've formed. So yeah, it's really awesome. And I actually was the CEO and I stepped back and I'm on the board. I'm not in a paid role anymore and I do mindfulness meditation and dharma teaching as my job these days.
00:47:31
Speaker
But I'm still very involved. and the biggest benefit i see really is this more kind of mental health and spiritual kind of benefit of coming together with other people who care about the same thing you do and who are feeling the grief and the fear and the anxiety for their children and the future um for for everyone but really for their children what will the well be like for their once their children are adults their children even are our children even going to be able to live into an old age like we are um so that kind of
00:48:10
Speaker
Oh my gosh, there's a lot of grief and fear amongst parents about that. And coming together with other people who feel the same way and you can talk about it and so you can feel less alone and then share about you the emotions as we were talking about earlier, just simply sharing emotions.
00:48:32
Speaker
naming I feel so much grief about my child's future or I'm I'm just shit scared about what's going to happen and you know I'm so anxious even just that sharing and like me too I'm feeling that as well it's so so helpful and then the last step that's crucial there is action like doing something together that's positive You feel so much better if you do something. Whatever it is, like we do, we tend to focus on things like meeting with our local Member of Parliament to to ask them to, you know, get the government to do something on, you know, specific, like we're trying to get their target to be zero emissions. for climate carbon, carbon pollution at the moment. But even just like doing an event and inviting other people in the community along and talking about it or getting in the local paper or things like that. All of that, you just feel so much better because you're doing something rather than sitting at home alone feeling
00:49:30
Speaker
deeply afraid and and depressed about it yeah one of the big big reasons i was drawn speaking with you is the way that you've woven together mindfulness and the poly crisis the the big hairy situation that we're we're facing into and ah offering this beautiful fusion of you know peacemaking and equanimity and activism so it's like inner work and outer work and I feel like something that maybe I hang on to too tightly is that if you don't know what to do doing nothing can actually be effective as well because there's a lot of energy and an action that can either be misguided or um takes a lot from you personally and I suppose it's different for all of us but I'm a big fan of
00:50:25
Speaker
you can slow down and in slowing the pace of our life and our mind, that in itself is a ratcheting back of this this train that is kind of hurtling towards the cliff. So I wonder, just in closing, how you feel most effective and does does the inner work need to come before the outer work?
00:50:47
Speaker
Wow, great question. And funnily enough, last weekend I taught a workshop called Deep Rest, compassion and wise action which is exactly on that what you were just talking about love have tuned into that yeah yeah and yeah I mean what that was about is what you're saying that um actually doing more is not always the best approach because um as I've you know experienced in as an activist you can get really burnt out and really ineffective because you you're not looking after yourself
00:51:22
Speaker
So we need to definitely look after ourselves in order to be useful in any kind of action. But also, yeah, it is deeper. As you said, it's like stepping off that treadmill of consumption and overworking that where you know that our society has taken hook, line and sinker, that we should be going faster and more and technology's made things go faster and we're getting dragged along by this technology and we're not enjoying it most people I know are like I hate my phone I want to you know burn the thing like and and all the million apps that we that are dinging at us and all that stuff so yeah this opportunity to just
00:52:07
Speaker
let it all go and just rest and be present and let go of everything is so important as a practice and we need that in order to then do anything effective in the world in terms of activism or making change so I guess it's like a process of resting and then you know the way nature does I guess in winter hibernate and rest and then spring open up and soak up the sun and then come out and be active it's good it's important for everyone to do that and and not feel that we should just endlessly do stuff even if that is good work good activism
00:52:54
Speaker
it's still important to stop and then come out with more energy and then the crucial part of that is that um by stopping and yeah doing that in a work not in a work i won't say work but just turning inwards and nurturing ourselves we can tune into the heart and feel like what's really important here, what do I really care about?
00:53:19
Speaker
And then that deep care is what takes us back out and you know connecting and doing things in the world. Yeah, I feel like we'd be hard pressed to find a human who didn't deeply care about the more than human world and this wild world that we're all in the web of if they really tune in to those feelings.
00:53:42
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah.
Conclusion and Connection Details
00:53:44
Speaker
Well, you've just offered so many treasures in this conversation. i feel so grateful for the time that you've carved out to speak with us today, Susie. Where can people connect with you and your offerings?
00:53:56
Speaker
so in terms of mindfulness and dharma teaching um on it's called insight meditation australia that's a website if you just search that um i've got a profile there and ah all my events are workshops and retreats listed there and also sydney insight meditators is another another one but yeah insight meditation australia and just find susie brown in there and that's um where you can find me and also um parents for climate as well from a more activist and environmental action point of view so we have a website you can see what's happening there as well yeah i'll link those goodies in the show notes and yeah thank you so much thanks for having me
00:54:45
Speaker
That was meditation teacher and all-round sunny human Susie Brown, who you can connect with via the Linkypoos in the show notes. I have got interviews coming at my nuss on this road trip, so I can't wait to share another juicy convo with you next fortnight.
00:55:01
Speaker
Till then!