People involved in the Network
Write a description of an experience that was significant in some way, taking into account:
'Reflection' has become an increasingly popular feature of professional education and practice, with, for example many training courses requiring people to maintain a reflective journal. Our retreat aims to bring together aspects of this trend with Buddhist themes, especially mindfulness.
To me the links are highly evident. The Dharma so often encourages us to come back to our own experience, rather than blindly follow dogma or received opinion. In health, social care, counselling etc it can appear that practitioners have never had so many sources of support and guidance...research journals and web-sites proliferate, professional bodies and care organisations publish policies, mission statements and much else...team work and informal networks may offer valuable help...and we may even have access to supervision, or have people in our personal lives who take an interest in what we do in our livelihood. Yet for all this, in day-to-day work situations, we are often alone.
Usually our training gives us a grasp of key principles and standard methods of working, but only experience can teach us how to exercise our judgement. And experience in itself is never enough; there is the old saying that someone claiming to have 20 years experience may really have had one year's experience repeated 20 times! Much of what we do probably disappears rapidly down the plug-holes of oblivion. Even so we can choose to look at some aspects and learn from them. Bodhipaksa writes about reflection whilst in a state of mindfulness, commenting that "It's a happy coincidence (or is it a coincidence?) that like a lake, our mind can only reflect when it is calm." Where better to do this than on retreat?
With Metta - Dayasara. June 2005
Bodhipaksa (2003) Wildmind - A Step by Step Guide to Meditation. Birmingham, Windhorse Publications.