Rainforest Mind with Kaspa Thompson

In this episode we explore Wildness and Wild Therapy. Stephen Tame is a trainer on the Wild Therapy training course, and also on the Embodied Relational Training course that I’m currently taking.

We talk about what wildness means. Is it chaos and unpredictability? Or something else? We talk about what supports wildness, and wildness in urban settings.

We talk about the ideal of Wild Therapy – what kind of people is it trying to produce?

You can find details of the Wild Therapy training and Embodied Related Training on erthworks.co.uk, including a Wild Therapy weekend workshop in October 2018.

Nick Totton’s book is called Wild Therapy. The Charles Eisenstein essay Stephen mentions is Invitation into a Living Planet and James Lovelock has written about the Gaia hypothesis in many of books. Stephen also mentions Joanna Macy (if the world’s dying, let’s go down with some grace) the environmental social activist, and Buddhist scholar, who has written eight books.

Stephen’s own website, with details of his therapy practice is: https://www.stephentame.com/

Following on from the last episode Empathy With My Enemies, I ask the question what supports empathy? How can we be more empathic.

To help me answer this question I’ve roped in a special guest – psychotherapist, Buddhist priest and writer of novels and self-help books, Satya Robyn.

Satya also happens to be married to me, and we co-run the temple here in Malvern.

We talk about the therapy/client relationship, emapthy in friendships and how spiritual experience can support empathy.

Apologies for the slightly echoey audio in the conversation. I had a one microphone set up and as we were different distances from the mic you could hardely hear Satya on the recoding

In this episode I talk about the power of dialogue across difference, using the example of two counsellors who now work together, both grieving the loss of their sons. One killed by an ISIS suicide bomber, the other whilst fighting for ISIS.

I talk about processing my own feelings that came up when I took part in the Worcester March for Unity on September 1st, marching past an EDL protest taking part on the same day.

And I talk about my vow to save all beings. All of them? Even the ones I don’t like.

I couldn’t think of a good image to illustrate this, so today’s photo is of our brand new mandala in the temple hallway, painted and donated by the artist Mathew Casey.

Today I enjoyed spending some of the morning with Rev Ian Spencer. Ian is an Anglican priest and runs a retreat centre not far from here. He’s very involved in interfaith work and is also a Zen Buddhist. He seemed like the perfect person to speak to about Buddhism and Christianity.

In this conversation I ask him what Zen Buddhism offers his Christian practice, how he makes sense of ‘The only way to the Father is through me’ and we get to the mystical heart of each tradition.

We cover topics like intimacy, holiness, relative and absolute truth.

Ian mentions books by James Finley and Thomas Merton.

After listening to episode three: wildness, someone asked me, “If the jewelled forest in the Buddhist teaching is a call back to a real wild forest, why build temples?”

I take that question as my springboard this week, thinking about how both wildness and temples have supported my spiritual practice and drifting off into other interesting and not completely unrelated areas.

Hope you enjoy listening. Do drop me an email or comment below.

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The importance of wildness, why wildness is fundamental, and trusting the process.

I talk about getting out into the natural world, and touch on the process that led to the creation of the Amida Mandala Temple.

In this episode I refer to Isabella Tree’s Wilding, and Nick Totton’s Wild Therapy.

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In this episode I recount discovering a deep need (that’s probably impossible to meet),  what helps me work through such needs, and how I can land in a place of feeling deeply satisfied.

The Buddhafield talk is below, as is the talk from Sarah Boak that I mention.

Kaspa’s talk from Buddhafield Festival:

Sarah Boak’s talk:

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This week I’m talking about Christianity and Buddhism, inspired by a recent (good) experience in a church, and Justin Whitaker’s blog post: The three Jewels of Buddhism and Multi-faith Affiliations

I also draw on Paul F. Knitter’s book Without Buddha I Could Not Be A Christian and David Steindl-Rast’s Deeper Than Words.

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