(from our school newsletter, Friday 11th December 2015)

It is with great sadness that we say goodbye this term to Bea, one of our longest standing members of staff and much loved by us all. I have worked alongside Bea for the past four years and her creativity and wealth of knowledge re the school have been invaluable in enabling me to fulfil my role as Communications Manager. Up in the top office, we have laughed and cried (often at the same time!) and shared our ideas and hopes for the school. I shall miss picking up Bea’s favourite ‘Sister Peace’ sandwich (carrot and Wensleydale cheese) from M&S, and putting the world to rights over lunch and a desk stacked with overflowing in-trays and good intentions.

Bea has held the heart of the school close to her own for so long, often at the expense of her health, because she loves this place (and all that it stands for) so deeply. Throughout the past two years, she has been our lynchpin during what has been a challenging time of transition. As Joint Acting Head (prior to Clare’s arrival) she shouldered a huge amount of responsibility, on top of her role as Deputy Administrative Head. Quite simply, without her dedication, the school would have struggled to thrive.

Bea’s background is in art, design and photography and she worked in advertising before joining the school as a Teaching Assistant in the Nursery. She has taken on large-scale art projects – mandalas in the playground, school artwork for the interior design of Maycroft Manor (a local Nursing Home) – and been our ‘official’ photographer for many years. As well as raising funds for the Bodong project, and co-ordinating our relationship with Plum Village, she has trained as a mindfulness teacher on the .b programme and been an ambassador for the school at numerous events, including Future Mind’s education conference with Alison, our Head of Nursery. Bea has always been committed to the ethos of the school in practice and I hope she will continue to share her wealth of wisdom and knowledge with us moving forward.

- Sally Turner
Communications Manager

Photos (from top)

- Bea with Clare, our Head Teacher

- Bea Art Letters

- Presents for Bea (including art canvasses from each class)

- Bea with our lovely staff!

By popular demand we bring you a video clip of Lotus class performing ‘Where is the love?’ during our end-of-term puja - arranged and conducted by our Head Teacher Clare, with Lotus class teacher Gina on bass!

 

‘Where is the love?’ by Lotus class - December 2015 from The Dharma Primary School on Vimeo.

My final blog this term is a reflection on Christmas. With so much going on around this period it can be a challenge to stay present; the feeling of overwhelm can be very close to the surface. For starters, there is Christmas itself – often a reuniting, memory-filled event and the hectic build-up to it. For many of us, our Christmases can contain a bittersweet remembrance and sense of loss for those who are not with us.

These days Christmas can feel like a massive consumer event, with little true meaning. Can we imbue it with meaning and significance, amidst the swirling waves of excitement and the buying and giving of items that may be unnecessary? Can we save it from the hijacking that seems to occur? What is a Buddhist Christmas?

For many years, I spent Christmas or New Year, one or the other, on retreat. I was really happy to hibernate and contemplate. In that less pressing space I was able to take stock of the year that had been and to catch up with myself in order to meet the New Year well and with an idea of my bigger life plan. Earlier on in this phase of my life, I went to Gaia House and took refuge in the silence. I have to admit I also took a little store of presents and chocolate for my own personal rituals! I spent a great deal of time asleep, exhausted by both my teaching job and the winter. I came out renewed and refreshed. Even on a silent group retreat there was a super sense of community, meditating into the night on either Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve. I found a deeply satisfying return to myself in the dark time of year. I felt connected to the winter solstice, in which the seeds of the year are already held in potential, but still sleeping. I returned to a pagan noticing of my place amongst the short days and superlative sunsets.

Things are rather different with a child! For one, there is the desire to make her Christmas happy and memorable. I am also connecting with, and even creating, the customs and rituals of our family. It is worth reflecting on the rituals of Christmas in a conscious way and checking that they are in line with my ethical values. Although I am not a Christian, I still love the feeling I get singing Christmas carols and watching children’s Nativity plays.

In the family context, what might a Buddhist Christmas look like? Buddhism focuses on ending suffering. All strands of Buddhism have the Four Noble Truths (the cause of all suffering that the Buddha discovered) and the Eightfold Path (the way out of that suffering, the Middle Way) in common. One thing I feel I can do as an antidote to my continuing preoccupation with myself and ignorance around being interdependent is to give thoughtful gifts. I talked about this in a previous Head’s Up and noted that the inclination in the mind of the giver is important. Also, that the gift does not have to be material, it can be a gift of time or service. I am hoping as I get older to spend a Christmas with Crisis, the organisation that works with homeless people and feeds them a Christmas lunch.

It is also important to care for yourself during this potentially stressful time. So much stress comes from the idea that everyone should be happy and get on well. But things are as they are: children can get hyper and temperamental and old family patterns can resurface. Allowing ourselves to experience any feelings of disappointment and frustrations when they arise, can help us find a more creative response.

The whole of the festive period is really about caring – and gratitude. It feels really apt to orient my mind towards the practice of loving kindness and find time to do this regularly over the Christmas break. During this time, I like to remind myself to enjoy things in moderation. Laughingly, I say that is the ‘Middle Way’! This is not quite correct because although the middle way avoids extremes of conduct and views; on the one hand, sensual indulgence and on the other, self-mortification, it really means to provide the body with what it needs to be in a strong and healthy condition yet at the same time to rise above bodily concerns in order to train the mind in right conduct, concentration and wisdom. In fact, the middle way is essentially a way of mind training, not a compromise with the attitude of renunciation (thanks to Bhikkhu Bodhi for this formulation). This is a continuing exploration for me as a lay person, deeply in love with the path.

I have really enjoyed meeting you all during my first term here at the school. Thank you for welcoming me into the school community and for the support and generosity you have shown. I look forward to resting up over the break and meeting the New Year with renewed energy. Wishing you a Merry Christmas and may you find time for peace and contemplation as well as celebration.

- Clare

“I believe strongly in failure”
– Marin Alsop, Musical Director,
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra.

Driving into work on Wednesday morning, I heard Marin Alsop being interviewed by Libby Purves on Radio 4. Something about what she said really caught me. Firstly, Marin Alsop is a rare beast indeed – there are very few female conductors of her standing. She was talking about her life and work and about failing in the context of her work. She gave the example of a violinist who can practise all the time and experiment with their instrument. A female conductor, however, does not have such an opportunity to try out different things, as the orchestra is her instrument. You get one opportunity and if it doesn’t go well, then you are not asked back! She believes that in order to be really, really good at something (she said ‘wonderful’ also!), you have to fail.

Leonard Bernstein was her mentor. He was generous, embracing and hard on her. She recounted an anecdote, in which she was practising a piece and he came up to her afterwards and said, ‘the conducting’s great, really good….but it doesn’t really move me.’ They took a break and she went outside, sat down and looked at the trees thinking, ‘well, I should shoot myself now – my life is over, Leonard Bernstein said I’m not moving him’. She then got to thinking about what she could do about this (as emotionally resilient people do). She said that when she went back in she felt as though she had had a massage; she was completely relaxed and stopped trying. Instead, she was ‘being about the experience’, not worrying about the technical part of it – judging, measuring, assessing – not having a fear of failure: ‘Once you fail you don’t have to worry about it anymore’. She conducted the piece again and Leonard Bernstein whispered to her, ‘yeah, that’s it.’

I thought about how close these words were to what I feel. Also, how they open me to embrace failure even more and allow me to risk failing. I feel that I look at my life – more often my work life – as an ongoing experiment.

I am going to do my best and to do that without a fear of failure. To get to that point, I have to be prepared to ‘fail’, as in fact we all do, and as it is actually ok to do. This is part of what I want to teach our children because, ironically, it is that fear, sitting in the back of my mind, that creates the conditions for me not to be as present and absorbed in what I am doing, and thus increase the likelihood of underperformance. Professor Guy Claxton who visited the school last week, identifies resilience as key to learning and describes it as ‘enjoying the feeling of learning’. To put it another way, dropping the judging, measuring and assessing and actually being present is a very enjoyable and blissful state to be in when I am learning.

As I see it, at the foundation of our community is the relationships we all have with one other. If we can keep a high quality of dialogue going this will serve us well and for me this means continuing to communicate fully and honestly. I feel that as a staff and parent community, we have the potential to give the children in our care a really creative, compassionate, well-rounded and emotionally literate education. The more space and freedom we can give each other to experiment and learn, the more able we will be to deliver this. Paradoxically, by accepting the possibility of failure, we open ourselves up to greater freedom and creativity, which is more likely to enable success.