Tristan’s Story

Tristan is now a regular contributor to our forum under the guise of BioSattva; I thank him for his excellent contributions. Here he has given us the story of how he came to mindfulness. Once again showing how each individual journey to mindfulness is unique and indeed inspirational.

Tristan’s Story

Maybe it was growing up until the age of twelve in the Welsh mountains far from a city, let alone village life, with a mother from another country, without fluency in the native tongue, without running water in one’s house, without much disposable income, without practicing the native religion – any religion, for that matter, lacking great physical strength, size or speed, and with unconventional hippy artist parents who encouraged me never to fight or kill anything and to care for the suffering of trees as if they were people…. maybe that’s the kind of upbringing that makes one seek something beyond the surface of daily life. For that is what I remember doing often in-between attempting and failing to follow the tried and tested paths presented by my wider community as ‘the way things are done, and always will be done’. I was looking for a system; a key which could unlock the answers to all the problems associated with the human struggle – a struggle I felt very acquainted with as a small, weak, poor, agnostic, hippy kid in a highly conservative God-fearing Welsh community far from the English border.

I did everything my teachers asked me to, it seemed I was destined to dig myself and my close family out of the poverty that had been controlling us since I could remember. It was all so simple – get the good grades, move on up through the system, and wealth and happiness would be delivered automatically. The deep love and philosophical freedoms I received from my parents watered the seeds of creativity within me, and I felt that there was a high probability of success. That was, until when I was 17, while getting stuck-into my A-levels, my parents divorced. That catastrophe removed the most stable thing in my life – our tight family unit. I lost a lot of faith in humanity at that point it seems – I got drawn into underground music and culture – I often went to parties and clubs, I made dance music, and lived carelessly because there wasn’t much hope of a happy future. With the core of my family life gone, I felt adrift; looking for a new community – something relatively stable that wouldn’t crumble beneath my feet.

The upheaval took around 10 years to filter through my system – to make me realise the magnitude of that event, and since that time I have been looking to understand the behaviours and mechanisms behind it. I saw the devastation in my mother, since it was my father’s choice to leave, and I feared causing such upset to another person. My paternal grandfather had done the same thing, and in a strange way I could feel that potential within myself. Luckily I didn’t let the depressing thoughts affect me to the point of dysfunctionality, and I managed to go to a good university and scrape through a degree in archaeology, before taking up various jobs to pay off a bank loan. I entered working life as an officebound depressed rat-racer – living for the weekend release of tension just like most other people around me at that time.

Looking into the various proposed solutions to life’s problems contained within different philosophies and practices, I graduated towards Zen Buddhism and Daoism. The connection with nature and the ‘internal’ soft martial arts that these philosophies are concerned with attracted me, even though they seemed mysterious and so alien to the West in terms of practice and fundamental perspective. I couldn’t imagine, for example, a world-view which didn’t involve a God or even ghosts. Living in Bristol in the UK was a fortunate situation, since Bristol has lots to offer on the Buddhism and martial arts front. As my interests in Eastern arts and seated meditation deepened, a thirst to see the landscapes and what remained of the ancient Zen cultural epicenters eventually brought me to China in 2006. By that time I had already begun dabbling in Japanese Soto Zen meditation and had been doing standing meditation in a taichi class.

I travelled all around China – climbing most of the famous mountains, visiting ancient temples, and trying to soak up any remaining traces of Zen Buddhism and Daoism. Returning to the UK in 2007, I began attending Bristol Zen Dojo weekly for formal seated practice. I tried to keep a seated meditation discipline at home, and then I went on a retreat. The retreat left a huge impression on me – I had never witnessed or experienced a community which aimed to practice such genuine compassion before. The level of acceptance and mutual support was so tangible that I was deeply touched and felt that I had discovered a new potential for human communal life. That key to dissolving human struggles I had sought in my youth began to appear more possible, and my enthusiasm for zen and other mindfulness practices deepened again. I began looking for the zen teachings which brought people together, no matter their background or beliefs.

As I practiced what I had learnt, and discussed the various ways of practicing zen with others, I found that Buddhist teachings from different Zen traditions could often clash. The way the teachings conflicted didn’t appear so significant with regards to my own practice – they seemed more like power-struggles than issues with how to sit peacefully, and I felt that there must be a way of refining the practices and describing them so that the core approach was made clear and logical – scientific, even.

Unfortunately it seemed there were no such teachings already in the world – I sought them in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village and in his books, and in a traditional Chinese Ch’an (Zen) lineage, until I decided to read what MBSR had to provide. I had bought a copy of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever you go, There you are many years before, but it was only upon comparing the practice outlined in in Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living to what I had already stripped my own Zen Buddhism practice down to be, that I became inspired to just go with the MBSR approach – it seemed to support pretty much the same methodology that I had arrived at through zen. Practicing zen through Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR appeared to amplify my progress towards a more accepting state of mind, and contributed significantly to my experiential understanding of the processes underlying the unfolding which takes place.

With the explosion of MBSR in the West – unfortunately happening while I have been so far away in China, I began following it all via news items on the internet. I realised that the scene was going to grow and so I decided to join in and follow Kabat-Zinn’s instructions for daily practice to the detail. Those instructions were the final jigsaw pieces which had been obscured by various apparently unnecessarily complex Buddhist teachings I had previously been clinging on to, and so now, coupled with the various traditional Chinese mindful arts I practice daily in-between teaching English part time here in Beijing, it seems there is no looking back, and I am looking forward to surfing this wave of simple, scientific, and secular Western mindfulness into the future with like-minded others.

Who knows, maybe a solid mindfulness community will spring up in the West – one in which we understand and support the unfolding nature of our friends and neighbours without fear and aggression – this is something the West is severely lacking at the moment, it seems.