Buddhist Meditation and Regenerative Culture

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Dido Dunlop Our hearts and outer world grow hearty together To restore Mother Nature, and grow tomatoes in our cities, we must redesign our inner gardens. New ways will only hold strong if we regenerate our inner culture too. What are our inner tomatoes? In meditation we cultivate all sorts of interesting plants in mind and heart. Kindness, love for life, resilience, humour, steadiness through trouble. Mother Nature’s Elements I’m a meditation teacher and climate activist. I grew up in the New Zealand bush. I began meditating to find the ‘bush’ feeling in the city. My first teacher taught us to…

A Simple Meditation for Pandemic, Climate Emergency and Other Disasters

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Dido Dunlop In times like now, our emotional strength and resilience can feel drained away. It can seem like our inner resources are not enough. Yet here we are, still alive. I Am Alive When the going gets tough, I meditate on this. I remind myself that I’m still alive. It’s the most precious and essential thing. Now, overtaken by pandemic, we’re constantly reminded that we or our loved ones might quite suddenly not be alive. We can get so caught up in worries about how to manage, we forget to stop, and notice that in this present moment, we…

How to Compost Your Pain

Permaculture Womens Guild

By Dido Dunlop (part of a talk at our New Zealand Permaculture gathering 2015, exploring how we can apply Nature’s ecosystems model to human relationships, to create a resilient way to live; it’s a contribution to Social Permaculture) What do we do with emotions that feel bad? How do we turn our miseries into rich nourishing resources, into love and constructive action? When we try to throw things out that smell bad, they don’t go away. That applies to emotions as much as food scraps and poo. We put our ‘waste’ in the compost heap so as not to waste…