Head in a Bucket

Sometimes it’s good to pause and take stock. Our small Sangha has just spent some weeks exploring what it means to be a bodhisattva. And admittedly it can all get a bit complicated - the balance between wisdom and compassion, the difference between compassion and empathy, exchanging our own wellbeing for someone else’s pain, practicing loving-kindness, giving and taking the victory and so on. Then on top of all this we have also been observing our own reactions to these practices in the belief that these will reveal places of closure within ourselves that act as obscurations to our awakened mind. No small task.

In fact I had a dream about this last night that I believe may have picked up on this exact point. I dreamt that I discovered several large deep holes that had been excavated from within my house and beneath the foundation of its walls. In my minds eye I can see the grey wall of one of these holes and it is accompanied by a feeling of terror. This semi-nightmare was enough to wake me and as I woke an understanding of the dream was immediately present. It seemed to me that I had dug down into my core wounds, deep places within me that threatened to undermine the walls of my sense of a separate self, and it was being pointed out that this experience from the side of my ego was very scary indeed.

Now thinking about this I am reminded of an idea found in both psychotherapy and also Tantric Buddhism, the notion of Protectors or Guardians. Though their meaning may not be exactly the same … In psychotherapy the term ‘protectors’ has to some extent taken over from the older notion of defences. So the things we do to protect ourselves from thoughts and emotions that are threats to who we feel we are. On a felt sense level this is what we refer to as closures. A good example of this that many of us may have experienced is when we go near something painful within ourselves - as our take on the bodhisattva practices has intentionally done - and we find we just can’t concentrate or discover ourselves doing something entirely different. In that moment our unconscious defences have kicked in, and if it’s really felt as very dangerous, then they up a gear and in zooms our fight, freeze or flee Fire Fighters to use an IFS term. The thing is, though these defences were developed at a time when we really needed them for our survival, they may now no longer be needed. As our mindfulness becomes stronger our ability to be present with these emotions increases - we can be present with them without being pulled in and overwhelmed. What Tsoknyi Rinpoche calls ‘working with our beautiful monsters’ - which is a real refuge just when we need it.

Guardians within the context of the Tibetan Buddhism also act as protectors but in a good way. Here the idea is that as we approach and work with our obscurations more deeply all sorts of energetic disturbances are possible and we can use the energy of the Guardians as a sort safety net to protect us from them. The Guardians are fascinating - it is believed that they were originally malignant and nature spirits whom the first Buddhist yogi in Tibet, Guru Rinpoche, subdued and then recruited as helpers. If we translate this legend we have a story about something that causes harm being turned by yogic skills into something that can be used for the good. And this works well. Those defences that no longer work for us, once we bring them into awareness, become our objects of mindfulness and as such are transformed into a skilful means for the realisation of the path. Places of closure, requiring we become conscious of them, become a source of further awareness.

Now the last image - head in bucket. This is a metaphor that just came to me about the difference between being caught up in our obscurations and the clarity of our awakened mind. So nearly all of the time we are bent over with a head in a bucket of water - one friend came up with porridge  - and this represents being entirely submerged within our thoughts and emotions, and this includes the protectors and ‘fire fighters’ mentioned above. So something we all know very well - long chains of memories, fantasies, obsessions, rumination, totally caught up in and swept away by the stream of mind stuff and not even aware this is happening. However, it only takes one easy movement to lift our head and the instant that happens we are back where we really were already. Sound is present, sight is present, sensation is present, there is a simple clarity of this moment with our senses wide open. It’s not a created state or experience - these are just more things in the bucket - it’s just lucid and spacious awareness of now.

So a summary of what we have been doing - and will continue to do. We work with stepping away from immersion within our obscurations - the clouds in the sky - and at the same time create the optimum circumstances for initially glimpsing and then resting within awakened mind - the sky itself. And then comes the delightful last twist - from the perspective of the sky, the clouds are simply its expression.

NW. 2 March 2026