On the beaches - Buddhist psychology at play

from our Order web site Namo Amida Bu: "I have been going from tent to tent doing first aid or distributing shoes, essential, clothes or foodstuffs. People now are a bit OK, however one month on the beaches are still masses of rubble and deserted. I was given five kites in a bag of toys to give out, and I kept them and asked for a lot more. I got 100 and 100 small balls and on Sunday took a huge pied piper of children with some parents to the beach. People flew the kites quite happily. Some even went in the water. They seemed for the first time to have forgotten the Tsunami."
Amrita's account of working with Tsunami victims in Sri Lanka gives such a wonderful example of Buddhist psychology in action. Her approach is not to get people talking about the pain of the Tsunami (though of course there will be a time for such sharing) She gets them, without even realising it, going back to the scene of the disaster in a happy frame of action. The new seeds sown by such joyful play (action conditions our mentality far more deeply than words) help these folk to reclaim the beaches, even though never a word is said.