In the Rainforest: The Five Elements

Rainforest Retreat 2025

In May 2025, Mindfulness Northwest Senior Teacher Tim Burnett led a 5-day retreat on the Buddhist and scientific teachings on the five elements of earth, fire, water, air, and space.

Unfortunately due to a mix of weather and nature walk scheduling changes and a tech glitch, just 3 talks were video recorded. For Tim’s talk on earth we do have below his notes. We trust that all five element can be found interwoven into the 3 available talks just as the five elements are interwoven into every moment of existence though!

Talk 1: The Elements – an Introduction

Talk Notes

We sometimes describe particular enviornments and places as “elemental” – big mountains, wide seas, tropic rainforests. Places we remember and feel the power of the elements.

Maybe because likes so many things we lose track of something essential – something elemental – in everyday life at home.

Going somewhere else, somewhere different reminds us of the elemental nature of everything.

At first we remember this by perceiving the world that seems to outside of us. These intense tropical rains. The warm humid air. The sounds of the frogs, birds, and insects.

And then maybe we remember that we too are elemental.

Elemental is an interesting word: the first definition is “primary or basic” – the basic stuff of the universe here. The second is “related to or embodying the powers of nature” which brings up the dicotomous idea that there is something that doesn’t relate to or embody the powers of nature. A kind of Western split between people and environment.

And that split is so deep in the Judeo Christian tradition – which probably we are all a part of whether we ever set foot in a church or not.

After thinking about doing so for 40 years or so I’m actually starting to do a close reading of the bible. And dang there it is, right at the beginning of the book, in Genesis, after God has regret about the first round of creation and floods the earth he promises all of non-human nature to “Noah and his sons”.

And fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every animal of the earth, and on every bird of heaven, and on everything that moves upon the ground, and on all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they shall be given. Every moving thing that lives shall be for you as food. As I gave the green plants to you, I now give you everything.

So we inherit a great separation there, don’t we? And one with a massive power differential in is. And one with fear in it.

I know probably none of us feel this way and it’d be easy to externalize this that the evil captains of industry have resulting in a system of exploitation of nature that stems from this. Regretable and something to work against but not my fault.

i feel that way.

And I know that’s too tidy. I have a separation from nature in my conditioned mind that comes from such thoughts. And I have a separation from my very self too. And that’s a deep source of pain and losss.

The the good news being that healing and reconnection and reunification are always possible. Not always easy but possible.

So perhaps that’s part of why we’re hear experiencing the elements and experiencing with fresh eyes the non-human world around us. Being in a powerful and different-from-usual environment can help us open our eyes and see, open our hearts and feel.

And lest we get all colonial about this it’s good to remember that people have grown up in this neighborhood for many thousands of years and this is their everyday place.

This idea of the elements is also an ancient exploration of what all of this is – our human minds want to know what’s what. We want to know how all of this came to be. And wanting to know that we want to know what it’s all made of.

And a pre-modern theory of that which seems to have cropped up in lots of different cultures – I’ve learned the most about the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese cultures – an ancient “building blocks” theory is that of primal elements of which everything is composed.

The systems all seem to include: water, fire, and earth.

The Chinese then add wood and metal.

The Indians and Greeks add air, or wind. And sometimes space.

These elements are both what they literally sound like: fire is fire. But more importantly they represent all of the qualities of that thing: fire is about warmth energy and movement. And also about underlying internal energies that we might now call psychological like motivation, desire, intention, and an outgoing spirit. I guess extroverts have more fire element in them.

SO they explain physical reality, yes, but most of these ancient cultures also didn’t make such a big distinction between external “physical” reality and our experience of everything internally and externally. There’s the bird as an object but more importantly theirs the bird as perception, as feeling, and even as imagination that it manifesting fire energy in it’s movement and wind or air energy in it’s freedom. And water in energy in how it flows through the air. And earth energy in it’s solidity.

Buddhism being our core inspiration for mindfulness practices I want to share a bit about where Buddha went with all of this. The elements were just a part of the culture he grew up in. People thought about things more in terms of the elements then it seems. It was their scientific explanation for how things are.

Buddha being Buddha he was interested in how every system of thinking and understanding could help us be more free. Free from conceptions of who and what we are the bind and limit us. That lead to suffering.

And his A-number-one realization was our rigid sense of self is a big problem for us. This separate being that we have to defend and worry about.

So naturally he suggested we look at our self not through the lens of “me” but the lens of the elements. There’s a line in the foundational early Buddhist text that led to MBSR and this whole mindfulness movement that says very directly that we should practice this way:

And further, a practioner reflects on this very body, however it be placed or disposed, by way of the material elements: “There are in this body the element of earth, the element of water, the element of fire, the element of wind.”

It’s not a line that gets a lot of attention. Other teachings in there around awareness of the breathing and of different aspects of the body get all of the attention usually so it’s interesting to tune into this one.

And after that he gives a kind of gruesome metaphor.

I’ll let a new found friend take it from here. This is a short essay by a Spirit Rock teacher named Sean Oakes. I don’t actually know Sean but I found his essay online and it helped me prepare this initial talk on the elements. I hope I will meet him one day to thank him. When you put something out there you never know who it will touch!

https://www.spiritrock.org/practice-guides/the-four-elements

Talk 2: The Element of Air

Talk Notes

[John O’Dononue’s blessing for Air]

Air is breath is life.

Biological life and inner life. To inspire is to breath. Our original inspiration from our first moment out of the womb is breath.

Inspire is spirit.

Here’s a little bit from Miriam Webster’s dictionary folks. Inspire was one of many words the the English language absorbed over the centuries.

This moving little word may be traced back to the Latin inspirare (“to breathe or blow into”), which itself is from the word spirare, meaning “to breathe.” It didn’t take long to establish itself in a figurative sense, as our earliest written English uses of inspire give it the meaning “to influence, move, or guide (as to speech or action) through divine or supernatural agency or power.” Many of the early figurative senses of inspire are religious in nature, so it is not surprising to learn that the word shares a connection with spirit (which comes from the Latin word for “breath,” spiritus, which is also from spirare).

And to breathe in the rainforest is deeply inspiring.

Rainforests are the lungs of the planet.

And rainforests are places of incredible life.

Life and breath, air and life.

The rainforest worldwide covers just 3% of the planet and is home to more than half of the world’s species.

Costa Rica is a small country – about the size of West Virginia – but it has incredible biodiversity. The US is 181 times larger in landmass but only has about twice as many species overall. Somehow bird life is a big standout here so it was exciting getting to birding this morning.

I was making sure my birding app has updated and it tells me that for it’s US and Canada database there are 720 different kinds of birds, and for tiny Costa Rica there are 812.

And the tragedy is, like with so many things our human society and patterns of development and exploitation touch, there has been a lot of loss in the rainforest.

About 1/3 totally lost and about 1/3 damaged.

Costa Rica is again a standout as countries go with 26% of all of it’s land in reserves. While I’m praising Costa Rica you might enjoy know they demilitarized in 1946 – there’s no army – and they’ve prioritized health care and education very strongly. The last time I was here I was talking to some locals about the incredible system of vocational education – “Ina” – the National Learning Institute – not only has campuses in all of the cities, it also sends teachers everywhere. The guy I was talking to said if you can get 2 or 3 friends together who want to learn a trade, car repair is what he mentioned, INA will send a trainer to your remote village. And it’s all free.

And I already mentioned how much I admire the vocation of nature guiding here. You take an 18 month course to learn the basics and then the guides seems to be very cooperative in how they help each other continue to learn. That vast diversity makes it a wonderful challenge to be a naturalist here! And I was so happy to learn that you can earn enough to support your family as a nature guide.

So it’s a good place to breathe. A good place for life.

Nowhere doesn’t have suffering and trouble – there are no Sangri-la’s and nothing can exist in isolation – but Costa Rica is a standout in many ways. Maybe the Americans here can feel that even more deeply given recent events.

And the element air, or wind, isn’t just literally the air. It’s that quality of openness and dispersion.

We can’t have concentration and focus without also having, and appreciating, disperation.

Sometimes in the mindfulness trade maybe we end up denigrating that quality of mind and reality. Mind wandering isn’t always bad. Relaxing and letting our minds takes us where they take us has an airy quality to it. And our feelings will tell us what’s peaceful flowing, open and exploratory,the good kind of unmoored and ungrounded experience, and what’s rumination and anxiety.

It would be healthy for us to try to always be laser focussed with a solid and deep focus. We do need that but everything also needs it’s opposite. To have strong focus we also need to know how to rest the mind. How to allow the mind to be like the air too.

While the water element has the quality of cohesion – of things that stick together like water molecules do – why we have raindrop and surface tension, and many of the qualities of rivers are due to the cohesion of water. The ancients didn’t have modern science and wouldn’t have know how the polar qualities of H2O cause it to stick to other H20 molecules like little magnets, but they were keen observers to be sure.

But the air element is the opposite. That which doesn’t stick together. That which disperses. And thus that which lets things through. You can get through the water but there’s a lot more resistance than through the air.

Air makes space for the movement – the fire element of all things – air is room to turn around.

A connected aspect is the air element is about expansion and the water element is about contraction.

A saying about one of my favorite Chinese Zen masters, a guy named Zhaozhou (9th century), is that he always had room to turn around. I aspire to that. Not stuck. Not fixed in place. Not held by reactivity or a particular point of view.

Here’s a beautiful Zen story that demonstrates Master Zhaozhou’s air element quality – and he doesn’t just blow in the wind.

A monk asked Chao Chou, “For a long time I’ve heard of the stone bridge of Chao Chou, but now that I’ve come here I just see a simple log bridge.”

Chou said, “You just see the log bridge; but you don’t see the stone bridge.”

The monk said, “What is the stone bridge?”

Chou said, “It lets asses cross, it lets horses cross.”

[brief commentary on the story emphasizing his unguardedness, how I aspire to that quality of “ah, you don’t see that I’m so great? that’s okay and…”]

In early Buddhism the elements are studied in two ways to help usbe more free.

The first is a process of not taking everyting so personally. To let go of the preciousness around ourselves – to look at your experience of self not in the usual way of me, mine, my history, my future, my needs, my problems – but rather as a collection of less personal experiences – even totally impersonal. As experiences of earth (solidity), water (cohesion), fire (warmth or energy), and air (freedom & dispersion). Earth, fire, water, and air.

This can get super detailed and analytical. Here’s an example from a famous early commentary on the Buddha’s teachings.

And the second is to help us practice equanimity. At one point the Buddha gives a personal lesson to his son Rahula who had just ordained into the monastic order. And he tells him to practice meditation like earth, fire, water and air with the spirit of recognizing how the elements aren’t disturbed by anything.

This is most clear to me with the earth element. The earth receives everything equally. It receives the wonderful clear water or rain and it receives toxic waste. It doesn’t complain. It’s infinitely patient.

And the other elements have the same kind of undistrubability. The air isn’t bothered by what moves through it – clean or impure. Pure oxygen created by the plants and air pollution from the loud deisel trucks that lumber by us is accepted by the air.

Equanimity is never to say unhealthy things are okay. But that our response is clearer, cleaner and stronger – in the Buddhist way of looking at it – if we’re not so reactive. If we more more in choice and response, less in reactivity.

Here’s how the Buddha talks to his son about this:

Meditate like wind. For when you meditate like wind, pleasant and unpleasant contacts will not occupy your mind. Suppose the wind were to blow on both clean and unclean things, like feces, urine, spit, pus, and blood. The wind isn’t horrified, repelled, and disgusted because of this. In the same way, meditate like the wind. For when you meditate like wind, pleasant and unpleasant contacts will not occupy your mind.

The same kind of formula is repeated for Earth, Fire, and Water.

This is right back to preferences at a deep level. Air doesn’t have preferences like our conditioned selves do. If we’re more like air we soften our desire for the pleasant and our revulsion at the unpleasant.

And that also doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the pleasant. It’s when we get lost, compulsive, addicted to what we imagine to be pleasant or needed – lost in trying to satisfy our desires that things go south. And I know some in our group have expertise in how intense that can get for us. It goes from being a bit distracted and missing out on the experience of life to full on life threatening behavior, right?

Buddhism emphasizes in inner work of seeing the very nature of self as manifestations of the elements. And I love how our Irish poet John O’Donohue focuses on the manifestations of the elements in our daily lives and our amazing natural world. I think we need both area of exploration.

Here are a few paragraphs from his essays on air:

We all breathe the same air. Air is the medium of interflow between all people. It is also the medium of interflow between person and nature. All plants breathe in the air; in this way the plant kingdom absorbs the ethos and the atmosphere of the planet. There is spirit in air. I remember as a child that whenever my father left home he always paused at the door and inhaled a last deep breath before he went out. No one ever commented on this; nor was it ever explained. But it was as if he wanted to inhale some of the spirit of the family before he left us. It is for me a poignant image of leavetaking, the fragility and contingency of love.

And

Breathing has its own rhythm. Breath comes in ebb and flow. Through breathing you come into rhythm with your self. At the end of the day, the only trustable metaphor for the inner world is the organic metaphor. The psyche is fundamentally organic. If you mind your self, your spirit will mind you. Sometimes we are misled by the promises of gurus and systems outside ourselves. We believe that salvation can only come from outside. This is the great falsity of all colonization, be it territorial or spiritual. It robs the native land, or the native soul, of the sense of its own indigenous treasures and resources. Against all attempts at programs and methods, the great art of holiness is to let oneself be. To be natural is to be holy. But to be natural is not easy in our technological and distanced world. We need to re-discover and re-awaken our sense of instinct and the ancient rhythm that still sleeps in our souls.

And I loved this reflection on one of the great things about the air element is the quality of invisibility. A freedom from needing to see everything is there when we embrace the expansive nature of air. John O’Donohue is also a Catholic so there’s some God language here.

ONE OF THE GREAT thresholds in reality is the threshold between the visible and the invisible. The visible is that which we can see: stones, roads, faces, chairs, etc. The invisible is that which we cannot see: beauty, silence, time, sounds, wind, God. Some of the central realities subsist in this invisible world. Many religious people become exceptionally impatient with the invisibility of God.

And the great point that there is a serious downside to being too obsessed with only the visible:

Materialism is an attraction to and an obsession with the visible. All materialism, be it for money, power, possessions or people, has to do with an epistemology of quantity. It is the mistaken belief that through an accumulation of quantity you can settle the task of your own identity. Such materialism is bad for the soul and the spirit since a friendship with the invisible is vitally necessary for the interior life. It is not good for us to linger too long in the world of materialism. One of the indices of the poverty of a culture is its lack of respect for the invisible world. Our culture suffers this lack of respect. The logic of our obsession with the material world is the destruction of the earth.

So a few reflections on air. Maybe I should have started with water given our experience this morning! The classical order is you start with earth. I’m not sure it really matters.

Let’s continue feeling into these qualities: earth, water, fire, and air. And later it’ll be interested to add space which is even more open and non-binding than the air element – but it’s best to sidle up to that meaning of space slowly.

Talk 3: The Element of Water

Talk Notes

[John O’Dononue’s blessing for Air]

Air is breath is life.

Biological life and inner life. To inspire is to breath. Our original inspiration from our first moment out of the womb is breath.

Inspire is spirit.

Here’s a little bit from Miriam Webster’s dictionary folks. Inspire was one of many words the the English language absorbed over the centuries.

And to breathe in the rainforest is deeply inspiring.

Rainforests are the lungs of the planet.

And rainforests are places of incredible life.

Life and breath, air and life.

The rainforest worldwide covers just 3% of the planet and is home to more than half of the world’s species.

I was making sure my birding app has updated and it tells me that for it’s US and Canada database there are 720 different kinds of birds, and for tiny Costa Rica there are 812.

And the tragedy is, like with so many things our human society and patterns of development and exploitation touch, there has been a lot of loss in the rainforest.

About 1/3 totally lost and about 1/3 damaged.

So it’s a good place to breathe. A good place for life.

And the element air, or wind, isn’t just literally the air. It’s that quality of openness and dispersion.

We can’t have concentration and focus without also having, and appreciating, disperation.

Air makes space for the movement – the fire element of all things – air is room to turn around.

A connected aspect is the air element is about expansion and the water element is about contraction.

Here’s a beautiful Zen story that demonstrates Master Zhaozhou’s air element quality – and he doesn’t just blow in the wind.

A monk asked Chao Chou, “For a long time I’ve heard of the stone bridge of Chao Chou, but now that I’ve come here I just see a simple log bridge.”

Chou said, “You just see the log bridge; but you don’t see the stone bridge.”

The monk said, “What is the stone bridge?”

Chou said, “It lets asses cross, it lets horses cross.”

[brief commentary on the story emphasizing his unguardedness, how I aspire to that quality of “ah, you don’t see that I’m so great? that’s okay and…”]

In early Buddhism the elements are studied in two ways to help usbe more free.

This can get super detailed and analytical. Here’s an example from a famous early commentary on the Buddha’s teachings.

Here’s how the Buddha talks to his son about this:

The same kind of formula is repeated for Earth, Fire, and Water.

Here are a few paragraphs from his essays on air:

And

And the great point that there is a serious downside to being too obsessed with only the visible:

So a few reflections on air. Maybe I should have started with water given our experience this morning! The classical order is you start with earth. I’m not sure it really matters.

Talk 3: The Element of Water

Talk Notes

Let’s ponder water a little. The most obvious element here in the rain forest.

Water is flow, cohesion, the sense of continuity is a water quality.

We say that time flows like a river. And the story of our lives if like that too. We each know we are a totally different person than we were 10 years ago, or even from who we were yesterday, but like a river looks like one river even though every water molecule in it is different every moment, our life looks like our life. It has a coherence to it even though that coherence is a bit of an illusion it’s an import illusion.

I thought I might share a little bit about my river-life-flow around how we got here.

My first intellectual and heart love was nature. I didn’t see it as at all unusual at the time but I paid a lot of attention to birds and flowers and weather. When I got to college I went into Enviornmental Studies and Biology and had the incredible good fortune to do multiple field-based courses where we were living and camping in nature – sometimes deep in the wilderness – with really wise teachers who were deeply aware of where we were and knew a heck of a lot about it.

Behind the curtains of my life my other first love was meditation. I’m not sure if “love” is the right word there. I usually didn’t enjoy sitting. But I was deeply drawn to it and I did it. I found I did it most consistently and learned the most from it doing it with other people. And the first form of meditation I was introduced to: Sōtō Zen Buddhism which comes to us from Japan (but everyone I met at first involved in it were Americans so it was a while later before I came to appreciate the Japanese culture’s role in it).

So I sought that out. And I was fortunate growing up in California where that kind of stuff tended to emerge first in American culture. The was a Zen Center in my college town and I would go there early in the morning on my bike, always on my own but there I would sit with other people. Just sit. I didn’t chat with them. I didn’t talk to teachers for a long time. I didn’t share with most of my friends that I was doing this. But I sure saw how much it helped. I was a pretty insecure young man – although that too I didn’t understand very well – and on days I sat things just went better on a lot of levels.

Eventually I lived at Zen Centers for periods of time. Eventually I became connected to a teacher. Eventually I started my own Zen Center. To compress decades and many inner and outer adventures into a few sentences.

And in the late 2000’s I started hearing all about “mindfulness” and wondered if that was a real thing. If it had the depth of my Zen training. And I was increasingly aware of how much “not for everyone” formal Zen is. The funny clothes and customs and coded language – much as we do our best to be friendly and welcoming at least at our place. Other Zen places take a little pride in being all about depth and awakening and don’t prioritize being friendly actually and that’s legit.

So I did the training. Discovered it was legit. And started teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction – MBSR – and started an organization and just kept growing and experimenting from there. I was especially curious about what I call the “8 week problem” – which is that the MBSR class is a powerful and immersive 8-week process. There’s usually not a dry eye in the house at the end of the last class. The group feels bonded and the transformational experience of it can be amazing. Many of you have experienced this I know.

But the problem then is: it ends. And in contrast with my Zen training: it never ends, you are always a beginner, always in training, always learning more. Never done. Like a river.

Meantime my paid “official” career was zigging and zagging. One wonderful sounding career after the next came and went: I did do field botany for a while; I taught school kids about nature at an environmental ed site; I taught pre-school; I was a carpenter; I was a computer programmer; I taught elementary school. Nothing quite stuck for the long haul. Either there was some kind of bad fit or I was just caught in a cycle of seeking deep meaning in my work – or probably some of both.

But, remarkably, Mindfulness Northwest grew to where it could support me and my family. I had to create a big enough organization and be the director of it – not just teach – but it worked. A miracle I am so deeply grateful for.

That had pretty much just stabilized, I think, when my 1st wife and I did a birding tour of Costa Rica. We’d never been here and we like to travel independently but were a bit daunted. Happily we found a tour company that specializes in setting up self-guided tours. They figure out a great itinerary and help sort the logistics but you go along on your own. did it on our own, not in a tour group. It was really a wonderful trip in terms of nature. In terms of the marriage I can see in hindsight there were problems cooking but I wasn’t very clear about that at the time.

The point being that Selva Verde was included and our trip was in May. Maybe 2014. And the place was EMPTY. I might be exaggerating a little but as far I could tell there was only us and a German couple in the whole place.

I got to chatting with the manager (who I guess didn’t have all that much to do, he was around a lot to chat with!) and he said May a very quiet month. The begining of their rainy season after the busy winter months when it’s both dry here and so cold up north – a kind of perfect combo for North American tourism. And that in this particular area there is a lot of tropical biology – both research science and teaching – so they get a of groups oriented around that in the summer even though it’s pretty wet.

I summoned up my courage to ask a crazy question – and to give her full credit I am pretty sure my ex-wife is the one who had this idea first – could I come back some time with a group of meditators?? Would a Costa Rican hotel manager even know what the heck I was talking about?

To my great surprise he lit up and said, “Yes! That is one of the first things I thought of when I first came here to take this job: what a great place for meditation.” Amazing. And so here we are. A place where i can bring my biological interest and my mindfulness together and share it with people. After that initial visit you’re the 3rd group I’ve been here with. My intention was to come every other year – annually just seems like too much but I may change my mind about that – and a certain pandemic got in the way for a while there.

So that’s the river-story – at least one version of it – of how I got here and for this week your life-river and mine are flowing along together. The funny thing about these life-river stories is everytime we tell them we are creating a new river in our minds really aren’t we? So it’s always a little different in every telling whether we say it out loud or just say so to ourselves.

But wow water Starting with rain. It’s been fascinating for me to see how little I know about the weather patterns here.In the 4 timesI’ve been here the pattern of rain has been different every time.

The first time I came for retrat it was so tidy so I decided that’s just how it is here: sunny all day and then torrential rains at night. Robin and I had planned to lead loving kindness practices in the evening and we had to abandon that because it was raining so hard no one could hear us. Somehow yelling over the rain wasn’t conducive.

And then every morning the day dawned with sun shining through the wet vegetation and mist rising. Perfect.

And that’s a way we misunderstand the water element: we take one glance – have one experience – and our minds fix it in place. Ok, that’s how it is here. Ok, that’s how she is. Period. Done. Freezing the flowing rivers of ever changing experience into ice.

And sure enough it wasn’t that way next time.

Another year it didn’t rain at all for the first 6 days. I was surprised how much hotter it was. Maybe in fact it was just a few degrees hotter than I remembered from the previous trips but it pushed me over some kind of threshold of discomfort. And as I said this room was pretty much a screened perch with no A/C – ooh my we sweated in here.

And then on the last day the sky opened up – it was like the torrential rains in Genesis – darn it that story’s really affecting me.

“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.”

I didn’t realize all of these early biblical characters lived hundreds of years – Noah was already 600 years old and he still has to go on to have all kinds of adventures before he dies at 950 years old. And I thought some of the Buddhist texts were weird!

But I don’t mention that just casually: intense rain and floods are deep in our Judeo-Christian conditioning too. And they are sent by God.

Anyway that year it felt like a party – I didn’t think about God – but it felt like such a gift. It cooled down and that was right when we were scheduled to go across that suspension bridge into the primary forest. We went and got wet and felt so truly immersed in the rainforest. A big group of spider moneys passed over us too and we got to see how their areal trails work. Biology side note: there are 4 monkey species in Costa Rica: the howlers are most common and we’ve seen them already and you can hear them pretty often, the other two are spider moneys are, I think, most likely here. With maybe capuchin monkeys – I saw them in a vast wetland on the Carribean Coast one time. The 4th are called Squirrel Monkeys, they are only on the Pacific side, smaller and rarer – I haven’t seen those.

And now this time a different pattern of rains altogether. Off and on all day. And patches of sun. It’s been amazing how much the light varies. The way our guide Elcan had to get out his flashlight yesterday to show us the broad-billed motmot under the trees – it was like dusk under there.

A wet place. And of course there’s an annual pattern of rains between the dry season November through April and the wet season which is just starting now May-October. I wouldn’t be surprised if climate change was tweaking that around of maybe May being a kind of hinge month in between dry and wet just varies.

Back to the mind: it’s facinating how quickly the mind thinks it sees a pattern and we think we know this is how it is here. We come by it naturally – this deep urge to understand the world and make it into simpler patterns than it really is we’ve been developing since childhood. This self that Buddhism is encouraging us to lighten up on is reassured by an orderly universe and that self is quite happy to create that orderly universe if we give it half a chance.

Rainforests turn out not just to be rainy but they help the planet stay mosit with clean good water. And we cut them down at our peril – this from the Rainforest Alliance which was one of the first enviornmental groups to try to bring attention to the importance of rainforests for our planet in the 1970’s up north. I can just remember there was a lot of “save the rainforest!” energy back then. And of course it’s no less important now.

Rainforests add water to the atmosphere through the process of transpiration, by which plants release water from their leaves during photosynthesis. Deforestation reduces the moisture released into the atmosphere, causing rainfall to decrease. This is why the loss of forests often leads to drought. Forests are also natural water filters, keeping pollution and debris from flowing into water supplies and slowing the movement of rainwater so it flows into underground reserves. Scientists estimate that about 15% of the world’s freshwater flows from the Amazon Basin alone.

It’s hard to remember that compared to our great oceans there’s not that much fresh water on our planet.

Only 3.5% of the water on Earth is freshwater, and a significant portion of that is unavailable for use. 2.5% of this fresh water is either locked in ice or deep underground. This leaves only about 1% of the total water available for human use in rivers, lakes, and shallow groundwater sources.

Just 1% for us. We gotta be careful here. Clean water to drink is just as essential as clean air to breathe. Many of us have had the upsetting experience of our air becoming unbreatheable but probably all of us here are blessed not to have experienced no access to clean water to drink. If you’re following world events you know that there are many who are not so fortunate.

Let’s take a moment in compassion for those folks. It’s hard to imagine and of course in those closes there is also not enough food.

[pause]

So the rain here is a big deal. It’s imporant to our survival as a species. And it sure is fun. Our guide Elcan told me it rains even harder than what we experienced yesterday morning when the full on wet season arrives.

We too are full of water and depend on water. I looked up why. Here are a few reasons to geek out on:

1. It helps create saliva

2.Staying hydrated helps regulate your body temperature – through sweating and some other mechanisms

3. It protects your tissues, spinal cord, and joints

4. It helps excrete waste through perspiration, urination, and defecation and prevents constipation

5. It helps with nutrient absorption -f you’re dehydrated the your system has trouble processing vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients in your food.

6. It improves blood oxygen circulation

Water carries helpful nutrients and oxygen to your entire body. Reaching your daily water intake will improve your circulation and have a positive impact on your overall health.

7. It helps fight off illness – dehydration increases risk of a number of illnesses including: constipation

kidney stones, asthma, urinary tract infections, hypertension. And if it gets severe there are issues with brain swelling, kidney failure, and seizures.

8. It aids in cognitive function – not drinking enough water can negatively impact your focus, alertness, and short-term memory.

9. It helps improve mood – dehydration may result in fatigue and confusion as well as anxiety.

10.And It helps keep skin bright – we are all bright and shiny here aren’t we? I guess that’s not just the sheen of sweat but I read that adequate water intake will help keep your skin hydrated and promote collagen production.

But at an even more essential level your very cells are designed to be surrounded by water:

Your body is made of trillions of cells. These cells require fluid to maintain their structure and, in turn, to function properly. Taking in enough fluid is the first step to achieving cellular hydration. Your cell membranes are highly permeable to water (meaning they permit water to pass through them), and water follows osmotic gradients. Osmotic gradients are generated when the concentration of solutes, such as sodium, is higher on one side of the membrane than the other.

In the context of your cells, this means if you don’t have enough water circulating through your body, water will be drawn from the inside of the cells due to increased osmotic pressure — causing those cells to shrink.

We are water and we need water as living bodies. When it rains, when there’s fresh water available, we should be really happy. Water is life very literally.

And we can look at the water-ness of everything. Beyond just the wet stuff we’ve been talking about. The way things flow and cohere. Movement seems to be driven by the fire element – the energy of movement – but also shaped by the water element, flowing – a sense of order and cohesion, and the air element – a sense of freedom.

The elements were important in some many cultures as you know. An important one for deep exploration of the water element is Daoism. The first Eastern spiritual work I ever met is the brief and powerful Dao de Jing. And Daoism is all about water. It’s also called the Watercourse Way. Learn how to flow around obstacles like the water in a stream flows around a rock is one metaphor.

We tend to not flow around that rock. We’re more like “STOP everything, this watercourse is not correctly engineered. All water stop flowing immediately while we wait for the bulldozer!” Right? We want to bludgeon our obstacles out of the way instead of flowing around them. They bother us. We have trouble tolerating them.

Here are a few lines from the Tao te Ching – and of course there’s a lot more going on there than water imagery – it’s a deep and complex cultural-spiritual tradition that I have only a surface (surface! ha!) level knowledge of:

There was something formless and perfect

before the universe was born.

It is serene. Empty.

Solitary. Unchanging.

Infinite. Eternally present.

It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name,

I call it the Tao.

It flows through all things,

inside and outside, and returns

to the origin of all things.

…

The great Tao flows everywhere.

All things are born from it,

yet it doesn’t create them.

It pours itself into its work,

yet it makes no claim.

It nourishes infinite worlds,

yet it doesn’t hold on to them.

Since it is merged with all things

and hidden in their hearts,

it can be called humble.

Since all things vanish into it

and it alone endures,

it can be called great.

It isn’t aware of its greatness;

thus it is truly great.

So tying together Buddha’s emphasis on freedom from our self-concept and our modern scientific/medical understanding of what we are: it I’m mostly a bag of water does “Tim” really need to keep worrying so much about whether people like him? Really need to keep worrying too much about what they’re doing? I myself was actually called out recently for micro-managing – have you had that experience? Ouch. I went through a round of defensiveness and luckily managed to sleep on it before lashing out and realizing they were right. (And I also asked them to listen to the wisdom in my ranting too, please). But really who is this “I know best” self who needs to tell people what to do all the time? That righteous one? Can I soften about him? Can I be more like water?

And Buddhism takes it one further: can I release from being anyhing at all? Just be. Just be.

Here’s an interesting practice suggestion from a famous 5th century commentary on the Buddha’s early teachings. This suggest we can practice freedom from self concept with the water element using tears [Visudhimagga, p. 355-6]

Tears, when produced, are to be found filling the eye sockets or trickling out of them. Herein, just as, when the sockets of young palm kernels are filled with water, the sockets of the young palm kernels do not know, “Water is in us,” nor does the water in the sockets of the young palm kernels know, “I am in sockets of young palm kernels,” so too, the eye sockets do not know, “Tears are in us,” nor do the tears know, “We are in eye sockets.” These things are devoid of mutual concern and reviewing. So what is called tears is a particular component of this body, without thought, indeterminate, void, not a living being, liquid water element in the mode of cohesion.

We do a lot of interpreting. Why am “I” tearing up? Can we let tears just be tears? Can we let a moment just be a moment without seeing it so much through the lens of me & mine. Am I okay? Tears are just water. In some ways they don’t “mean” anything. And yet to our conditioned selves the mean a lot.

[talk about the transition more briefly to get to RJ’s story sooner]

As some of you know I recently had a big change in role at Mindfulness Northwest. I’ve left my main position as the Executive Director – I’m staying on as a senior teacher and getting to do what I love the most which is practicing and teaching with you – so thank you for helping to make that happen! But in our little world at the organization it’s a big deal. I’m the founder and the center point. I had a pretty light touch, mostly, as a leader so the wonderful thing is that a strong team grew up around me – a team with a real feeling of family. Economic realities have challenged that as we have had to shrink our admin team just to survive so it’s not such a tidy story as all that but still it’s been a pretty wonderful group of humans. Every one involved has a deep practice of mindfulness too. And most of them did extensive training with me too. It’s been quite something.

I was actually burn out a bit on the meetings/email/coordination/decisions/being a boss blah blah blah parts of it all but I’m so grateful for what happened. That I could have a big chapter my working life in something related to meditation is nothing short of a miracle.

[And there’s a whole ‘nuther story entertwined there around my Zen Buddhist journey but that’s for another day]

Anyway as a transition present the staff put together a kind of memory book. Photos and reflections and stories about each of their journeys in Mindfulness Northwest and oodles of appreciation for me. I totally teared up myself. I actually read it at the Seattle airport while I was waiting for my much delayed first leg here – and before I realized that it was so delayed I was in real danger of missing the flight to Costa Rica! but that’s also another story. I had a few adventures getting here.

Anyway our newest hire shared the following:

Below is a picture from our teacher training graduation 2019. I’m sharing that just the day before I’d wept while reading a poem during my final presentation, the first time as an adult I’d cried in public.

Thank you for helping break open this full heart!

So tears are also a big deal. Sometimes a very big deal.

And again we have this wonderful both and possiblity as modern practioners of mindfulness informed by Buddhism. That we can both learn how to take care of our tender selves better. To treasure those tears at graduation. To ask for what we need. To set boundaries. To be careful. All of that.

AND we can learn to let all of that go too – into the freedom of just being the elements. Setting down the burden of being “me” all the time.

Our joyful opportunities as “creatures made of mostly water” as one of the aliens on Star Trek called us, is to be precious tender human beings and to be completely a flowing mandala of earth, water, fire, and air.

All at the same time, isn’t that wonderful?

Sometimes I think of this work of practice as having two interwoven paths:

The path of healing and the path of transformation.

And they support each other. We need to heal before we can really approach transformation deeply. And the practice of transformation frees us up to heal so much more fully and ease-fully. Healing with support from transformation isn’t such a struggle or a slog – it’s a ligthening and releasing. It’s about less, not about more. It’s about dropping what blocks us not about accumulating more tools or skills or techniques. There’s an organic process to all of this I think and here we are in the intense organic center of our organic planet – at least of the thin living surface of the planet! When we look at fire maybe we’ll remember what’s going on deep under our feet!

Thank you.

Talk 4: The Element of Earth

Tech glitch - not recorded.

See the talk notes below.

Talk Notes

[appreciate how everyone’s navigating our hybrid retreat: 8 hours of formal practice each day, being more casual during our nature walks, settling back in over our silent meals, and how very grounded and quiet it always is in our home area. If people were getting into conversations on the walkways we’d all feel it big time.]

I’ve been kind of revising the description of the retreat in my head and later maybe I’ll ask for your help wordsmithing that – it’s a unique thing we’re doing I think. A tropical vacation, and a nature study course, and a grounded week of formal mindfulnes & meditation practice – all mixed together in a beautiful place with some yummy Costa Rican food. My experience and understanding is that what we’re being offered is pretty much everyday typical Costa Rican cuisine. Probably a little more elaborate than you’d cook for your family at home – maybe what you’d cook for Sunday super after church.]

[don’t let me forget I have a favor to ask of you too]

Here’s another poem from Robin’s picks:

Larry Butler – The Earth Says

The earth says

keep still

stay put & listen to the roar of silence

hold on & root deep for treasure

feel the sap rising through your bones

wait & see what happens

The river says

keep flowing

into the lochs swirling & swelling & swishing

keep floating down down & down

falling & carving the mountains

down to the beautiful sea

The trees say

keep rooting

rooting & rising into sky –

spread out your arms to embrace everything

breathe deep deeper with each falling leaf

gather fruit & nuts for winter

The sky says

keep looking

sniff the air & notice the small

changes moment by moment

breath by breath cloud by cloud

watching your thoughts float by

The birds say

keep singing sing from your heart

fly from branch to branch

stay curious stay light start fresh

each year with a new nest then be patient

& sit on your eggs till they hatch

The sun says

keep smiling

smile at your reflection on still water

from dawn to dusk go outside

out to play with light & shadow

in the day long dazzle leaping through thin air

The compost heap says

keep rotting

decomposing turning burning

digest everything that comes your way

keep returning to the earth

& the earth returns tenfold to you

the earth says keep still stay put

wait & see what happens next

Here we are doing our best to feel the earth, to listen to the earth, to treasure the earth. To be the earth.

From time to time I think about whatever’s happening – or whatever existis – and ponder how easily it could have been otherwise.

If the planet that became the earth was just a little further away from the sun it would have been too cold to support water-based life – we wouldn’t have liquid water, just frozen water or no water at all – like Mars. The average surface temperature there is -81 F. If it’s had been too much closer it would be too hot and we wouldn’t have an liquid water – just steam. Mercury is a lot closer to the sun and it’s average temperature is 333 F – but it varies alot there’s a cold side turned away from the sun and a super hot side.

They say that our earth is a planet that’s right in the middle of the “goldilocks zone” – like Goldilocks and the 3 bears where her porridge was just right. I think that term was actually created by science fiction writers but has been adopted by astronomers which is cute.

And you can just keep going from there. Not every planet in the goldilocks zone is going to have life on it or the rich diversity of life that our planet enjoys once we had a few billion years to evolve this incredible diversity.

Why are the tropics so biologically diverse – why are there SO MANY more species here than areas away from the equator?

The primary reason is just the same as in your vegetable garden at home: you plant when there’s plenty of sun, you water your garden to keep it nice and moist and you grow your veggies when those conditions are going to keep going for a while from late Spring through Summer.

Well here it’s naturally always good garden conditions. The rains increase and decrease over the year from the dry season in the winter to the web season in the summer but in this area anyway even in the so called “dry” season it rains 4 to 6 inches per month. About as much as it rains in Tuscon all year. And then in the wet season we’re looking at 20+ inches per month. Per month.

So we have great conditions for a natural garden to grow.

And we also have competition for resources: light from the sun is obvious, also nutrients. Here we’re into Darwin stuff: through random mutations that can happen in reproduction plants shift and change a little. Sometimes this results in an adaptation – like growing taller to reach the sunlight at the canopy – then the individuals in that species that are more that way tend to dominate and that trait gets built into that species. And animals follow suit. There’s also a rich rich interaction that happens between flowers and the insects and other animals that pollinate them which is worthy of a few talks all by itself – it’s incredible.

Like if your planet evolves a brighter colored and more distinctive looking flower, the wasp that pollinates it has a better time as it flies around the dense dark canopy finding it. The wasp gets some nectar and pollen to eat and they rub the pollen from one plant around in the flower of another individual plant and the plant can set seeds and reproduce. To flowers aren’t pretty for us: they are pretty for their polliinators – or better to say distinctive and recognizable.

The tropics are kind of this in engine of species creation in those ways and many more.

And the other reason there is such diversity has to do with our species. The human cultures who ended up living first in the tropics had simpler tools and lived off the abundance around them – they did, and do, some modifications, some gardening, some burning off undesirable species, some clearing but mostly everything you need is right here. Especially the diversity of species leads to diversity in their chemistry leads to more medicinal plants. Our pharmaceutical companies have been mining the tropic rainforests for drug ideas for centuries.

Europe was pretty well clear cut for agriculture. The tropical regions of the Americas, Africa, and Asia were not. Especially here in the Americas. So part of why there’s such incredible diversity here is humans didn’t clear all of these forests. And while it’s great that Costa Rica preserved 25% of it’s land area, the bigger number there is the 75% cleared for people to live on and farm on and drive on – all of the human infrastructure that makes our modern life so workable and frees us up to overwork!

But the diversity here is truly a wonder and humans haven’t messed it up yet. Here’s hoping we don’t.

Which brings us back to my little rave about Costa Rica the other day. This really is a pretty great country I think as countries go, but of course you know it’s built on colonial genocide starting with the Conquistadores and the Jesuit missionaries followed by many waves of settlement. The Jesuit’s weren’t all bad – in many ways they were very sympathetic to indigenous cultures and actually helped preserve indigenous languages by writing dictionaries and similar bits of early scholarship – but they certainly had an ideological agenda.

Most Costa Ricans identify as Catholic as a result. That number has gone done in the modern age though: recent surveys have about half Catholic, a quarter Protestant and a quarter non-religious.

But back to the tragic history that’s pretty much everywhere: just like in North America is was the old world diseases these European explorers, conquerers, missionairies and settlers brought that did the real damage.

Here’s an utterly horrifying number we’ll need to breath with a minute:

Estimates suggest that up to 95% of the indigenous population in the Americas died within the first 100-150 years after European contact. 95%.

I won’t pronounce them right but I was to honor that when we’re in Costa Rica we’re in the lands of the Huetar, Maleku, Bribri, Cabécar, Brunka, Ngäbe, Bröran, and Chorotega. Today about 2.5% of the population identifies as indigenous.

So we sit on the earth with our earth bodies.

Earth element means solidity and stability but there’s a nuance to that solidity. That stability isn’t so dense and unchanging as we think it is. Every element also has qualities of the others and I think the important one to me with Earth is the 5th element of Space that’s intermingled with it. Being a science-y guy I think about how we know from physics that every atom is almost all space – there are just some strong forces between the central nucleus of the atom and the electron or electrons that are bouncing around.

I’m fond of this number: the simplest element from the world of physics, hydrogen, is actually 99.9999999999996% space. That was 99 then 12 9’s then we just drop to a 6 in the 13th decimal place. That’s almost almost almost nothing but space and that’s the building block of the physical world. Mostly space.

Psychologially earth is associated with patience and groundedness. And it makes sense that you need to have a sense of solidity but you also need to be able to feel some space.

A super super popular mindfulness quote fits here, attributed to Victor Frankl, the Jewish psychologist who survived the holocast in both body and mind, that goes like:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space; in that space is our power to choose our response; in our response is our growth and our freedom.”

There’s a groundedness there but also literally a speciousness: feeling the space. And kind of feeling the space in time itself there too, right? Not being fooled that everything is a dense continuous flow and unlike my favorite Zen Master from the classical age there is no room to turn around.

So the earth element suggests a spacious groundedness. A solidity and stability that has a some room in it. Not rigid.

This is mirrored in our meditation posture and practice. Ideally you’re settling into a calm and basically relaxed stillness. Sitting up right and letting go. Or lying down and releasing into the Earth. There IS benefit from sitting still, from walking slowly and mindfully – that’s a practice for us of stability and especially non-reactivity.

Jon K-Z thought of all this and cooked up a meditation called the mountain meditation. Rather than just talk anymore about all of this – let’s try his meditation (at least my version of it anyay). In the imargery I don’t know enough about Central American Mountains so I’ll speak from my own Western US perspective on what a mountain is.

JON K-Z’s MOUNTAIN MEDITATION

ASK FOR PHOTO SHOOT FAVOR WHEN WE GO TO LUNCH

Close with Octavio Paz (1914 – 1998, Mexican poet, sympathetic to Buddhism) in English and Spanish.

Octavio Paz – Between Going and Staying

Between going and staying the day wavers,

in love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay

where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,

all is near and can’t be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,

rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats

the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall

into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,

watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,

I stay and go: I am a pause.

Octavio Paz: Entre irse y quedarse/Between Going and Staying

Este poema de Octavio Paz, para mí, recuerda bien la naturaleza efímera y contradictoria de la vida. Es importante en estes días de Terri Schiavo.

Entre irse y quedarse

Entre irse y quedarse dude el día,

enamorado de su transparencia.

La tarde circular es ya bahía:

en su quieto vaivén se mece el munco.

Todo es visible y todo es elusivo,

todo está cerca y todo es intocable.

Los papeles, el libro, el vaso, el lápiz

reposan a la sombra de sus nombres

Latir del tiempo que en mi sien repite

la misma terca sílaba de sangre.

La luz hace del muro indiferente

un espectral teatro de reflejos.

En el centro de un ojo me descubro;

no me mira, me miro en su mirada.

Se disipa el instante. Sin moverme,

yo me quedo y me voy: soy una pausa.

In the Rainforest: The Five ElementsRainforest Retreat 2025 | Four Talks by Tim Burnett

Rainforest Retreat 2025

Talk 1: The Elements – an Introduction

Talk Notes

Talk 2: The Element of Air

Talk Notes

Talk 3: The Element of Water

Talk Notes

Talk 4: The Element of Earth

Tech glitch - not recorded.

Talk Notes

In the Rainforest: The Five Elements
Rainforest Retreat 2025 | Four Talks by Tim Burnett