Episode #127: Helping to Cushion the Blow
“I basically started meditating about eight years ago, and it's it changed my life completely,” Claire Thorp explains at the outset of the interview. Her first meditation experience came in the form of a ten-day vipassana course at Dhamma Dipa, a center in England in the tradition of S.N. Goenka, which is a Burmese lineage.
For years, Claire had been intrigued observing how her partner kept up a daily sitting and was curious to give it a try herself. The initial result, however, was not what she expected, as the intensive course was so difficult that she didn’t know if she would ever be able to do another one! Yet that would change before long. She recalls thinking that “there was some sort of pull there, almost like a sort of magnetic pull that I felt towards the practice, just because it was so powerful. And sure enough, after about six months, I went back and I served.”
From that point on, Claire became a regular at the local center, alternating between sitting and serving. Once she made that commitment, she realized she needed to find one item in particular that would support her developing practice: a meditation cushion. However, she couldn’t find anything that fit her needs, and so had to improvise with what she had on hand.
Some time later, Claire traveled to India for further meditation. She ended up visiting Jaipur, where she took a course in natural dyeing. This would eventually lead to the creation of her company, Sati Designs, which produces meditation cushions. The Pāḷi word “sati” means “mindfulness,” and that began to guide the company’s vision.
“The reason to call this this company Sati is because I wanted the process to be a very conscious one, where the impact on the environment was very low. Using natural dyes and processes, but also just the nature of block printing, it's a very mindful technique, because it's very hands on. You have a wooden block that's been intricately carved.”
The product itself has intrinsic value to Claire. “A cushion is a sacred, isn't it?” she asks rhetorically. “That you will use perhaps daily for the rest of your life. One of the things that I felt I wanted to inspire is to create these beautiful cushions that would almost be a sort of an inspiration to you to sit more.”
Claire enthusiastically describes her experiences with Jaipur’s wood carver artisan community. “You walk down the street, and it's just incredible, the sound of tapping everywhere,” she recalls. “They have a set of chisels, and they are all ever so slightly different. They have slightly different tips and slightly different ends, and you hit them in a slightly different way.”
Many of these artisans come from families who have been using traditional techniques for generations. Far from large factories, they work right out of their homes. Through these connections, she located sources for every part of the production: the block printing, the natural dying, the cotton and spelt husk filling, and the textile covers. “It's a very niche process, but incredibly beautiful,” she notes.
Following her second Vipassanā course, she made a strong resolution to visit Myanmar. “I just had the sense of gratitude that I felt towards this country and its people for preserving the technique,” she notes. From the moment she arrived in 2016, there was a sense of warmth and inclusion. She recalls the taxi driver from the airport talking about the pilgrimage that S.N. Goenka had led there several years prior. “And I thought, ‘Well, gosh, isn't this amazing?’ Like, I've just gotten this taxi and this man, he knows all about vipassana! Gosh, this is so ingrained in the culture that the Buddhist tradition is my first interaction. And I just thought, this is incredible!”
Claire took a course at Dhamma Joti in Yangon, and was immediately struck by how serious her fellow Burmese yogis were, and how long they could sit with only minimal cushions and support. “I felt such a warmth towards the country, even just in the center. There was a sense of real familiarity with the place.”
After the course, Claire visited the nearby Sule Pagoda, where she sat down to read an Oscar Wilde book. Recognizing the cover, a local man approached her and struck up a conversation, and eventually told her about an orphanage he was supporting. What happened next was something that always stayed in her mind when recalling her trip.
“I had a very good sort of intuition about this man,” she remembers thinking, in a way she never would feel in England with a total stranger. “And I said, ‘Would you take me to see this orphanage?’” But as it was not convenient to visit on that day, the man instead offered to take her to a local monastery, and Claire immediately accepted. “So this random man who I'd only known for a half an hour, and I was like, ‘Yeah!’ So we get on a local bus, and I have no idea where I'm going, but sure enough, we went to this lovely monastery. He introduced me to one of the monks and we sat and had a cup of tea together. The monk couldn't speak any English, so the man was translating. And it was just really like, ‘Wow, gosh, look at that, an hour ago, I was sitting in a park reading a book, and now I'm having tea with a monk, and he's telling me to become a nun!’ That was one of the few things he said was, ‘You shave your head and become a nun!’” While Claire would not end up taking his advice on that particular trip, the spontaneous spiritual injunction would have quite an impact on her.
Claire has been following the unfolding events in Myanmar since the military coup with sadness, while trying to bring attention and support. Towards these ends, she has generously offered a special two-week promotional period from October 14th through the 28th, in which 20% from all sales at Sati Designs will be donated to Better Burma.
With memories of her Dhamma Joti course still in mind, and with the continued benefits of her daily practice, Claire is grateful that she has the opportunity to give back through this promotion. “[The coup] left me with such a heavy heart,” she says. “I know that I wasn't in the country for very long, but I felt such a connection to the country and to the people that it was it was heartbreaking. I felt a real sense of like, I need to do something, but I don't how. I think a lot of people felt this sense of a helplessness.”
Claire recalls how after her course at Dhamma Joti, she ended up making a friendship with two fellow yogis who treated her for lunch later. “They were such incredible people, and so I think having that kind of personal connection with people in the country who are going through such hardship at the moment, it's just reinforced my, my desire to help.”