I keep coming back to intention and motivation — to the question of what I am doing, why I am doing it, and what I am silently offering in the doing of it.
My mindfulness and compassion training, rooted in both secular and Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, has shaped me profoundly. I experience it not as a religion but as a way of examining life — my life, its meanings, and my motivations within it.
One of its most quietly revolutionary teachings is that of dana — generosity. Not generosity as transaction, not even generosity as virtue, but gift giving without expectation of anything in return: the cultivation of a generous spirit. There is something in this idea that keeps returning to me, something I struggle to name but recognise immediately when I encounter it.
The image that stays with me is the relationship between trees and the world around them. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen for life to flourish, and they ask nothing in return. They are not even aware of their own generosity. There is something almost unbearably beautiful in that — a biotic reciprocity so complete it doesn’t need to know itself as such.
I find myself wondering how much of the work I do carries that same quality. Therapy can be, and of course is often, a financial transaction. And yet what actually moves between me and a client is something considerably more than what is accounted for on an invoice. There is a gift in the quality of presence — in the holding of space, in the refusal to simply deliver a service and move on. The same is true in my supervision practice: offering someone the gift of genuine attention so they can explore what is alive in their client work, in themselves, and in the complex relational field that holds them. That field fascinates me. It hums with meaning.
I have been noticing this same spirit of generosity closer to home — with my sons, with my wife. My therapist said to me recently, “Bill, you care so much.” She was responding to something that had seemed small to me: my wife had asked to be alone in the house to deliver something vulnerable to her course group, and I had honoured that. But I stayed watchful, knowing she might be carrying something heavy when she came back downstairs. When she did, I came in from the office and I was simply there for her. I didn’t try to fix anything. I held her and let her cry it out. My therapist was genuinely moved as I described this. The strange thing was — I had not even noticed what I had done. I had simply responded to what was needed, without thought or performance.
Perhaps that is the point. When generosity flows from intention rather than performance, it doesn’t announce itself. It is just what happens.
The Fife Men’s Project: Gift Giving in the Woods
It is within this understanding that the Fife Men’s Nature Project has taken shape — and it feels, to me, like the fullest expression of what I mean when I talk about gift giving.
Working alongside Douglas and a small team of like-minded male practitioners, we have been developing a nature-based men’s group here in Fife. The project keeps evolving and emerging almost of its own accord, and I believe that is because both the need and the connection at its heart are genuine. Men in this part of Scotland — men who are struggling, men who would never walk through the door of a conventional counselling service — need something different. They need to be met where they are.
The therapeutic approach we are drawing on is Contact Oriented Therapy in a natural setting, emerging from the tradition of pre-therapy developed by Garry Prouty. Pre-therapy was designed to engage people who find it difficult to make what therapists call ‘psychological contact’ — the basic human capacity to be aware of our inner world, the world around us, and other people. Trauma, psychosis, and other difficult experiences can impair this contact profoundly. People can appear incoherent, withdrawn, or unreachable — not because they are beyond connection, but because the bridge to connection needs to be rebuilt slowly, concretely, and with great patience.
What the natural setting offers is exactly that: tangible, shared experience. The temperature of the air, the texture of bark, the quality of light through trees, the smell of woodsmoke. And tasks — particularly the task of making fire together.
When you make fire with a flint, steel, char cloth, bark, and dry kindling, you enter into something ancient and collaborative. It demands patience, gentleness, persistence, and real communication. When the flame finally catches — when that first ember glows in cupped hands — it feels like a gift from nature and from each other simultaneously. That moment of shared effort becoming shared light is, I believe, a form of profound human contact and gift giving.
The men I have invited into this project are, each of them, natural gift givers. Over many years they each have taught me skills, and I have watched them do the same for others — including my own sons. I invited them to trust me, and to bring their gift giving into the woods — to use what they know and who they are to reach men in Fife who are struggling. We are moving slowly, building trust, sharing what we each carry. That, too, is gift giving.
Only The Impossible is Worth Doing
My teacher Vin keeps gently reminding me: open your awareness and feel the interconnection — the truth of interdependency, impermanence, and compassion — and then lean into it, trust it, give it some intention. Watching this project take shape, that is exactly what I feel. Not forced. Not effortful. Something that can be trusted to come to life through patience, gentleness, kindness, and warmth.
Like the gift giving of Akong Rinpoche — imbued with deep knowledge, understanding and belief in interdependence, impermanence, and compassion — it can only manifest as a life with purpose and meaning: the relief of suffering, and the celebration of this one precious life.
“Only the impossible is worth doing,” said the great Akong Rinpoche. And he did!
Pure dead mental, perhaps. But it all feels very right. And for that, I am deeply grateful.