Naikan and the Art of Living Peacefully: With a simple 3-question method to more contentment

By Sabine Kaspari

This book provides you with a unique, simple method for getting to know yourself honestly, objectively and without prejudice and thus developing a more peaceful way of dealing with yourself and your environment. Based on three simple yet challenging questions, you will experience yourself and your past from a new perspective. This will enable you to reshape your future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: tredition
• Release date: Nov 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9783384074737

Sabine Kaspari

Sabine Kaspari, born 1960 in Munich (capital city of Bavaria, South Germany). She has three adult sons, learned about Naikan in 2002 as part of her training as a Naikido Shiatsu practitioner, practicing her first Naikan Retreat in 2003 with her teacher Josef Hartl in Austria. Two years later, Naikan helped her over a serious personal crisis and she began her training as a Naikan guide in 2006 with Franz Ritter and Prof. em Akira Ishii. Since 2007 she has been accompanying a few hundred participants in their Naikan Retreats. In 2012 she moved her center to the edge of National Park Bavarian Forest. Her greatest passion is to provide the Naikan experience and with it a tool to inner peace accessible to as many people as possible.

Book preview

Remark about readability

In order to simplify readability and the flow of the text, I have in part waived the use of both genders. For all these cases the other gender could also be used. Thank you for your understanding.

The inclined reader will inevitably notice that certain parts in this book are repeated several times. So in all larger chapters you can find descriptions on how to deal with the three questions, the division of time periods and so on. This is primarily due to my expectation, that this book will be used more as a work in progress than as a flowing reading and would like to spare the reader from having to constantly scroll back in order to start an exercise directly.

Those of you who actually manage to read this book in one, I ask for your understanding about these repetitions.

Preface

"Peace: …(a period of) freedom from war and violence, especially when people live and work together happily without disagreements…" Cambridge Dictionary, 2020

*****

"Peace is a concept… In a social sense, peace is commonly used to mean a lack of conflict (such as war) and freedom from fear of violence between individuals or groups. Throughout history leaders have used peace making and diplomacy to establish a certain type of behavioral restraint that has resulted in the establishment of regional peace or economic growth through various forms of agreements or peace treaties. Such behavioral restraint has often resulted in the reduction of conflicts, greater economic interactivity, and consequently substantial prosperity." Wikipedia, 2023

*****

This is how »peace« is explained, if you search the internet for this term which is so important for each of us. If one takes out some parts from the above definition, a most interesting task arises for us as individuals: … a lack of conflict (such as war)… freedom from fear of violence between individuals or groups …

How can this general state between people, in which existing conflicts are settled without violence, be achieved by each of us? This certainly requires a definition of the term violence, because one could easily fall into the temptation to think here primarily of physical violence and to say to oneself: I'm not a violent person, I don't hurt anyone. Yet derogatory words, punishing silence and ignoring can sometimes hit harder than a spontaneous, helpless slap in the face.

Please think for a moment about how you deal with conflicts within your family, with friends, work colleagues and so on. What does your culture of conflict look like? Are there not occasionally violent words, gestures, threats or offended silence? How often have you wanted to do violence to your counterpart, shake him or her, destroy something to make him or her understand what you mean?

Most people are capable of violence; it only takes certain circumstances to allow it to erupt. So, we can say: Peace starts within each one of us. Only when we manage to cultivate peace in ourselves, to learn to live peacefully and contentedly, will the world have a chance to be pacified.

In this sense, I wish you many insights about yourself and others while reading this book and perhaps consequently - Contentment.

Yours Sabine Kaspari

Foreword

Today, it is almost impossible to escape the many influences on which we are exposed on a daily basis. Especially in this day and age, a variety of fears develop such as: fear of social isolation, fear of loss, fear of unemployment, fear of poverty, fear of illness, pandemic, and much more. These fears, together with the countless demands that life places on us day after day, give us a feeling of helplessness, of being at the mercy of others, of insecurity, but also of anger.

What can I do…? we ask ourselves, convinced there is nothing we can do about our own increasing dissatisfaction. We like to blame circumstances, the economic situation, bosses, colleagues and even our relatives and friends. Few stop to look at their own part in a situation, to rediscover their own potential, to look at the plain facts of life and accept them.

The purpose of this book is to shake us up, to show us a way to take life into our own hands again, to find our way back to the essential: to love ourselves and our fellow human beings and thus to more inner CONTENTMENT. Therefore, I wish Sabine Kaspari with her book about Naikan that many readers discover the power of this method for themselves and follow this gentle path of self-development.

Prof. em. Akira Ishii

Naikan is a method developed by a Japanese Buddhist to deal with oneself in a meditative way.

It is based on three central questions through which we learn to reconcile with the past and feel more peace and gratitude.

The only prerequisite is to regularly set aside some time for the exercises.

What is Naikan?

Naikan was developed in Japan in the 1940s. By applying this method to ourselves, we can heal wounds of the past and live happier and more content in the future.

What you can reach with Naikan

The term Naikan is composed of the words Nai = inner and Kan = observe. It means to look inside or inner observation. Naikan is based on the idea that we create our personality and our view of the world ourselves, including all difficulties, mistakes and conflicts. Consequently, we can change ourselves and our perception of things. The path of Naikan allows us to become more attentive and mindful. In this way we prevent unconscious impressions from influencing us without us realizing it. That means we make ourselves aware of at least a part of these impressions. In addition, we train our ability for self-observation. In modern parlance, the term self-coaching is used for this process.

Three magic Questions

The Naikan exercise is based on three questions which can be called magic as they are able to help you create a more conscious life:

1. What did someone do for me / what did I get?

2. What have I done for or given to someone?

3. What difficulties have I caused someone?

The so-called fourth question, what difficulties someone has caused us, is not given any weight in Naikan. Many of us are very aware of it and answering it does not move us forward in our development process.

Classically Naikan is learned in a 7-day retreat and then practiced as regularly as possible. The focus during the retreat is on dealing with the past. A Naikan facilitator visits the practitioners at regular intervals and is available for supportive assistance. With the help of this book, you can learn to apply the method on your own. However, for deep, lasting insights and changes, the 7-day retreat with professional guidance is required.

Change in everyday life

If this book has found you, it means it's time for a change. Not a sudden, rapid change that would overwhelm you and those around you, but one that creeps into your life slowly and naturally - one that has a lasting effect. Gently, yet inexorably, Naikan practice will change your perspective. Reading the book and especially the practice will, of course, require some time and discipline, but you will see: The effort is worth it. Once you have internalized the three magical questions, they will suddenly appear in your daily life, after you have been terribly angry about something or someone, or when you are about to tell off your husband, your wife, your children, a colleague or whoever, or while you are sulking because someone gave you his honest opinion. The three Naikan questions will help you to deal with these and similar situations more calmly and confidently.

What this book can achieve

After reading this book and, of course,, after some time spent implementing the exercises and letting them work, you will find that you feel more content overall, that you are silent and smile more often instead of sulking. And you will have learned to value honest opinions. You will go through the rest of your life more calmly and with more gratitude even for the small things, and this will have an automatic effect on those around you.

You will not become a perfect person - there is no such thing. But you will be able to deal with many things more openly and less fearfully, and you will be more confident. Also, you will still cause difficulties for your environment - because this cannot be avoided! But you will do this more consciously and will be less ashamed of it but will rather stand by your (for others) uncomfortable character traits, which are commonly called faults. You will become more self-aware (of yourself) in the truest sense of the word! As a simple consequence you will also accept some peculiarities of your fellow humans or different situations. If you don't succeed with one or the other, you will learn to forgive - yourself and the other.

This is what Naikan with its three questions can do for you. Life will not become easier, but clearer, more beautiful and peaceful! To encourage you even more to go this way, in this book you will find again and again statements of people who got to know and appreciate Naikan in a seminar.

A new view for me and the future

I have known my patterns and sore points for a long time, only I have not yet found a way to come to peace with them and to gain strength and ease from them. We cannot change others, only ourselves - I have only understood the meaningful implementation in everyday life here. This will help me immensely in the future. Vera S.

Where does Naikan come from?

The founder of Naikan was the Japanese businessman Ishin Yoshimoto (1916-1988). He was a practicing Buddhist who, after long and difficult practices, reached enlightenment, which he expressed in the following words: I got a new life full of joy. From then on, he dedicated himself to his desire to make a life full of joy available to all people. He was looking for a method that would be relatively easy to do and independent of religion. And so, Ishin Yoshimoto developed the way of Naikan. Since Naikan was also practiced with prisoners in Japan, the criminologist Professor Akira Ishii encountered this method of selfexpression. He was so fascinated that he began to practice and study with Ishin Yoshimoto and eventually became a Naikan guide himself.

In 1980, at the invitation of Franz Ritter, Akira Ishii conducted the first open Naikan week outside Japan, in Scheibbs, Austria. Since then, Naikan has spread enormously in Europe. Akira Ishii comes back every year, gives Naikan seminars and lectures. His roots in the Japanese Naikan society always brings new methodological impulses for the development of Naikan and Naikan leaders in Europe.

In Japan Naikan has already had a firm place in personal, social and professional areas for many years: in schools, in the health sector, in resocialization, in business and management. Naikan is also spreading more and more in the USA, China, South Africa and many other countries of the world.

Naikan is healthy

Sayings like that hits me in the stomach or that goes to her heart indicate that our body reacts to everything we encounter every day. We feel this very clearly when we are in love, when we are very happy about something, when we are angry about something or someone, when we feel attacked or misunderstood we frequently experience physical reactions.

This is often true days or even years later. Please recall a situation that was extremely unpleasant for you. Be it a dismissal, the news of the death of someone close,