What does "Samudradaka" mean and what significance does it hold for you?
It has a number of levels of meaning. Originally my Preceptor thought of my name because he thought I was in touch with the heights and the depths. "Samudra" stands for ocean and signifies the depths but it also means an ocean of the sky or a celestial ocean. "Daka" also has a number of meanings. It can mean Sunyata (emptiness), the sky, or reality. "Daka" also means (in a similar way to Dakini the female version) a being who dances or walks in the sky. So if you put the two together you have "sea-sky", or "the sky-walker of the ocean and sea", or even "sky sky"? Also visually it has a strong significance for me in terms of color - different blues; and particularly the subtle point where the horizon is, the liminality, the threshold between the sea and the sky - which is actually where the Dakas live, particularly on the threshold between non-enlightenment and enlightenment.

You were Ordained into the Western Buddhist Order last year, what is the biggest change the Ordination ceremony and retreat has brought about in you? It's not an easy question because in some ways the process is still going on now, I'm still working through it. Apart from the obvious external things like being part of the Order and now going to Chapter meetings and Order weekends, on an internal level a major one is self view - letting go to a considerable degree of old, negative self-views and a view of myself as limited and unconfident and now feeling the freedom to move outwards. I seem much more able to connect with a positive self-view and to have a sense of possibilities.

How do you balance activity and stillness in your life? It's difficult to describe. It's a bit of a mysterious process. I don't spend a lot of time being still, I do do a lot of stuff , though I seem to experience stillness. In meditation I can have quite a lot of mental activity going on and at the same time there is a deeper stillness which feels quite easy to access; on an emotional level there is a sense of stillness. It's something I'm still learning to do. When things go well I do have a sense of a natural rhythm. A lot of it is letting go of the desire to keep doing all these things and realizing I can't do everything at once. It's a question of being honest with myself as to how much I can take on verses how much I want to do. I've got two sides, one can get very inspired by different ideas and projects but another side experiences anxiety in the face of having a number of jobs to do at once. So there is a contradiction between the two, and one has to learn from the other. The anxiety has to trust in the bigger vision and the vision has to listen to the anxiety of the everyday experience and be realistic about what's actually possible.

How long have you lived in communities? It depends what you mean by communities. I've lived in shared houses since '88. For four years I lived in a house where people had shared ideas about veganism and worked together on environmental issues. Since 1994 I've lived in the Leeds Buddhist Centre community.

Why have you decided to live in this way rather than alone or with fewer people? I think the idea of living on my own or with one other person or with a couple of other people, on a fairly loose level, might be interesting to do at some point. I have enjoyed, and I still enjoy living in communities. I like the opportunity that it provides on a practical level; working together; simple things like sharing cooking, shopping and washing up, obvious practical advantages, it's cheaper. But also the idea of having a collective goal that we are all working towards in terms of how we relate to each other and work together. I also like the fun of living with other people. It's a bit like how my family was. There were always a lot of people around, and a good element of fun went with it.

How does Spiritual friendship affect your life? It makes my Buddhist practice more real, in that I can share what I'm doing. I suppose the spiritual life tends to be quite an internal experience, so without Spiritual friendship it would just be within myself. And not being able to communicate it with anyone else would be quite a frustrating experience. One level of Spiritual friendship is having other people who understand what I do and being able to express it to them, and the other level is the response in terms of feedback; other people seeing where I go wrong, seeing blind-spots. So they can help me out. Particularly people who are more experienced than myself. Spiritual friendship is spiritual practice, in that it allows me to experience, on odd occasions when there's quite a deep level of understanding, the opening up of higher states of consciousness and deeper understanding; not just of the other person and what it means to be a human being but through that communication, of reality itself to some extent.

What is your long-term vision for the Leeds Buddhist Centre and yourself. I see myself being around in Leeds for a good number of years. I do want to help get the Centre established on stronger footing. So very short term I'm looking to work with people to help get the organization of the Centre improved. It would be good to have a Centre of some sort either on a long term lease or to buy somewhere; it would be good to have some structure to act as a focal point. I'm not convinced it needs to be anything like the size of the Manchester Buddhist Centre. I'm quite interested in other ways of looking at it. I'm also quite interested in broadening out into other areas of Leeds and other cities; trying to run out-reach classes, with the Centre as a focal point and trying to coordinate that. Longer term, I'd like to work to build up a stronger network between the different Centers in our local region, for example Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. There are ideas of working together as a team and maybe at some point setting up a retreat centre between those Centers. I'm also interested, at some point in going away from Leeds with some friends and setting up a Buddhist Centre somewhere else; maybe abroad. At the moment, I've been Ordained less than a year, and I definitely feel bedded into Leeds and want to be here to help establish it, and I wouldn't want to leave Leeds in a position of weakness.

Are there any particular areas of the Dharma that you are focusing on? I have quite a broad appreciation of different schools of Buddhism so I don't feel drawn to one particular school or one particular teaching. I have had strong responses where I've thought, ah yes, this is the one I'd like to focus on, but I do appreciate it in it's entirety. I'm not at this moment pursuing a particular course of study, I'm more in a process of absorbing what we studied on the Ordination retreat and going back over notes and not trying to fill myself up too much. My approach to practice I see on two levels; one in terms of renunciation and working with my ethics and the other in the sense of vision and "Other Power". So it's a combination of something that seems a bit dry on the one hand and something that is Mythic on the other and for me they go hand in hand. So renunciation is giving things up that inhibit me along the path and "Other Power" is being receptive to the influence of something else, like another spiritual being, far more advanced than myself, like Sadhana practice, a visualization practice which one takes up when one is Ordained, based on a Buddha or Boddhisatva figure. It's as if that being or Buddha exists in a particular realm, a very pure realm, and in my current form, as I am now with all my unskilfulness, I can't really exist in that realm. I can perhaps touch it now and again, just have a sense of it but I can't actually move into it because it's as if I'm anchored down into this mundane world by all these unskillful habits I have. So this attraction I have with renunciation and working with ethics is on a mythic level trying to unhook myself from what is holding me back from entering into that purer realm of the Buddha's and Boddhisatvas.