The past month has been very busy. There was a week’s retreat in France, a new social enterprise launching next weekend (more to follow on that!), an MSc assignment to write, meetings for two new initiatives with different groups of people, all interspersed with regular coaching clients and other scheduled work. Each time I have planned to have an evening or a day off, life has decided otherwise: a close family member was admitted to hospital unexpectedly, our drains got blocked, we had to get rid of and replace our broken down pickup, and unexpected visitors of both human and canine varieties came to stay.
Although I am usually very good at taking time for myself and doing my yoga and meditation practice, this past month has been so packed that some of there simply hasn't been enough down time. And although physically I’ve felt ok, there’s been a part of my brain that began to feel deeply exhausted. So finally, when I got a day off, what did I do? I went foraging. In order to pick blackberries or apples or do any kind of foraging you have to stay quietly present. If you don’t, you will either miss what you are looking for, get scratched, stung, covered in sticky seed cases or you just won’t end up with many to take home. And it is precisely maintaining this present moment awareness, or alpha state, that is so deeply restful. It is in this state that we restore our balance from too much forward planning and calculating, from too much stimulation, from too much thinking. It is in the alpha states that we build resources that actually help us become better in all these other states that are so common in our lives, precisely by giving us a break from them. It certainly worked for me, and when I sat in meditation later that day, I could find the restorative quiet I had been so badly missing. Two hundred years ago most people would have spent much of their waking lives doing simple things such as planting, weeding, tending animals, sewing, baking bread, chopping wood, collecting water and so on. Today we have mostly automated these processes. I am very happy that water now comes out of taps and that I don’t have to make my own clothes, but we have lost something precious in making things so easy. When at our desks, in our cars and in front of our televisions we are rarely able, for long, to remain in a state of relaxed, yet alert, present moment awareness. Instead, our minds are - necessarily - having to move rapidly from subject to subject, from past issues to future planning, figuring out or dealing with the implications of our actions and constantly recalling and learning information. The restful and healing quality of staying present without all that much to do is, of course, key to the practice of mindfulness. It is key to the great popularity of yoga and chi gung and one of the reasons, alongside the physical, why we feel better after a class. It is also behind the love many have for gardening, running, playing music and the many other activities where you quietly participate in something repetitive, familiar and ultimately very rewarding. And in our hugely busy lives, these moments are invaluable. So a wonderful thing to do on these autumn days is to spend an hour picking blackberries, elderberries, crabapples or whatever takes your fancy. It’s an effortless meditation practice. And as you put the crumble in the oven, blitz the smoothie in the blender, or put the jam in its jars, congratulate yourself on nourishing not just your body but also your mind.
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6/23/2014 0 Comments On compassionThere are some places that are special to us. As one of my teachers, Lama Lena, once said, they have ‘more place-ness’ to them.
For me, one of these is in the woods where I walk the dogs. On the river bank, leaning out of a stony bank, grew a beech tree. As I passed under its branches, day after day, month after month, year after year it became a place that I paused, appreciated the birdsong and sound of the river, and often sat and meditated for a few minutes. Two weeks ago I had a lot of internal turmoil going on. As I approached the tree I paused, as usual, and it felt as if it offered a compassionate presence as witness to my suffering. Simply being in this place, under these welcoming branches, transformed my state of mind completely. As I touched its rough bark, covered in ivy, I noted the slant of the trunk and the thought passed through my mind that one day it would topple over. And then, giving thanks for this place and the gift of that moment, I walked on. I was away for the weekend, and when I returned four days later I found the trunk completely snapped in half. When I saw this I was shocked to the core, it was a huge reminder of the mortality of all things. Invisibly, rot had set in and finally the trunk could not support the weight of the branches. And yet the beauty and grace of the tree, even in its demise, was clearly apparent. So I did all I could, which was to offer my own compassionate presence to honour its passing. I realised in that moment that the deepest and truest compassion arose in me when I was fully aware of and facing the depths of my own suffering, of the destruction inherent in all creation. It is a deep recognition of the way things are. For us to be birthed, our mother goes through pain. For us to eat, something has to die. I see this expressed in my husband’s paintings, in many great works of art, in many of the most touching pieces of music. They draw something out of us that brings us fully into life with all its joys as well as its sorrows. Lama Lena is coming to Devon to share teachings on compassion next weekend. The weekend retreat is almost full, and there is also a public talk in Totnes on Sunday 29th June. Do come and join us. More info at www.lamalenadevon.weebly.com 11/2/2013 0 Comments Where lies the truth?'The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off '- Gloria Steinem My last post made me think a lot about truth.
How can my truth be different to yours? How do we come to accept something as truth? And, when we talk about something like EMFs (Electro Magnetic Frequencies) where there are numerous perspectives, how can we discover whose ‘truth’ is the right one? Most of us believe in there being an absolute truth about something, if only we can find it. In spiritual traditions the word Truth is often capitalised to denote this, with the caveat that until we are awake/realised/enlightened (in other words, able to see the whole picture without distortion) we won’t be able to access it. But, until that point, what do we do? Interestingly, on my MSc course we recently explored different theories of truth[i]:
So, I’d say that my view on EMFs comes from correspondence (there is enough scientific evidence to make me concerned), coherence (the ‘story’ of EMFs makes sense to me), consensus (several people I know and trust have suggested caution) and pragmatism (I get a headache if I spend a long time on a mobile or DECT phone). I’d say the last two are the most persuasive for me, and are why I wrote the last blog. But you could argue, if you believed a different truth, that I keep poor company and that the headaches are caused by something else. So let’s take the debate into another area. If we look at the link between saturated fat and heart disease, back in the 1970s there was initially some scientific evidence (correspondence) between the two. Then, a coherentscientific theory was created to explain this, which was convincing enough to create a medical consensus. So far so good. And for decades now, the ‘truth’ that has been presented to us is that a diet low in saturated fat leads to good heart health. However, at the same time that this advice was being given out by doctors, food manufacturers and many other healthcare professionals, levels of heart disease have grown exponentially. So something clearly wasn’t right. Then the medical consensus began to change, initially with controversial voices disagreeing in the wider press, and leading, this month, to the highly respected British Medical Journal[ii] publishing an article declaring that saturated fat is not the major issue, trans fats are – and that the advice that was handed out for all these years may have made the problem worse. And yet on the day I heard about this controversy an advertisement was played on my local radio station giving advice to listeners to eat less fat. So where is the truth in this matter? Have the scientists got it right this time, or are trans fats another red herring? More widely, what do we do when the truth (in the form of a general consensus) changes, or when scientific ‘proof’ is potentially decades away? Finding the truth appears to be a delicate balance between not believing blindly (ie. looking carefully, questioning what we are told and exploring the potential agendas of those who might be presenting a particular truth to us) and having enough faith to be open to what lies beyond what we can see and feel and sense at this present time. So we still need our teachers and guides, but always want to test this, where possible, ourselves. If I’ve never seen a rainbow because I’ve never looked up at the sky when there was sun and rain present, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist and I can’t ever see one. And those with the experience of having seen rainbows can help me understand what the right conditions are and that I then need to look up! Then the experience of having seen a rainbow becomes mine, it becomes my ‘truth’, but I might not have got there without them. So although we want to search for our own truth, we can never stop listening to others. I’ll leave you with this quote from Chogyam Trungpa, from his book Transcending Madness: “Things do exist as they are, but we tend to see our version of them, rather than things as they really are. That makes everything that we see projections. But one doesn’t have to make a definite & absolute reassurance of that neccessarily at all. You just go along with situations, go along dealing with them. If you are going too far, they’ll shake you.” So… notice what shakes you. Just as I notice headaches when I use certain phones. And let that, informed by what you read and are told by others, be your truth. [i] Darwin, J (2010) “Kuhn vs. Popper vs. Lakatos vs. Feyerabend:Contested Terrain or Fruitful Collaboration?”, Philosophy of Management Journal [ii] http://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f6340 |
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