Attending to inner struggles

https://jackkornfield.com/stopping-the-war/

It's about accepting instead of fighting the conflicts within ourselves. There's a meditation text embedded in it.

You might find it helpful/useful

Ishmael's vision of the sea

In my last post, I referred to the opening of "Moby Dick," by Herman Melville. Here it is. I'd never noticed the last sentence below, even though it's a theme I often return to.


"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago- never mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. 

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. 

This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs- commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?- Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster- tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling And there they stand- miles of them- leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets avenues- north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever."


 

flat on my back, not really meditating, when...

 In a meditation session, our minds rest with the breath, or areas of the body, or ..whatever it is we are using to centre ourselves. But our minds move away into linked chains of memories, or anticipations and fantasies, or - well, if you meditate you'll know the stuff. So we are taught to bring our consciousness gently back to the breath, or whatever we're using...

It's been frequently observed  that one difficulty with discrete meditation sessions can be that we try too hard - "how can I get back to that wonderful feeling of being here and now and only here and now?" (Not that we ever can, in any real sense, "get back" to anything - time's arrow moves in only one direction.) "How can I stop my mind wandering away from the breath?" And the harder you try, the harder it gets.

And meditators can often feel self-critical because they feel they were "drifting off,"  "not concentrating," "letting my thoughts run away with themselves." The "I'm useless at meditating, must try harder " treadwheel.

 Perhaps these feelings are endemic in discrete sessions "on the cushion" (chair, stool etc) exactly because sesssions can seem special, apart, to one side of daily life. 

I should try to remember two things; it was John Peacock who first made it clear to me that having the mind wander off, and gently returning it to the present moment, is all part of meditating, it is not some shameful failure of mind! And secondly, that it's not helpful to feel that being mindful is only a product of discrete meditation sessions.

This morning, I was doing the few simple Pilates-based exercises I use each morning. These are to stop my back throwing in the towel too far in advance of the rest of me. 

 it's probably needless to say that this lissome young fellow is not me, and I was on the carpet at home, not on the grass surrounded by flowers.

Lying on my back, I finished with a big stretch, then relaxed - and with no bidding or effort felt -  It. Being entirely and only present. No effort preceeded it, no thought in particular led to it. 

Maybe it was having being bodily aware of the various quite small and focused movements needed for the Pilates, letting my mind stay with them. Maybe it was the contrast between the effort required, followed by the abrupt release of effort and muscular tension.

It didn't last long, It never does, but It'll be back, perhaps when I'm on my back, perhaps when I'm walking along the top lane, perhaps when I'm in session.

 Doesn't really do to analyse It too much, I'm just grateful for It's arrival, and will try to arrange myself, in whatever posture and location seem propitious, to encourage Its arrival.

"Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time..." 

                                  (TS Eliot, Burnt Norton)

Revolutionary eyebrows part 2

He's still looking doubtful, so I'd better finish off my thoughts (8th December) on his revolutionary contemplations!

So the proposition from Dr. Williams is that contemplative practice is potentially revolutionary, because to follow it is to learn what we need to live truthfully, honestly and lovingly.

Much of our commercialised culture is driven by skilful methods of manipulation and deceit, for which we have to thank marketing psychologists and ruthless advertising (you'll maybe have seen the TV adverts with which children are bombarded with on TV.)

The buzzword in politics is "post-truth" but maybe "post-fact" would be better. Whatever view you take of the UK's vote to leave the EU, I'd find it difficult to deny that much of the debate was highly emotive, post-fact campaigning. Basically, powerful people shouting at each other and at us. How good is that as a way of deciding the futures of millions of people?

There's a lot of untruth, dishonesty and lovelessness about our society and its cultures - and we are luckier than many people in the world.

Contemplative practice, built up over time and entered into regularly, doesn't so much change perceptions of other people as change how one perceives them. I don't find meditative exercises on self-compasssion, and compassion in general, particularly effective, perhaps because they are so deliberate and targetted. I'm sure they work for some. But I do find it easier, as a result of some years of meditating and contemplating, to understand the contexts and viewpoints of other, to see why people behave as they do before simply dismissing them.

I don't really think, except in the very broadest, almost metaphysical sense, that "All You Need Is Love," because you also need "Shelter From The Storm," i.e. it's harder to love others apart from those closest to you if you are wet cold and hungry - or so it is for most of us. 

But I do think and feel that compassion, and acceptance of the reality of the Other, are essentials for any degree of contentment, individually and socially. I'm in no doubt, from my own experience, and I write as a not particularly tolerant person, that contemplative practice leads to growth in these areas of feeling.

I think it's difficult for compassionate people to be dishonest and manipulative, because lying and trickery tend to result in more suffering, waste and despair - now or soon.

All this is, I'm, sure, blindingly obvious, but maybe, just now in this dark time of the year, there's no harm in re-stating a few basics. We need - and  we may be in the midst of - a revolution, or at least a rapid evolution, in the way we treat each other. 

Contemplative practice (I'm not necessarily, or at all, talking about religions) could be a huge element in these changes.

Enter the silence and find out who - what - you are. When you come out of the silence, you may find yourself changed, bit by bit, into someone kinder and more honest.

You may even get your eyebrows tweaked by a Buddhist with a sense of humour.

 

an inward revolution and Rowan Williams' eyebrows

Rowan Williams, 'To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need to live truthfully, honestly and lovingly - and is therefore a deeply revolutionary matter'.

Always the danger that because he was the Arch B of C,  those not of a Christian persuasion, or those who are but didn't care for his leadership, will pop that statement into a neat and dismissive box. 

Or socialists might see him as leading a religious grouping, and all such are irrational, and oppressive morally, psychologically, and materially. Or they may object to a non-Marxist idea of a revolution. 

Conservatives might see him as too liberal, and "wishy-washy."

I'm increasingly prepared to take him exactly at his word on this. 
In fact, let's leave him and his splendid eyebrows alone, and just look at those words.

I take contemplatives practice to refer to meditation (Buddhist or otherwise), deep contemplation, and prayer, particularly of the wordless variety as, for example, practised by Quakers and Christian or Sufi mystics. 

Praying for the name of the Derby winner or for your bunions to stop aching or even for peace in Syria is not a deep contemplative practice, because it involves the ego wanting things and making narratives about it. One-way narratives, I'd say because I don't think it works, but that is another story.

To jump to the other end of the statement, let's consider revolutionary practice that is not in the usual sphere of political and military action. It seems to me that the people who, historically, always suffer the most in violent revolutions, be they of the right or of the left, are the poor. I think we're too tightly interrelated now for a traditional "storming of the winter palace" - type revolution to be particularly beneficial, in the long term, to the majority. We need, urgently, a reallocation of wealth in our society, but spare us the Bolsheviki.

And yet we surely need massive revolutions across the planet in the ways that we live and interact. Whether climate change is or is not significantly caused by human action, it is surely happening, and so is the depletion of what we see as global resources (in terms of fuel, food, medicines and so on) 

That is, the resources people sometimes say that we need to "save the planet." Well, that phrase is misleading. The planet will be fine for many more millions of millions of years. The question for us is surely how long will we survive as a species, and, more narrowly, as a civilisation and a set of cultures? 

Maybe some people will be surviving somehow in a few hundred years' time, even if we don't stave off disaster. But we all know that sea level rises, if they come to the extent that the majority of scientists agree is possible/likely, will have catastrophic implications for cities such as London, Sydney, New York -  you complete your own list of cities that would be threatened by inundation, whether from the sea or from rivers. And that doesn't even touch the question of food shortages and animal and plant extinctions that could also threaten our cultures.

Oh, enough of all that, I'm not naturally pessimistic, I just want to establish that there is an urgent need for huge change in how we live. Most of the answers that you could call "we'll be okay if we carry on just as we are, but with a few changes" won't make much difference. For example, electric cars, which people refer to as if they didn't put out huge amounts of carbon in being manufactured, and as if their motive power, if it's not from solar panels, didn't come from power stations of one kind or another.

So we surely need to consume less and differently on our paths through life. We surely have to live less selfishly; any sense of species survival surely runs contrary to economic systems that generate a tiny minority to own, directly or indirectly, such a huge proportion of the planet's assets. 

If we follow a historical model, seize all those people's wealth and no doubt shoot them, then surely history tells us that inevitably, a new elite will take their place and that elite is unlikely to be happy living with much less power, influence and wealth than the previous lot. Few are the leaders anywhere who want to live, in material and ideological terms, like the more modest of those they rule.

How could contemplative practice possibly help?

Because it can change so much about what we are, how live.  More next time.

 (He's looking dubious because I'm not entirely one of his flock. Hang in there, Rowie, I'll get to the point eventually.)

Home, part 3

(This one may get a bit preachy for you; if so, just flee...It also rambles a bit, but one tried, one tries...)

So we are a restless species, looking for a home, and not just when we have to. I knew a man who had a good job - vice-principal of a nice college, in the days before things got a wee bit more challenging in the 90s. When I told him I was leaving to work abroad for a couple of years, he said that he'd often wished he'd chucked it all up and done something similar. Even he, who seemed very contented, could feel restless, wishing he'd tried a new home.

Americans (USA variety) have so many road books and films, so much space and distance. In "The Electric Muse" Rob Young contrasts the US road myth as a way of finding roots and belonging somewhere else - a horizontal journey - with an English inner and vertical journey. Back in the mind and in the music to the past as a state of mind.  Young moves on from this to write about the folk revival in terms of classical composers like Vaughan Williams and Moeran, who used folk tunes in sophisticated compositions, and then on to the folk-singer's revival we're still in the middle of. Looking for a musical home.

So maybe it's this:

vs this:

or this:

Looking for a home, on the road to LA if you're from midtown Illinois, amongst the travelling people and their songs if you're Sam Lee. (Forefront, above) In the uncertain but ancient past of the Horn Dance. (Dig the cross-garters...no, it's too easy to laugh. They are in pursuit of something significant for them.)

I don't mean to suggest that folk singers and travellers on Route 66 are all wracked with uncertainty; I just want to move on from that idea of outer or inner journeying to find a home, to the psychological and spiritual dimension. The greater journey.

RD Laing talked about "ontological insecurity;" Buddhists talk about "Dukkha," perhaps too easily translated as "suffering." According to John Peacock, the root of the word is in something closer to discomfort and unease, the idea of a wheel that doesn't fit properly on its axle and gives you a queasy sort of ride.

Meditation can help us spend some time in the present, out of the stream of wanting and dreaming and planning, of wishing we were somewhere else, were something else, out of a state of recurrent unease. It is a training in reducing dukkha. It won't show us a new home - it's not so much a revelation of a new heaven and a new earth,  it helps us to be where we are. Ultimately, it refers I think to (another tricky word coming up) a mystical state, non-verbal -  both in time, as everything is, and out of it.

Eliot says it is:

"Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline."

He also tells us
"I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time."

It's not that we spend our meditation time entirely there, it is simply that meditating without striving; recalling the restless mind to the present (usually using the breath); moving our attention back to the present and what is happening now, can have a cumulative, slow but powerful effect. It can put us in a different relationship with the present, giving us a wider sense of what is real. It can make us feel more entirely at home in ourselves and where we are.

It's not stasis, it does not abolish conflicting impulses and pressures, we don't grind to a halt in some phoney self-willed pretend-nirvana. But we can feel, if we persevere, if we expect nothing and strive for nothing, we can feel less existential unease, less ontological insecurity.

Accepting our present state doesn't mean all is perfect in a perfect world. Nor does it mean we should simply give up trying to make material matters better for ourselves and others. But it surely means we are more fully in our world, not at a slight angle to it. We can feel of our world, not outside looking in and wondering if somewhere, down Route 66, there's somewhere else, more perfect for us.  

Eliot again:

"Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated 
Of dead and living."

and

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

I think the physical journeying, the mythical explorations, can merge with the mental, spiritual journey.

In "Learning to Fall," Philip Simmons writes:
"We seek that sure ground of our being and our doing, the home that withstands the vagaries of time and chance and change."  

I'd add that we cannot overcome time chance and change, we have to accept that we are exactly those things. The paradox is surely that we can only be at home by acknowledging it, by living in the understanding that home always changes with us.

Simmons agrees with Eliot, that "in the end we return home by recognising that we're already there. Indeed our true home is within." 

He quotes Marcus Aurelius: "Look within. Within is the fountain of good. And it will ever bubble up if thou wilt ever dig." 

Finding this fountain of good, adds Simmonds, "we discover that no land is foreign, no matter where we go we are never strangers. We return home to the place we never left."

So we aren't boll weevils. We can only feel at home if we are at home in ourselves. My route to that home is meditation, and some reading. What's yours?

what the clouds said

This title could open the gates to a big rush of whimsy. Remember "I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow, it's cloud's illusions I recall..." 

These clouds last evening weren't objects of such verbal games.

 I hadn't meditated, by the early evening. You know, if you are a meditator, how it goes. You tell yourself it's much more productive to meditate every morning, even if it's for less than 30 or 40 minutes. But somehow, you don't. 

"I'll just do these few pressing little tasks first, and then.." And then it's tea-time.

So I went for a walk along the top lane. Usual thoughts - what a beautiful evening (it was) aren't we lucky to live around here (yes we are)....Then without really trying, I was there. 

All I had to do was put my attention with my feet, and walk fairly slowly. The lane stretched ahead, but it seemed like a new lane. Maybe not new, and not the same old. Just...THIS lane NOW. Something like that.

And above the lane, and field, and the hedges, and the hills - the clouds.

 These unique, always changing, never still, little clouds. Not altostratocumulusnimbus let's label and analyse them, not let's use them as symbols of illusions as in Joni Mitchell's song, not let's compare them with yesterday's clouds, or clouds somewhere else.

Just these entirely present clouds. Here and now.

Is Zen a religion? If so or not so, so... what?

There will be a point to this, I hope, about mindfulness and Zen. So bear with me, or alternatively, not....

Is Zen a religion? This might matter more than it seems. 

Let's not get bogged down in definitions, but I'd like to consider this: Zen came out of a traceable lineage in Buddhism. Buddhists tend to point out that Buddhism isn't a religion, i.e. Gautama Buddha didn't think he was a supernatural being, any more than anyone else was. Zen could be seen as the least religion-like branch of Buddhism.

However, Gautama's was an age (6th century BCE) in which his people very broadly believed in reincarnation, and therefore in a metaphysical reality beyond our observable and measurable lives. I mean, something/someone has to move from a dying person to the next object of reincarnation if the system is going to work, and it can't be the sort of being you could meet in the frozen food aisle in Tesco's... (if you think, by the way, that you have met such a being in Tesco's, maybe seek help?)

But despite this supernatural component to Buddhism, derived of course from his Hindu background, Buddha wasn't a god in the usual way we use the word; he didn't rise from the dead, ascend to heaven etc. He didn't see himself as a supernatural being, or preach to people from such a standpoint. So Buddhism isn't a religion in the Judeo/Christian/Islamic sense - though at times it sure looks like one and perhaps gets used like one.

(OK, Buddhists may say, they aren't worshipping a god here, they are merely venerating historical enlightened people. But they do ask sometimes for what a Christian might call intercession. H'mmm...)

Interestingly (to me anyway) Zen developed out of the kind of Buddhism in these photos, the Mahayana, as opposed to the rather more austere Theravada Buddism of Thailand, Burma etc. These shots are of the huge Yonghegong Tibetan Buddhist temple in Beijing.

 When Buddhism came to China from India/Nepal, a school of thought developed called Ch'an, which was influenced by Taoism. Then Japan absorbed Cha'n Buddhism and Zen developed.

That's the end of my weak attempt at a history lesson. 

Zen perhaps more than any other form of Buddhism doesn't look to me like a religion, despite having monks and temples. The stories and meditative exercises I've come across make no mention of gods, miracles, prophets of a god.

Of course, a Zen monastery looks like - well, a monastery, which most of us would call a religious institution:

amd the monks look like....

er, monks....

So, assuming you don't want to rush off to Japan, shave your head and join a monastery/nunnery, what's in it for us run-of-the-mill Western meditators? Here speaks one who may help us:

"Zen does not yet exist in the West as a living tradition. Many monks are teaching the practice of Zen there, but this practice remains oriental; foreign to western culture. The fact is that Zen has not yet been able to find roots in this soil. Cultural, economic and psychological conditions are different. One cannot become a practitioner of Zen by imitating the way of eating, sitting or dressing of the Chinese or Japanese practitioners. Zen is life; Zen does not imitate. If Zen one day becomes a reality in the West, it will acquire a Western form, considerably different from Oriental Zen."                                              Thich Nhat Hahn

 "Zen is life; Zen does not imitate." I'll carry that thought forward to my next post on this subject. Please do try to contain your eager impatience....

Silence, or quiet?

A useful prompt from Messrs. Laurel and Hardy. We usually mean "not talking" when we talk about silence. Keeping quiet.

I can imagine few more terrifying things than total, absolute, zero-sounds silence. On earth, we can make rooms so effectively sound-dampened and insulated that if you go into one and don't talk, it's pretty close to absolute silence. An anechoic chamber.

 People really don't enjoy being in them. The record endurance in there is, apparently, 45 minutes. Total absolute zero silence I guess you'd get in space, because without atmosphere you can't have the vibrations we call sound. (I'm now going to doggy-paddle hastily back into my depth in the physics swimming-pool...)

So a silent retreat, a silent meditation, is simply a time during which we don't speak, and we seek therefore not to listen to words. On retreats, we are usually encouraged not to read much either. The final touch is to avoid extensive eye contact. Nothing wrong perhaps (views vary) with a quick friendly smile when passing someone in the corridor, but  too much direct gaze can break the...whatever it is that's going on in your head.

Is it scary, lonely, oppressive, to keep quiet for a day or two? I don't find it so, particularly if you are with a group of like-minded people similarly intent on it. It certainly has a gentle but powerful cumulative effect over a few days. The quiet can be broken - a "how's it going, anything to tell us?" discussion or a one-to-one chat half-way through I found very valuable. 

So it's not silence. Hearing natural sounds can be a great help, for example. I don't recollect anyone saying "curse that blackbird, singing away, he's broken the silence!" It's simply not talking, and not listening to much other than guidance at the start of or during a meditation. 

The effect is powerful but difficult to describe, other than it helps you to feel you are in the present moment. When I come out of silence, I often don't want to talk much for a bit, to ease myself gently back into the richness of verbal discourse (and its frequent and sometimes enjoyable banality, of course.)

Similarly, in ceremonies funereal or matrimonial, people sometimes shy away from the idea of a minute or two's silence; yet communal silence, when all present are thinking of the same person or people, can be very powerful, joining up those present at a different level, in a different way from speech. 

We shy away from silence, I think, because we are surronded by, conditioned by and perhaps addicted to verbal input. How often have you, sitting alone to eat, reached out for something, anything, to read? Just this morning I reached unthinkingly for the cereal packet. I mean, who cares about riboflavin anyway? I thought I needed words. How about just eating, and being with that?

Then there's the mobile phone. I'll just pop it beside me on the table because...I don't know why because. It is comforting. I exist. Someone is getting in touch, so I must mean something out there in the cosmos.

Well you do, but however powerful your mobile is (I love mine, too!) it can't tell you what you mean in the cosmos. Silence and meditation are much more likely to get you There. The phone can wait, monkey-mind!

You can't phone the Tao, and if you could, you'd just get - silence. 

St Beuno's part 2

St Beuno's describes itself as an "Ignatian Spirituality Centre." Ignatian, as no doubt you know but just in case, refers to St. Ignatius Loyola, he who founded the Society of Jesus, aka The Jesuits. 

The shock-troops of the Counter-Reformation, seeking to purify Catholicism of those corrupt and worldly practices that had helped the Protestants to gain ground across Europe in the mid-16th century. Ignatius had been a soldier, and apparently his writings very much emphasize fighting evil, battling the works of Satan and so on. All very dualistic.

I don't know a lot about the Jesuits but I mention all this just to explain something of the ethos I found at St Beuno's. A "spirituality centre" sounds a little as though you might find New Age Pagans, Tibetan Buddhists, evangelical Christians, Druids, Hare Krishnas etc etc all  grooving away meditating, worshipping the sun, whatever path you're on. 

But the spirituality (increasingly woolly word, these days) is, of course, very definitely Roman Catholic. St B's used to train Catholic priests, i.e. it was a college, but now it is a retreat centre, and a specifically Catholic one. 

So what was it like to be a solo retreatant intent not on Christian prayer and Ignatian exercises, but on Buddhist-derived mindfulness mediation? 

 If you join a group of strangers on retreat who share sessions with you, it's a different experience, of course, from being solo. I found it strange to be alone and silent at mealtimes, knowing the other retreatants, also silent, were engaged in their own thing, not mine. I felt oddly self-conscious. All in my own head, of course.

Since it is a place of devout Catholic studies, it is hardly surprising that the corridors were full of literature for sale, sculptures of the Holy Family...and large crucifixes. I found a little of looking at a large sculpture of a man being tortured to death went a very long way, for me. But then good and brave though he may have been, and many truths he may have told, I don't believe Jesus died for my sins and was raised from the dead on the third day. So life-size crucifixes were a purely gruesome sight.

This isn't a grumble - how could it be? Their gaff, their rules. I expected it, and anyway, I was a guest, at a very reasonable price, of a centre that specialises in beliefs and practices that are a long way from mindfulness meditation. 

But what it does mean is that, despite the peace and quiet, and the friendly welcomes and goodbyes from the helpful office there, it's not really my kind of place.  Swarthmoor, the Quaker retreat centre in the Lake District, seemed much more neutral, plainer, lighter, somewhere I am more in tune with. Trigonos, for specifically mindfulness meditation retreats, was ideal, though I think retreats there are expensive.

What I did value greatly at St Beuno's were the gardens and grounds. In particular, there is a tiny building, the Rock Chapel, hidden by trees on a rocky outcrop. You collect the key, walk across fields, duck under the temporary farmer's electric fence (not very spiritual of him!) and walk up to this:

Inside it is lit by sunlight pouring through small stained glass windows of abstract design and lovely bright colours. It was a perfect spot for a peaceful meditation.

There was a crucifix, but mercifully, it was small and quite abstract so your squeamish reporter was untroubled by it.

There is also a labyrinth in the gardens, which I found very useful for walking meditations:

 Your feet crunch on the gravel. Less attractive than the grassy one at Swarthmoor, but somehow very conducive to some presentmomentness.

The gardens and woods were full of birdsong:

which was quite magical - beautiful and calming. Bluebells and wild garlic help a lot, too, and some wonderful beech trees.

In the distance, over the roofs of St Beuno's, I could see the A55, by way of contrast. There goes the world, about it's business - time for me to re-join it.

So I had found a place apart, a place for some meditation, for which I thank it and them; but perhaps not a place, I think, to which I'm likely to return - despite wonderful sunsets over the Clwyd valley towards the sea.

 

what the A55 said - en route to St Beuno's

Having decided to take a couple of days of silence at a suitable and not-too-distant retreat centre of some kind or another,  I trained and bussed to St Asaph, then walked the 3.3 miles to St Beuno's. Certain amount of leg-pulling at home about my private pilgrimage  - you can imagine..."no, I won't have to get up at four in the morning for matins, or wear a long robe, it's not a monastery, or eat gruel at every meal..."

But although I didn't see myself as a pilgrim, it did feel quite special, a new experience, to be approaching such a place on foot.

A pleasant walk at first; idyllic moments gazing at Afon Clwyd. 

The picture is deceptive. A few yards further on, over the river, and what's this ahead?

The A55. From the footbridge over it,  the blast of noise, the pressure of the speed, is almost overwhelming.

 Well, that's quite enough of that. If you've ever been stuck on  the hard shoulder, (bad luck - so dangerous!) you'll know what I mean. I'd rather listen to that river.

But there's no point in being self-righteous about this. I might be en route to a couple of simple and tranquil days' living, I might feel virtuous because I'm walking the last bit, but I've driven at 80 mph along this road myself, many a time. And being close to this horrible racket is a useful experience - makes me remember that it really is worth trying to drive as infrequently as possible. So what the A55 says to me is "keep off me as often as you can."

It hardly seems possible that this corridor of noise and tension should co-exist with that peaceful little river. The impact on its surroundings of a fast road like this is so much more than omnipresent noise for many many yards all around. It's a huge slice of the land, slicing through whatever continuities existed previously. It's all that exhaust gas. Perhaps the only upside is that motorway verges act as longitudinal nature reserves, and corriders for species distribution. Kestrels like to hunt them.

This road doesn't even have proper motorway-type verges. It was a motorway on the cheap, dangerous and in places not well engineered. But it is an E route to and from Ireland. Everything on it is in a big hurry.

Happily, I'm not - lucky me. I plod on, alongside the noise for a little while, steadily up hill, getting hot - my backpack is quite heavy, containing as it does, in addition to the usual necessities, a couple of books and a Very Special (large) Notebook for Inscribing Great Thoughts. (It didn't exactly get over-filled...)

I pass through a very settled comfortable-looking little village, under the A55, and then I'm very pleased to be hauling myself wearily up the drive to St Beuno's.

Of which, more anon.


 

Meditation gateways

Six or seven of us have formed a meditation group that meets every fortnight. I think we are quite varied in our approaches. Some of us meditate just about every morning, others less frequently. We also very in our belief bases, from Buddhist through "kind of a bit of a Buddhist," from agnostic to atheist. 

Partly, that last statement is guesswork- we don't discuss beliefs directly because it isn't directly relevant to the practical and deeply rewarding business of meditating together at regular intervals. If it became relevant we'd discuss it, I'm confident of that.

Our basic methodology comes from the classic mindfulness based stress reduction course (MBSR) developed out of the work of John Kabat Zinn and others.

(this above isn't us, btw; our average age is, erm..  a bit higher than this lot's - but there's a nice informal look to this group that is like how we go on)

Lately we have been interested in the potential of words and music to act as gateways to a meditation. Usually, we meditate in silence and only occasionally have a guided meditation. The idea of a verbal or musical gateway is simply to lead in to whatever sort of meditation each of us might then want to carry on with.

On an MBSR retreat or silent day a poem is often read out to the meditators just before a session. Something one of us learned on a Quaker-run retreat is a different use of words, a little further away from the usual MBSR practice, I think.

The ancient Benedictine practice of Lectio Divina involves four stages: read, meditate, pray, contemplate. It does not seek to analyse Christian scriptures but rather sees the words as divine, as powerful in and of themselves. Through the word of God you can exist in a closer relationship to God. (Any devout Catholics out there will have to forgive me if that's a pretty crude summary. They may also have to forgive me truncating and de-Christianising their methodology. Blame the Quakers, they led us to this!)

What we sought to do the other day is derived from that practice, insofar as we were encouraged to read through a number of passages, prose and poetry, until a short sequence of words "spoke" to each of us. In other words, it drew our minds to it, rather than us fussing ourselves up to look for meaning. Let the words find us, perhaps.

We were encouraged not to analyse or judge, but simply and for as long as felt right, to let our minds be with the phrases each of us chose- then to move into a meditation. 

To help us not to judge, to leave the ego out of it as far as possible, the passages were not credited to their authors. We didn't want "Oh no wonder that isn't for me, I've never liked late Romantic poetry," or vice versa, we wanted a kind of mutual attraction to develop between our minds and the words, wherever they came from. Just the words, and not too many of them. Excerpts from excerpts. Words as agents in the service of silent meditation, no more.

Each of us in different ways seemed to find this useful, and interestingly different from our usual practice, because each of us chose the excerpt that suited that individual, rather than all listening to the same poem, and because we did so in silence before moving into silence. (Different, not necessarily better, nb)

So this gateway idea seemed to work well, and we may use it some more. 

Here are a few of the passages we considered, also anonymised in case you fancy the idea.

 
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

 

Like a pebble

that rolls downhill

I arrive at today

 

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by
 what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance –
and changes us, if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave ...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

 

All my larder
“best before”
tomorrow

 

To travel like a bird, lightly to view
Deserts where stone gods founder in the sand,
Ocean embraced in a white sleep with land;
To escape time, always to start anew.
To settle like a bird, make one devoted
Gesture of permanence upon the spray
Of shaken stars and autumns: in a bay
Beyond the crestfallen surges to have floated.
Each is our wish. Alas, the bird flies blind,
Hooded by a dark sense of destination:
Her weight on the glass calm leaves no impression,
Her home is soon a basketful of wind.
Travellers, we are fabric of the road we go;
We settle, but like feathers on time's flow.

 

Butterfly

hovers

on my empty diary

 

The pivot of Tao passes through the centre
where all affirmations and denials converge.
He who grasps the pivot is at the still-point
from which all movements and oppositions
can be seen in their right relationship...
Abandoning all thought of imposing a limit or taking sides,  he rests in direct intuition.

 

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine,
Under every grief and pine,
Runs a joy with silken twine.
It is right it should be so,
We were made for joy and woe,
And when this we rightly know,
Through the world we safely go.

 

Three crows in a bare tree

proclaim the meaning of life

                            as usual

  The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

  Always we hope
someone else has the answer,
some other place will be better,
some other time it will all turn out.

This is it.
No-one else has the answer.
No other place will be better,
and it has already turned out.

At the centre of your being
you have the answer;
you know who you are
and you know what you want.

There is no need
to run outside
for better seeing,
nor peer from a window.

Rather abide at the centre of your being;
for the more you leave it, the less you learn.
Search your heart
and see:
the way to do
is to be.



But nb eventually you need to let go of the words and meditate, in case this happens:

which it might if you start analysing and criticising the passages.