Hugh Jackman's Body!

 You may be surprised to read the title of this entry!  What is a meditating Grandmother doing writing about Hugh Jackman's body.  Well….. We were on our way to a wedding yesterday which meant that I could read ALL of the Saturday Times magazine without anyone wanting to take it away and without feeling that I shouldn't be reading for 2 hours non stop on a Saturday morning.   As I am always on the lookout for a snappy item to put in the Granny blog, I was thrilled to read Polly Vernon's interview with Hugh Jackman because I am one of his aged fans!   You see he was asked about his body for which he has had to develop extra muscles to be Wolverine and his beard to play some other part..  I quote what he says (but you can read the whole article by clicking this link) "This….is not my body!"   "He seems" says the interviewer, "genuinely detached from the hardened, muscular bulk currently propping his head up, as if it's a suit he wasn't sure about and someone else convinced him to wear. "
Of course, I think, this man speaks the truth and yet we are surprised yet it clearly makes sense doesn't it?  We only are what we are at the moment we are it, the real bit of us is never encased in a body, we have them and they grow and diminish and get hairy in some places and bald in others, those bodies don't remain the same for a single second but we do, we peer out of them when we are babies, we scramble to our feet when we are toddlers, we race and play our way towards adolescence when we start peering at ourselves looking out of new shapes and then we let them give us children and we play with them, then perhaps we play golf or bridge or bingo and then they start to creak a bit and diminish and we hand them back.  And yet we are surprised… we shouldn't be.  I think Hugh Jackman knows a thing or two don't you!

Triumph of the Spiritual, from the Gita to the Water Babies

Harry Eyres writing in the Financial Times on May 3rd speaks about the Triumph of the Spiritual.  If I get his  meaning right, he is saying that religions like the buildings and images they contain evolve and undergo change; one generation not being turned on by the God or gods or leaders that the previous generation focussed on.  Eyres goes with the idea that our modern spirituality comprises a mix of eastern practices and western psychotherapies which he says might fulfil the spiritual needs of today.  He quotes Claudio Arrau, a Chilean pianist who found salvation from despair through Jungian analysis. He was freed from whatever bound him to fully express his spirit through music.  Arrau said "Anguish and fear of death had given way to a firm belief in the indestructibility of the human soul". This is also the message of the Bhagavad Gita, the story of the conversation between the Lord Krishna and  Prince Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra.  Lord Krishna urges Arjuna to lift himself out of his despair at the thought of the battle to come by knowing himself and all others to be indestructible.

Today in the Daily Mail, there is an article about businessmen turning to mindfulness,(could this be the same phenomenon, turning to spiritual life to sort out the stress of being a businessman!).

But my real epiphany about spiritual triumph came at the most brilliant production of the Water Babies, now previewing in Leicester at the Curve Theatre.  DON'T MISS IT IF YOU ARE NEAR!  It is a musical whizz, a dancing dream and a triumph of acting PLUS, and this is the most important thing for a Granny wishing the best for grandchildren,(their own and yours!), the story is of Tom freeing the Water Babies  from their underwater refuge.  They have all been rescued by Mrs Do-as-you-would-be-Done-by  (played by Louise Dearman, what a voice! ) from their miserable childhood slavery and are playing about in the  bottom of the ocean, retelling their bad luck stories over and over again.  Their freedom is only available if they give up their stories. This is the brilliance of the story…. none of us can be free while we think we are bound, we could be bound by any identity, being a mother, father, grandmother, businessman, actor or even a Waterbaby.   But you have to say this to yourself over and over again, practice being free, meditate on being free.  (You knew I'd get the word in somewhere!)

What Harry Eyres is talking about (I think) is that spirituality always triumphs by evolving continuously.

Congratulations to the Water Babies team for a terrific entertainment but with a remarkable outcome.

What would you rather do?

the chilly pond!

It is testing to meditate twice a day!  I have been looking at the things which stop me meditating and wondering if it is just a question of finding excuses not to take that time to be still regularly.  The two of us are in a good position now to meditate regularly and yet there are occasional lapses.  We are retired and most days are uncluttered by having and needing and doing and going.  We get to choose how our time is spent and we are pretty disciplined, after all, we have been meditating now for 40 years.  We nearly always complete our two half hours each day unless…..something gets in the way….. and I don't think that happens to a real meditator .  I don't believe that a Swami doesn't meditate because he thinks he is a bit fluey or a BK because they are involved in grandchildren's early rising.  Nor do the committed get tripped up by party mentality, by too many people around all waiting for dinner, twinkling glasses and candles spelling out fun.  The compelling nature of life is what stops us when we don't do it and now it is summer again and as both of us have been under the weather we have been a bit flaky about early rising.  

Here and now, I put on record that I will try to rise early again and I mean to swim again too in the chilly pond! with the tadpoles and the one newt….but will it be tomorrow? Will a little frost put us off? Watch this space!

Grannies should be happy DEFINITELY

*I heard Ari Seth Cohen taking part in an interview on the Radio yesterday.  He has made a documentary about older people, (grannies! in this blog!) who love to dress stylishly, never mind their respective age.   It is a lovely film showing how these particular grannies or perhaps I should call them stylists find their bliss. In the interview he was being roundly told off by a woman who said that this film would give us grannies a complex about how we looked, we would all feel inferior to the styley ones.  Anyway, let me put her right….. Grannies want people to be free, especially Grannies who meditate and being free of jealousy and desire is a great goal to have.  So, bring on the styley ones and let them shine, bring on every octogenarian who is having fun and any meditating Granny worth her salt will be happy for them.  Well done Ari for focussing on happiness.  Perhaps you might like to focus on grannies who meditate next?

If you fall, what are you going to hang on to?

When you are a Granny, you are almost certainly the same sort of age as other Grandparents and many of them have been friends for years; a few childhood friends, some school friends, teenage friends, friends whose weddings you went to and friends who you met at the school gate or in the playground when you were learning how to be a parent!   Now only a few of them have a parent left, I have two friends with parents who are around and they are the survivors aiming for the hundredth birthday royal telegram.  

All of these friends have had aspirations to happiness, remember the smiling faces at weddings, at christenings, at school sports days and at graduations.  And then remember seeing all these things through your granny eyes, it's a different way of looking.  The thing is to have no regrets and that is a job in itself but it is an even bigger job when you get bowled the real hard ones, the tragedies that come out of the blue and whop you under the chin or right in the stomach.  I would like to say that meditation prepares you for these shocks, it doesn't make you numb but it helps you to see things in perspective and to find letting go of the deep attachments to life a little easier.  

Sri Shantananda Saraswati
Shankaracarya of Northern India
until his death 

There are some people who are called to the inner life early and they have a quality about them which is comforting.  I believe that they are the gatekeepers, they are there to welcome you in to the place they have made for you.  Get to know them, find about their practice so that you can come to it when you need it.   There are more of them around than you may think!  And of course if you come to St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 26th in the day or to St James' Piccadilly in the evening you will meet some very good examples of just this and you get to try out meditation and stillness yourself in a beautiful place.  To find out more go to www.justthisday.org or click on this link to read the newsletter.  Here is a picture of someone who knew all about this and sent loving messages to us in the West to say that meditation was the key ingredient to both spiritual and secular life.

Granny at the Vatican!

watch out for grannies

Headline in today's Easter Sunday paper is about Grandmother, aged 71 tackling slave traffickers for the Pope.  This conjures up an old lady out in St Peter's Square beating up people trying to make off with vulnerable young people.  Of course that is what you think of grannies, they should be old and have sticks and be a bit cross with people who do the wrong thing.  But let me tell you that grannies are of every kind, they aren't all old at heart and this one in the newspapers is qualified for the job by her intellect and passion, not by her age.  I expect that she meditates too, don't you?

Happy Easter every one, Grannies, grandchildren and all that lies between.

Archbishop calls for wild burst of enthusiasm for religious life

A beautiful Nun

Sister Jayanti, BK

Our very own ABC, (Archbishop of Canterbury), Justin Welby, (click to see video) speaking about what he saw as a dangerous decline in the true religious life, said yesterday that Monks and Nuns are like trainspotters….(.I find myself imagining monks and nuns leaning over railway bridges and lurking round stations with notebooks like trainspotters because this seemed a rather odd description of "a decline in the religious life"!)   However, I think he meant that train spotters stay in one place spotting trains and the rest of us are commuters.   They watch, we move in the world.  He also described embracing the religious life as a "the ultimate wager on the existence of God".  

So, where has the religious life gone?  the ABC says that the Church needs not just an outward expression of religion but it is upheld by those who commit themselves totally to a religious life, committing themselves totally to God as an ultimate and total reality.  He has invited members of  a religious community, Chemin Neuf to live at Lambeth Palace.  This would mean that a cycle of prayer and interiority was at the centre of the Palace and I think this is what he is really after.  Life in the world is anchored by these few who are called to commit themselves totally to God or totally to an interior life, and what he says is that the outer world is dependent on that.

Nuns of the Order of St Benedict

Buddhist Monks

So, Meditating Grannies and meditating people, this is what we do, we hold the interior ground, we don't just do it to feel good, we do it because it is an imperative to keep the balance and it is as much an act of love for the world as all the wonderful work that goes on out there.  This makes meditating when you might not feel so much like it, or when you don't think you are any good at it, a really really reasonable thing to do not a gamble or wager at all.   So go Grannies Go, or maybe stop going Grannies because the world needs your peace and stillness.  Actually I expect there will be a revival of the religious life after Call the Midwife.  There has certainly been an upsurge in applications for midwifery because we all loved those midwives but we really all loved Jenny Agutter, the Mother Superior and all the faces of the nuns as they sang and prayed and kept the Mother House a centre of spiritual life in the East End.