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.

Mothers Day means Grannies too, and more

Behind all these lies...

a great grandmother

Great Great Grandparents

When you are in the middle of your being a mother, you think YOU are the one, you are the mother!  Well, you are, but only at that moment and then off the young fly and you are either the one who isn't or you have changed your form and become a gardener or a bridge player or a yoga enthusiast or maybe a university lecturer but like all mothers before you, you have ceased mothering.  Then the same thing happens when you become a Grandmother, you think you are the one or at least one of two because they will be another one on the other side of your son/daughter's family.  You look at yourself and see that you look more and more like your own mother….. when she was a grandmother……your hair is a dead giveaway, it goes grey just like your mother or father's did……your legs go wobbly, even if you do a marathon, they cease to have that young skin and cellulite in it's funny unevenness strikes.  You can't fool yourself if you have a mirror!  And yet and yet and yet…..you feel the same inside, even if you feel tired or you aren't well or you are busy or you aren't, you feel you have always been the same person that swung it's legs on the swing.   But you have to make an effort to access that person, especially if you aren't well or aren't busy or are suddenly on your own and just as you might put a little bit of savings in the Bank or Building Society towards a mortgage or towards a pension or even….a Care Home.   So, why not think about building up your spiritual capital, all it takes is a little time meditating each day and from my experience every little helps even if you don't think you are very good at it, actually especially if you don't think you are very good at it. 

This family was One which became great great grandparents, one is the great great great grandparent of the ones above.

 This one on the left became this one on the right who is grandfather to the one beside him who is father to one of the ones in the top photo.  He married the beautiful one underneath.  And this is only part of a story of passing people all taking part in One story which is just a part of One much bigger ONE.  So meditate to find out what lies behind all this ONEDERFULNESS

A great grandmother

A Great Great Grandmother

A Great Great Grandmother

A Great Great Grandfather

An Iron Approach loses this Granny

You will have realised by now that I believe in meditation, especially for older people and this is where meditation has taken me this week.  I was rather surprised when I read about 

Sharon Meers, co author of Getting to 50/50: How Working Parents Can Have It All.  In an interview to promote her book, she explained that having set out to create the sort of egalitarian marriage of which bickering dual career couples can only dream - one where everything from childcare to chores, to the responsibility for earning a living is split 50/50 between them, she and her husband have a "family agreement" which was committed to paper before they for married and it covers everything, childcare, time off and commitment to earning. See Gaby Hinsliff's article in The Times this past Thursday.  Doesn't she look great, good teeth, handsome and happy husband and successful career.  My gripe isn't what you might expect a Granny to gripe over, I really think that sharing is good but my gripe is with the iron nature of committing it to a signed agreement.  It is the iron nature of that which I have in my mind.  I found myself looking out of the train window as it sped through the countryside.  The approaching spring, green leaves coming out and more light shows the sharp contrast between the natural landscape and the metalwork which carried out ways of communicating.  I thought that this was a mark of the iron age, metal frameworks allowing speed of movement and of communication and that there is much to commend the result but the metalwork, the structures which hold it in place are unyielding.  So, reading this article on the same day made me wonder how the agreement would hold up when things weren't so rosy, if redundancy struck one and not the other, if sickness or disease meant that one needed more care. A loving relationship backed by commitment would/should hold up if things swung to say 75/25 or even 95/5, it shouldn't need signing up for.  You see, events are full of surprises and old age creeps up and catches one person in one way, and another in another and it is only the spirit of the relationship which will cover those things.  It is real communication, real understanding and real kindness which gets you through that.  I expect that Mr and Mrs Meers may get through toothlessness and changes in face and body fine but maybe another couple would hold up the paper and say" "You aren't keeping to the agreement, I will only push your wheelchair if you push mine!"  
And that would be a shame because we need to be fluid in our understanding of one another.  Meditation allows the space to develop patience and understanding and that brings fluidity

Don't get mad get even!

A Report in today's press (see  http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/news/article4022272.ece) suggests that getting angry makes heart attacks and strokes more likely.  Think of all the descriptions there are of anger and you get the picture of a person on red alert.  Red mist! so angry he looked as if he would  burst!  or in Shakespeare, the call to arms in Henry V. In Henry's speech, the summoning of rage is contrived for a reason but of course the anger spoken about in the report is the habit of anger which eats up our consciousness.  So, why would meditation help you might wonder?  It is calming and you get to see what is happening, you can discover that you are not the anger until you join it and then you are able to view the anger in you and replace it with quiet.  A mantra helps, it has it's own power to clean up your problems.
So, go for evenness not anger.

In Peace, there's nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility,

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger:

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage,

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect,

Let pry through the portage of the head

Like the brass cannon, let the brow o'erwhelm it

As fearfully as doth a gallèd rock

O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,

Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.

Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,

Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit

To his full height. 

Protect yourself with meditation!

This statue which is half perfect and half destroyed by time and conditions comes from the Antikythera Shipwreck.

I saw it at the Archaelogical Museum in Athens last year and was struck by the way the perfect part had remained so unblemished although it had been  at the bottom of the sea for nearly 2000 years.  You see the Antikythera had sunk somewhere between 60 and 50 BC !  and nothing from it had been touched until 1901.  I am showing it to you  now because it's condition is analogous to the way meditation preserves the fine qualities of the soul.  The right side which is perfect was buried in the sand and the left side of the sculpture was in the sea.   I wonder if you believe me that the soul can be preserved  by meditation when everything we know about anyone is so much on view.  And yet, don't you really know that your innermost part is quite quite still if you let it and that it will not age or suffer decay if you allow yourself time to realise it.  Two thousand years is a long long time and see how he is calling out his message to us still.