Those genes you have aren't just yours!

That face keeps coming back!

love of crisps

new forms meet old very old ones

three generations loving the 2 Ronnies

With everything, the new seems to replace the old but I begin to see that what it does is just reinvent the old, it takes the old, dusts it down and represents it in an acceptable way.  After all, nothing lasts any longer than it is meant to.  Take your skin, or certainly take mine, it certainly doesn't look like it did once upon a time!  My hair which was brown is grey and that is just a person.  Look around and nature is all of a change and so are the buildings round us.  Down come the old ones and up go the new.  Some old ones get renovated but everything and everybody has a measure of life.  Grandpa's face came from a long line of lookalikes!  And they go on....and on...  AND ON!Visiting family in their abroad homes shows the way that time creates children and parents, time itself pulls us along and doesn't allow too much looking back.  It moves us along, making new shapes on old patterns, giving new expressions to old DNA as well as making new buildings behind the old harbour.  Should we mind?  certainly not because although our bodies and some of our thinking is the past, we are also the future.  See how often this face has been handed out! 

Old skills continue to play out

No such place as heaven? is it a question or is it a statement?

She, in Singapore, just turned 7, says that there is no such place as heaven.  He, in Jakarta, just turned 7, asks if there is such a place as heaven.  Me, recently turned well up the 60's (and that says the Jakarta boy, is pretty close to 100!) is put to the test because I don't think you can get to heaven by any physical route.  No aeroplane will take you, no train, no bus and certainly not on your old feet and yet I don't think that this 60 to 100 year span of time here is the whole story.  So, Archie and Grace in your respective places, this is the best I can do to answer your question or refute your statement about heaven and what or where it is.

Grown ups say that someone has gone to heaven when they die and yet there is no evidence that they are somewhere real, so where are they?.  After all, they certainly haven't taken their bodies with them so what has gone and where might it be? 

new baby, old soul?

 I think you have to go back to thinking about where anyone came from even before a baby was in its mothers tummy.   That was just where it grew from a single cell to a very complex and defined individual looking a bit like Auntie so and so and a bit like Great Grandpa, with hair colour like Dad, and a mouth like Mum.  This baby which we are about to call by some very nice name like Albert or Albertine, Clement or Clementine is a beautifully blended small person which has various interesting things about it which we are going to call its character.  It may be sweet tempered or cross, serious or a joker, a saint or a sinner, perhaps it will be athletic or academic or neither, what is for sure is that it will have its marks and tendencies with which it has to make its way in the world.  Some of these babies will have very defined talents some people say they have done whatever they are good at before.  Some mathematicians are just way ahead of others, some piano players, some violinists, some artists or poets.  They arrive and get off to a head start in their own special field.  And it may not have anything to do with its parents or grandparents or other relations.  It may but it may not so where did it come from?  Why do we call some people old souls if they show a particular wisdom.  

Some very wise people who have studied these things say that the soul when it leaves a body goes to the place it has earned a right to be.  If it has been a good soul, it spends time with other good souls, if bad, with other bad ones;  a bit like being at either a very good party with kind friends or finding yourself in prison with some bad ones.  This could be called being in heaven or hell and doesn't seem to need a body.  Then after passing time in the place it is, they say that the time comes when it has to move on.  Each soul looks down and with all that it had learned and all that it still has about it, it chooses to be born in the very best place to continue developing its particular skill or talent but more important it gets a chance to meet the things which it needs to meet to make progress by perhaps righting some wrongs done the last time round.  These wise people say that one day, the soul may give up all its baggage and be free from being sent back and back to the world.  That pure soul will go straight back to its source which some call God and some call its Father and that soul will unite totally with its Father.  That pure soul doesn't have to return unless everything on earth is going particularly badly when it may come back just to help all the people who have forgotten that they have a Father both in heaven and above heaven whose nature is pure consciousness.

If that sounds too complicated, I'll read a bit more and try again when you ask me again.  One thing I am sure of is that nothing goes unnoticed and that goodness always goes to goodness.  And because your real nature is pure goodness absolutely nothing can possibly go wrong for you.

Singapore travel, Grandpa passes the test!

Happy in every place!

I have heard that there is a vast capital of consciousness built up by meditators over the years and that when you need to tap into it perhaps because your own practice is dipping a bit, it is an ever generous provider.  So, every day, just like saving your pennies, when you meditate, you add a little to the pile. You are banking with the best bank of all and your pin number is secure because it is in your own mind, a mantra or particular visualisation.  No hacker can get at that. Let's say that your tradition is your bank manager and occasionally you have to visit the bank manager to arrange a loan.  

Grandpa is a very disciplined meditator especially in his own home.  He sticks to the prescribed half hour to the last second, so much so that the dogs also know exactly when to move from their own somnolent positions in the meditation hut and expect a walk.  Me, I am a bit restless at 25 minutes and if it wasn't for him, I might jump out of my seat and set off on my own daily round.  

At home ABROAD!

However, Grandpa is not, or perhaps I should say was not a great traveller; he searches around his waistcoat and coat pockets often to make sure that he has everything in order; passports, tickets, boarding passes, glasses and reams of paper which have been printed off with all the terms and conditions of each airline held together with a bulldog clip.  He checks his watch, the departure boards and his wife's whereabouts frequently to be sure that the aeroplane (in whose timings he has very little confidence) is listed and then we are off to the boarding gate as soon as it is announced.  No hanging about the pret-a-manger, W.H Smith and Jo Malone area, we are going to be sat by the gate watching and checking those pockets and making sure that the air hostess is in place before any other travellers.

So, travelling and keeping the calm built up in the meditation hut is always a test for him but oh readers and relations, I can announce with joy that travelling from Heathrow to Singapore and then  from Singapore to a small island 3 different methods of transport away, and then back again has been a seamless joy to me as his companion.  If you had ever thought that it was impossible to change the wiring which seems operate as soon as any identity is activated, I can confidently say that meditation and all its ancient stillness is the best bank in town.    One more travel today to Jakarta and instead of checking his watch, he is sitting peacefully on the balcony reading a book listening to the thunder of a short Singapore tropical storm rolling round the skies.  

Airports no longer trouble him! Meditation calms the most built-in agitation.

The buddha from the bric a brac reminds me

Lama Zangmo

buddha now in Singapore

www.justthisday.org

Discombobulated by travelling from London to Singapore, Singapore to Bintan, Bintan to tropical paradise, I find meditation disappears even though I think about it.  However, returning to Singapore with the granddaughters, I find that the Buddha from the bric a brac sale who came with Grace to Singapore after last summer is sitting on the bedside table. Amongst all the wonderful possibilities, the dim sum, the swimming pool, the botanic gardens and the timeless nature of being on holiday, the feeling I really couldn't miss and which was coming from him was an invitation, a coming home to myself.  Suddenly meditation wasn't a far away thing, it became easy again.  Originally bought  in a village bric a brac sale I now wonder if he came from somewhere much more important and that was what gave him that special quality of stillness.  His name, the Buddha is akin to the word Buddhi,  an ancient Indian name for your intelligent being, the place where you know what really is and can discard the things which pass one by one as objects to enjoy.   He seems to fill your whole heart space when you allow him in.  The lady on the right is Lama Zangmo, she has made becoming her Buddha like self, her whole life and you can see how the light streams out of her eyes and her smile.  A bit more of this may make the same thing happen to all of us.  You can meet Lama Zangmo on November 23rd either by coming to St Martin-in-the-Fields in the morning or by clicking on the sparkly globe on the www.justthisday.org website and joining from wherever you are in the world.  Go on, you know it must be worth it!

St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, London, you can join in wherever you are.

A test for Grandpa?

This could be us!!!

A patient man?

We are in a queue for travel to the Far East.  This is a test for Grandpa mostly because waiting is not his bag!!! Some of you who know him will be conjuring up pictures of him at airports in the past.   I say that this is a test for his years of meditation.  Of course meditation isn't just to get you through Heathrow with a beatific smile on your face.  It is an aid to combatting the tendencies to negative emotions which you seem to come into life with, it helps to clean up the neural pathways and this is where science and spirituality agree.  Grandpa isn't that interested in his neural pathways, he quite likes them I think, he enjoys the challenge of a traffic jam or a cold call on the telephone. He likes the drama of enacting the part of a gangster chase.  He is a really disciplined meditator, 30 minutes twice a day and never a minute short.  His interest in meditation is as a way of understanding that he isn't the drama, not the gangster or the Grandpa, he is just the director consciousness behind it.  My test is letting him  play all the Grandpa games without rising to the bait of his more dramatic confrontations with people doing their best to carry out the rules!!!  Our meditation isn't, I suspect going to change that drama but I hope it will come to our aid today as we hang about Heathrow waiting to be called.  Watch this space though to find out where we are going and who we are going to see!

taking the medicine as prescribed

It is the easiest thing in the world to take medicine when you need it; when you are feeling poorly and your appetite for everything else has gone.  Then you are so grateful for the way back to health that you swallow antibiotics, anti-emetics, anti-inflammatories, anti this and anti that.  The same thing with meditation, you are very grateful for it but until the habit is firmly established, you can easily fall away from a twice daily practice.  The other thing is that once you have missed one meditation for some very good reason; a visiting aunt or an urgent call or you have been somewhere you just don't seem to be able to make the move to a meditation seat, then it is much harder to get back to it and much harder to do the whole half hour.  This has given me cause for thought especially as I think what other things in my life I seldom miss.  A morning cup of tea or lunch for instance, a riveting programme on the telly or the radio (not the Archers, you can catch up on that!) and the irresistible call of cheerful voices in another room just asking to be joined with.   The pull of meditation is there but you have to develop a taste for it above all other temptations because reasonably one day the other things won't have the same hold over you and you will want to be able to naturally move into the space which meditation provides.  The speakers at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 23rd are there to show how it is possible to establish and unshakeable practice of meditation.  You can listen directly by coming to St Martin in Trafalgar Square, London or you can tune in via the www.justthisday.org website by clicking on the sparkly globe.  It will be worth it I can promise you.

Give us this day our daily marmite. A Meditation.

Crumpets without marmite, Julie Fleming-Williams

What do you think is missing from this picture on the left?  It is by my good friend Julie Fleming-Williams who paints a mean steaming picture of our favourite mealtime comforts.  I have a picture on my wall of one of her pictures which has a pot of marmite alongside a boiled egg and toast fingers.  In the picture of crumpets there is no marmite and as of today, marmite has been taken off the shelves of one of the nation's supermarkets.  Don't they realise that marmite isn't a product to be messed about with, it's our British birthright; almost every British child has been weaned from mother's milk to Marmite via a couple of mashed bananas.  Marmite should be given free as part of our heritage.  What I love about watching marmite eating in my house is how many different ways there are of having marmite.  Grandpa puts it on as thick as marmalade and we all groan and say how can you eat marmite like that with which he responds by actually having a spoonful, straight into his mouth just to show what it means to him.  My Grandfather used to have a spoonful of marmite in boiling water with a slug of sherry for elevenses.  My son butters his toast right up to the edges and does the same with marmite.  I just put lots of butter, preferably unsalted onto hot toast so that it melts in and then a thin layer of marmite.  Sometimes I put more butter on the top of that.   

The pot that transcends taste!

Marmite has enticed the sick  back to appetite and health, it has I'm sure got a place at Buckingham Palace on the Royal tea table as well as down below in the staff quarters.  It is meat to a vegetarian, and vegetable to a meat eater.  It is a leveller, a social leveller and a leveller of people with different diets.  It is like meditation, anyone can do it even if they do have their different methods of realising how delicious it is.  And of course there are a few people, (to  be pitied in my view!) who don't like marmite at all. Imagine what the world will do without marmite being readily accessible and canvas for change.

Wherever you are, you can join this meditation and perhaps make a difference

www.justthisday.org

I sometimes wonder how it happened that Just this Day slipped unnoticed into my mind and came to exist and take over the kitchen table for a couple of months before it happens.  But that was what did happen, one moment I was reading about meditation helping people at a much more profound level than anything we could do in the physical realm and the next moment I was walking past St Martin-in-the-Fields when I heard myself say...This is where we should do it.  One thing led to another and meetings with surprising people took place.  I expected at every moment that someone would say it was a mad idea but they didn't!  What they said was oh yes, come in and you can do it and we will help.  So, 9 years on and we have a great programme to bring people from different groupings together to meditate, to hear about meditation as a way of transcending our differences and to maybe make a small or large difference somewhere in the transcendent space.  I like to imagine all that good will going upwards rather like inverting a drop of red colour in clear water but it going upwards and spreading out and maybe just stopping one person from hitting another, help another person move towards a kind way of treating someone they wouldn't normally treat well and maybe maybe maybe open a tyrant's heart even just a crack to allow something better to happen.  I have heard it on good authority that meditating creates an auspicious energy which people in need can tap into and I believe that to be true.

www.smitf.org

The speakers this year personify good will.  Father Laurence Freeman, Neville Hodgkinson and Lama Gelongma Zangmo.  Each one has given much of their life to help others.  Each one has a core practice of  meditation and each one of them help others to meditate.   And even if it isn't possible for a person to learn to meditate, somehow the meditation and goodwill of these truly disciplined practitioners can change lives.  If you know any one of them, you know what I mean but if not, here is a chance to meet three remarkable people and hear them talk about the transcendental possibilities which meditation offers.  Come and join us wherever you are, go to the www.justthisday website on November 23rd and click on the sparkly globe you see above and you will be with us even if you live in the furthest part of the world

So, every year since the start, on we go and The Just this Day Newsletter was sent out today!!! Yippee for Mad Mimi which is the engine which does the sending and yippee for me that we are only one newsletter away from Just this Day itself.    Click here to read the newsletter.  Then register for the day at St Martin or get in contact and let me know what you are doing via the www.justthisday.org website and if you want it advertised on the website.  

Sunday Suffolk, Autumn morning, Church and Breakfast

Sunday has a particular feel to it. And an Autumn Sunday especially so.  We wake up a bit late after a cheery family dinner to a damp morning.  The Church, just over the wall from the cottage is being opened for Communion at 8.00 am.  We get a move on and join 3 other communicants in the choir stalls.  This is the only service in the village today and the kindly vicar who, with his wife, looks after 5 Churches on the Deben peninsula, comes in on the dot of 8.00 am having rung the chancel bell just in case there is anyone else waiting to hear it.  The Church is full of light and the light shows up the curtains of cobwebs up the stained glass windows and in the corners of the high high walls.  This is a Church which had ambition!  or the people who were priests here, who built it, enlarged it and worshipped here must have been ambitious because it can take up to 200 people in the long straight nave. On wet days when we were here with the children (who are now grown up), I used to send them in to the Church with dusters and spray polish.  Its great expansive space absorbed them for hours and accepted the spray polish without a murmur.  This morning, we 6, with the vicar are wrapped in its light, we notice the care that the few take of it, the tapestried kneelers, the embroidered altar cloth and the vestments the priest puts on which are fit for an Archbishop.  We have the old words of communion which have been spoken in this place for centuries and which have a particular effect.  They communicate the continuous message of God within, God without, God who loves and forgives us when we don't notice that we are walking round in a created universe which is testament to its maker.

We come home for breakfast and the day begins. Steaming cups of coffee, toast, bacon and eggs.  Not only churches hold traditions, breakfast patterns hold them too.

saturday suffolk thinking space

Sitting in the very nice cottage kitchen where so many friends and family have spent time I get a chance after breakfast, when they have all gone out to read a particularly special message from a wonderful 100 year old lady, Dadi Janki who leads the Brahma Kumaris world community.  What is remarkable about this organisation and about this lady is that it is based on cooperation and in fact their main centre in the UK in London is called Global Cooperation House!  I have often written about them because I find them so special and they have been unfailingly kind to me!  They are always cheerful and perhaps when you read the message sent just this week you will see why.  You will get the message too!

thinking space in cottage kitche   A MESSAGE FROM DADI JANKI Learn to Smile B.K Dadi Janki,  Om shanti. Dadi often asks people: Are you happy? Are you contented? We need to learn not to get upset. If you allow yourself to get upset, then you cannot at the same time be happy. How then can you be contented? Sit in silence, and check yourself. Learn not to keep disagreeing and arguing. To do this is your own mistake. Don’t let your old habits influence you. Rather let the power of yoga influence you. We have to learn not to keep looking at situations and thinking about them. Learn to smile. Is there effort involved in smiling, or would you prefer to remain dry? Without smiling, how can we speak with love? Is there anything difficult in this? No, there is love. We are all one and we all belong to One. www.smitf.org On November 23rd at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, Neville Hodgkinson who has learned much from this lady will be one of the speakers on transcendence.  He may show us how by smiling in the face of adversity, we can transcend the misery which can threaten ours and others wellbeing. It has to be worth it doesn't it, to exchange misery for happiness.  As they say, what's not to like about that!

Meditation not always easy but worthwhile. Examples help

www.justthisday.org

Ian Mason

When there is a lot going on in your house or in your head, meditation may be the last thing you WANT to do.  You may want to sort out the washing, the huge pile of ironing, you might be making a very important deal or there might be a most exciting thing you want to join in.  It is so difficult to leave a cheery gathering even if no-one is going to notice you slipping off for half an hour.  And then if you  start, your head stuff may want to come to.  If a problem slips in to your mind, it can be magnified a hundred times and played and replayed.  Of course, there are peaceful times when you easily leave things behind and meditation is a delight.  But it isn't there to always give delight, it is a bit like any relationship, you just have to work at it and when the worry or the enticing thought of holidays or wonderful creative possibilities comes in, you have to park them over and over again and make sure you are preferring the space where these things don't belong.  In fact, the effort is really in cooking them up but it seems the other way round, the effort to be still is a non effort, it is just a stopping, stopping, stopping, again and again and again.  Plus, it is only for 30 minutes twice a day, that leaves lots of time for everything else.

Lama Zangmo

Father Laurence Freeman

If I told you that your 30 minutes wasn't just making you better but was possibly creating a feeling for quiet for others to use when they needed it, when they were ill or were anxious or felt sad, wouldn't that be a spur to carry on?  

As a householder meditator with plenty to keep my hands and thoughts busy, I am grateful to people who give their life to creating the sort of space we all need through their meditation.  The speakers in November at ST Martin-in-the-Fields are marvellous in this respect.  Father Laurence Freeman, Neville Hodgkinson, Lama Gelongma Zangmo and Ian Mason have committed their lives and their time to make the way of meditation available to as many people as want it and even if you don't feel you do, or you don't feel you can, their meditation along with so many others who do the same thing, creates a good place for those in need.  Come to St Martin in the Fields or tune in via the live stream on November 23rd and find out how helpful this practice is and how it can transcend the pressing nature of worldly involvement

Neville Hodgkinson

An invitation for you and your friends

This is what you can do!!!
Print off the flyer below, put it in an envelope and send it to a friend.  Invite them to come round to you and join us in the glorious space which the internet offers and which will be full of good will streaming out of St Martin-in-the-Fields to you and which if you join it, will stream out to the world around.  Plus as well as being still, it will be so interesting to be virtually there and to hear the speakers who are a marvellous group of people.  If you would like me to send you some flyers or a poster and you are in the UK, do contact me via info@justthisday.org or go to the www.justthisday.org website contact page.  Please let me know if you are joining in.  Having an idea of how many people will be joining is so cheering and make every effort worthwhile.
Thanks to everyone for reading

This is the flyer

Introducing friends

Neville Hodgkinson

Lama Gelongma Zangmo

One of the best things about Just this Day is that people get to meet others who might have different ways of meditating and different ways of life but they get to see how marvellous one another is and how meditation unites them.  How does this happen you might ask.  Well it is because in meditation, you start to dissolve some of your views, some of your ideas and some of your attachments and when they dissolve or disappear for a bit, you see that because they do disappear and hopefully dissolve, they can't be the whole story.  They must be on top of a more fundamental identity and that one is the one shared by all of us.  

Ian Mason

www.smitf.org

So there are the methods and there are the places and there are the events.  There are the people who practice meditation and some of them wear white and some saffron and some maroon and some just wear any old thing.  But the clothes and the organisations are only there to show that there is someone or something inside and it is meditation which reveals that very special person who needs no covering at all.

www.justthisday.org

My friends who are coming to St Martin-in-the-Fields are representatives of their own groupings but they all believe that meditation belongs to none in particular and to anyone who practises faithfully.  There is a mark about them which is worth noting.  They all have winning smiles and I think that is because they feel happy and at one with themselves and with each other.  

Do come and meet them in November, either at St Martin-in-the-Fields or by turning on your computer and visiting our new website www.justthisday.org.  You can read about them all there and even more important, on November 23rd, you just click on the beautiful sparkling globe and bingo, you will be with us by live-stream.  Do please do this and make some good new friends.

Father Laurence Freeman OSB

Together in one space

The globe on the home page

 Dear All you readers of the blog,

Father Laurence Freeman

We are moving towards November 23rd and the central event of Just this Day in London.  I am hoping that you will join in wherever you are.  I hope that putting aside your own identity and joining many others in the single still space of meditation that our common effort will help the very divisive world we now live in.  It may sound airy fairy to say that meditation helps by spreading a feeling of unity but if you came into the summer house where we meditate or if you came near to it or near to a person who is meditating, you might notice that everything around that meditation participates in the sweetness of that stillness.  Even the dogs know exactly how long to stay absolutely still.  So, multiply that microcosm of stillness by pools of it round the world and a reservoir of it in the centre of London at St Martin-in-the-Fields where people with different backgrounds to their meditation join together and you might really believe in the powerful transcendent reality which is always there but often ignored.

Neville Hodgkinson

Ian Mason, will be chairing the event

Of course, if you live in Australia or New Zealand or if you are in New York or Trinidad, Singapore or Jakarta, your timings are different BUT with the miracle of YouTube you can join us at EXACTLY the same time.  Just go to www.justthisday.org and click on the beautiful sparkly globe which is on the home page on November 23rd and you will be straight there.  You can hear beautiful unaccompanied Bach playing us in, you can hear 5 different people, the vicar, Richard Carter from St Martin-in-the-Fields, the Benedictine Monk, Father Laurence Freeman OSB,  the philosopher and barrister, Ian Mason, the author and journalist, Neville Hodgkinson and the first female Lama to be appointed in the UK to Samye Dzong Ling Tibetan Buddhist Centre, Lama Gelongma Zangmo.  They will all be speaking about the transcendent power of meditation.  You can check them all out beforehand by clicking on the names under the photographs.  

Lama Zangmo

If you can't join us while the day in London unfolds, you can listen and join in as soon as you can by going to You Tube or via the website.  And of course, I will be reminding you as the days go on.  I will also be telling you just why all these speakers are so very special and why I really hope that you will get to meet them and hear what they have to say.

So, what I hope you will do is to help me to spread the word about the day beforehand.