Meditation and Addiction

You may be surprised at what you are addicted to!
These are things that you can't live without, that are really a part of you, the things you are so attached to that going without them causes a reaction.
Having a rather spasmodic few days of meditation, my irritation level soared!  Doesn't this happen when you are addicted to a mood changing substance and you stop it.  I am just hoping that this means that I am addicted to meditation and my whole physical and mental being is affected if I go without it.
There may be a few others in my life who would agree!

Retreat again and again

In the grounds of Waterperry is a tiny Church, over 1000 years old with wooden box pews.  During Art in Action, which buzzes with people, pancakes and pzazz, Discantvs Choir joins a reader and they provide a period of music and poetry with a reflective theme for people to sink into.  If it wasn't that the pew seats were made for medieval bottoms which must be much smaller than the current variety, I would have stayed there ALL day.
There was a 70th and 80th birthday to celebrate.  The owners of the birthdays were particularly dear and close to me and it made me realise that time goes rattling past, decades seem like weeks and lives together which were to have been forever, dissolve back into singularity.  And you can't stop them.  You think that you are in control of time but time is going to move every bit of your human person along just where it wants you to go.  Your only point of control is .... to know that this is a fact, bring a bit of meditation into your life and then enjoy the time, don't fight it.

Christians on Sundays

Sunday is the day for Christians, not just to be Christians but to hold the faith for all people.  It is comforting to think of all the good people going to Church, facing God, singing their praise for Him, and remembering Him as the Source of All Goodness.  It is probably lucky that different faith groups have their different days, Saturdays are holy for some, Sundays for others, maybe Fridays too.  I think that Wednesday is a free day so why not remember particularly every Wednesday that All People share the same source and give a little special spiritual effort for those All because they might need it.  Wednesday will come round every week in this blog until Wednesday November 30th, when you are all invited to remember Just this Day, a day for everyone of faith and no faith to join in stillness.
www.justthisday.org.
But today is Sunday, and the last day of Art in Action; if you aren't in Church or in the garden and if you are anywhere near Waterperry, Wheatley, Oxford, this is the place to find sheer joy.

meditation means you can do nothing ALL the time

6000 people in, several hundred volunteers, thousands of cups of coffee, sandwiches, sales of cards, pictures, works of art, everyone greeted, fed, provided with car parking space, places to sit, music to listen to, all in a space of 7 hours and then all the people left behind need food and space and beds to sleep in and it all works.  Go a bit further, millions of drivers piling down motorways, millions, literally millions of people texting, calling, then the people are all shapes and ages and they are walking down busy streets, across lawns, to railway stations, airports and then going back to their houses.  Wouldn't you think we might all bump into each other in our cars or bang into each other in the streets or our telephone calls would somehow get jumbled up.  Well they don't very often, mostly we all get up, get going, go home and go to bed and somehow everything manages without much help from us.
Someone is in charge of keeping order and we just participate with our limbs and our  minds.  The organiser of Art in Action said at the start of the great big jamboree that it was important to remember that the real person, the we, the I, does nothing.  Resting in that for just a moment here and there connects you not to O2 or Orange, but to something much more powerful and restful and my goodness, that really does the business

Art in Action

Every year, Art in Action takes place at Waterperry House, residential centre of the School of Economic Science near Oxford.  The students of this particular organisation offer meditation and philosophy.  This is a rather brilliant way of making sense of meditation, it helps to make philosophy real.
Art in Action is so busy and wonderful that pinning yourself down to stillness is like finding water in a desert.  Even here amongst the busyness, you can always find somewhere to meditate, the Church is a lovely place to be, and there are trees and shady places in this lovely sunny place.

This is a beautiful meditation,

https://www.facebook.com/gabriellaandtheplanets/posts/10151698611732920

Meditation, a pathway

Every day when I take the dogs out on a walk, we go on different size pathways; the first is just a barely discernible overgrown pathway from our garden to the field outside.  We then join the big pathway along the river everyone goes on to walk their dogs.  It is a regular social outing for people and dogs and a great leveller, you might meet the Lord Lieutenant or the newspaper man, all are intent on walking their dogs.  From there, the dogs go on a lead to walk along the formal pathway, the road back towards home.  At the end, they jump over a gate into the field outside the garden and start chasing rabbits.
Being in a meditative mood, the mind gets a chance to really examine the small lie I told you about yesterday and to dissect its horrid little phenomenology. We all know that one small lie will lead to others and lies are a pathway to increasing self deception never mind about deceiving the person to who the lie is told.  So, what was the little white lie about?  It was really about how I would look to the hopefully new friend if I told her I had just messed up.  It wasn't really about making her feel better, which at least would have had an element of compassion to it.
As I got back to the field this morning with my thoughts in order, the idea of pathways forming through people walking particular ways struck a chord.  If we meditate regularly, really discipline ourselves to our practice, it creates a pathway and a good habit.  To begin with, the pathway is small and individual but if you become part of a community which meditates, the pathway is wider and easier and you don't have to duck under the branches, miraculously they have receded.  Your pathway may have been created by a Saint or a Holy Man, by the leader of one of the great religions and all that will ease the way to meditation, they will somehow take you by the hand and help.  Then, when you get to the big field and are in sight of home, you will be carried as lightly and easily as you wished when you started the journey.  Of course the pathway of lying starts off broad and easy and the little white lies just trip off the end of the tongue and you almost believe them, but when you get to the end and you try to go home through that little cut back into the garden, there are nettles and brambles and the branches stick you in the eye.
Off now to meditate with my morning meditator who is on night duty and calls in on her way home trying to make a meditation pathway again.