Girls starting school

This girl starts school shortly, she is 4 and she has a large uniform with new name tapes.  Now she is 4 she says she doesn't mind tadpoles anymore!  YOU are a bit older than 4 and you are about to start a new career as a teacher!  WOW, that is something.  I know that you are more nervous than Grace, it is no mean thing going into a classroom of up to 30 girls aged 14 or 15 and not being nervous.
It is a bit too easy to just suggest meditation will help, I can't do more than suggest it but I can try to give a reason.  There is something that happens, some connection to a bigger, wider, more profound source which takes place when you turn inward.  If you just turned inward to thoughts, you would get thinking done, but if you turn and open to a still presence, using your mantra or a prayer, you are saying that you hope for help, you are admitting your own vulnerability.  You will put in all the effort to be a good teacher, that is in your nature, you will prepare and be ready for whatever comes, so I can only encourage you from my place of retirement to make that extra effort, take that little extra time each day to be still.  All the girls in your care will be, like Grace, nervously waiting for school but really they will want to be taught and to be liked.  Good luck old fruit! We will be thinking of you.

Just this Day

In November, you can join lots of meditators meditating and then hear some ace meditators discussing  meditation as it  filters down to us from different traditions and its relevance today.  I have heard that when you meditate, you join all those meditating and all those who have ever meditated through the established forms of meditation.  That isn't a bad deal when you think about it, it is better than being with a good bank, its gives you spiritual capital beyond your own meagre offerings.  This also means that meditation isn't confined to the time your are meditating, it would seem to have a cumulative effect, to have a substance which can be added to and which you can resort to when your own efforts are depleted through illness or press of worldly events.
So, on November 20th, think about joining in wherever you are, or come to S Martin-in-the-Fields in London and listen to 4 people who  practice and value meditation and mindfulness speaking from their understanding and experience of meditation.  To find out  more go to www.justthisday.org and register or say what you might do.
Of course just this day applies to each day, each day is Just THIS day.

meditation and older bodies

There were 20 of them, average age 87, some well into their nineties, who joined us at Mandeville Place, Central London for meditation and philosophy.
Old age is like an invading army which comes and lays waste all the treasures of the city if it can.  Bodies bend and bones weaken, sight goes, hearing lessens, feet seem a long way off when it comes to putting on socks and shoes, velcro becomes your friend.  But these are remarkable people and what they say about old age, meditation and philosophy is inspiring to this Granny who still thinks she is young by dint of being younger than them.
Most moving, Hedi who has practiced meditation for maybe 50 years and studied all that time as well, had spent some days in hospital since we last saw her.  She said how in hospital, so much time is just spent waiting, just waiting for things to happen and that when she had sight she used to be able to read to wile away the time and now she is no longer able to.  So she searched in her memory which she describes as slower now for an old prayer, finding a word here and a word there and repeating it until the whole prayer was there and together, just repeating.  It is a prayer which pleads that the mind of the aspirant will join with the mind of God, it asks that that far shining light of lights, which rises afar, will become mind for me.  It must have done because she experienced a peace beyond the confines of the body and for this Granny listening,it was a confirmation that faith and years of practice will help to protect the real person when the tide of time tries to undermine.

without meditation

Out late at a party, waking late with a busy day ahead, so easy to  miss meditation, so easy.  But it's like missing out on water because you have had other drinks to cover the idea of thirst, coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, wine in the evening when what you really really love is the water.  So, although you wake up a bit late, you know what you need to do to bring yourself to yourself, you need to meditate.  Especially when you can see that everything round you is in the process of change, bodies getting older, problems rising from that, worries about health, about family, about houses and maintenance of all these things, all this sets meditation as a way of establishing and maintaining some equilibrium and equanimity in the face of change.

I have a dream...

50 years ago Martin Luther King made his important I have a dream speech.  We need to keep that dream alive for him by enacting it.  It is about freedom and freedom for all.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

When we rise each day, we start to enact our own dream which can be as small or as large as we choose, it can be as small as our individual life or it can be as large as the whole of humanity.  The biggest world is God's world and that includes every single being and all that lies between.  Our formal meditation practice is to realise there is a space for God and our daily life should be to make His dream work.  Every day whatever  and whoever we meet gives us another chance to make this real.

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Meditation measures pleasure, a thought for Sophie age 12

Dear Sophie,
You are about to start senior school! Well done!
You have had some lovely times so far in your life and I hope that you will go on having wonderful simple easy pleasures.  These are a few things I wanted to pass on to you as you move on to your new chapter especially as your name means Wisdom.
It is clear that pleasure is relative!  And that the zone of life that is pleasant is quite small when you think just how vast things are.  You have only got to look at the effect of the weather, of the heat and cold and wet and dry to see that we are only able to live in a small zone before we either freeze to death or burn up.  And we can only keep alive when the air is pure enough and we have enough food and enough sleep.  If we go without or have too much of any of them, the very delicate  balance is upset and we don't feel well.  And it can't have passed any of us by that our life span is also limited and not by government health initiatives, it just is limited to a certain number of years.  For life to be pleasant we have to be careful, not too much of this or too little of that.
We take our survival and our right to a pleasant life rather for granted.  From time to time there is a wake up call, we may be alerted to the fragility and beauty of the life around us and feel amazed and grateful to be here.  We may lose someone close to us or our own good health be compromised and then we know to be grateful for our well being and aware that our own life is balanced delicately. This wake up call is important, once we think about it, we wonder about that power which keeps us safe, we wonder what feeds us, what brought us into life and what might be beyond it.  The wisest people have pointed this out and at the same time have given us help.  While we are alive, we have doctors and teachers and lawyers and all manner of clever and artistic people to make our lives easy.
When we start to wonder what lies beyond our life, what will happen when we die, we are helped by wondering and by our own observation.   And we are helped by those people wise enough to help us measure up to this, who have given us ways of touching a space which is real but isn't touched by all the opposites.  These people have found out for themselves and left us special prayers and meditations to prepare.  Meditation is just that, it allows you time to be alone without worrying what you look like, what you are going to eat, to have or to know.  It introduces you to a steady and peaceful place.  It helps you to practice for what is unknown and to be without fear because you meet a very real Present Guide.

Coming home

summer house

 There is the physical coming home to your own place and there is something more.  It seems as if  you have dreamt the being away, all the images are like the photographs you have taken, they are reminders but not the real thing any more.  Conversations which were so bright with consciousness are dreamlike, the feel of sun and sea are already memories.  But home has a gentleness about it and finding my way back to meditating in the summer house while the rain pattered away outside was just right.

meditating dog