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.

Everyday Transcendence

Wonderful paralympic team 2016

If I asked you if you had had a transcendent experience, you might doubt it, you might search for some out of body experience, some deep and profound shift from one consciousness to a state of sublime bliss and not find it there!
The subject of transcendence fascinates me because it seems such a far off and unlikely event in the ordinary way of things.  However, if you look at it in a different way (and especially look at it after the end of those wonderful Paralympic Games) you might get a hint of the possibility of everyday transcendence.  Because if transcendence means to transcend one state of being for another, then surely a person who might think they were disabled but who decides to transcend the condition by taking part in an exacting sport is someone who has transcended the state of disability and risen to the state of athlete.

lovely glass of wine!

In the same way, a person with a headache who goes to work has transcended the state of headache, not accepted the headache as a reason not to go in.  They have transcended state one for state two.  My own state of transcendence is to complete half an hour of meditation and transcend the ideas which beg for attention some of which are completely brilliant and would let me rebuild the house and probably remodel the universe!!! Some of them are the opposite, those ideas tell me what rubbish I am, what a failure and why would anyone like me!  Transcending the second lot is clearly desirable, transcending the great and glorious ones takes a bit more effort.
You have to make sure that the lovely supper or the glass of wine aren't going to win the day because     somewhere deep in your consciousness, you know that they are a passing thing and you are trying to build up a capital of remembering the transcendent reality of your own soul. You have to have the discipline of an athlete, an everyday build up of strength to be able to transcend the idea that you are just a body with a small mind inside it bound to your name and your nationality, your status and your age.  It has to be worth it doesn't it. Plus you can have the glass of wine when you have finished especially if you haven't let it cross your mind during your meditation!