Two women transcending time and space.

B.K Mina

This is Mina, she is one of the happiest and brightest and cheeriest young women you could ever wish to meet.  I would like to introduce her to everyone I know.  Her happiness is not a happiness dependent on anything other than her own understanding and belief. Her belief that her whole being and person was/is designed to be peaceful, happy and content and to help others feel the same.  The photograph doesn't really convey how beautiful she really is.  You find yourself just wanting to watch her and the reason seems to be the beauty which although it is beauty of face and feature, is also a beauty which is also a beauty beyond it.  She would say that her real self is within, it isn't the white sari-clad 5 foot, 5 inch (I'm guessing) person made of flesh and blood. 

 She would say, and indeed she does say that her self is a point of light within which has a direct connection with God.  Having met her, I find myself convinced that what she is saying is true for her and is quite possibly true for us too.  You could meet her if you went along to the Oxford Inner Space Centre on Broad Street which she looks after.   She came to talk to a group of us who had been considering meditation in a new light.  We had started looking at meditation not just as a discipline but as an act of tenderness between the meditator and God, an act of gratitude for all we are given, an act of surrender of our own belief that we are the ones who do, who give and who have.  If you think about it, the idea that we own anything, give anything or are anything is a joke which we haven't really decided to join in with.  When you meet someone who has realised that it is a joke, a kindly joke and they give up the idea of their individual person to something larger, they shine with the confidence of it being just like that.  

The icon of Mary and Jesus tells the same story about the act of tenderness and love which is the real bond between two apparent human beings.  These two women, one of 2016 years ago and on of 2016 show something which is both real and true then, now and forever.

Spot these two picketing Grandparents!

We few, we happy few, we band of grannies;

For he (or she)  to-day that stands and strikes with us

Shall be our friend; be they ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle their condition;

And other grannies in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,

And hold their granhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us on this defining day.

Spot us TODAY picketing our way round three hospitals in the East of England during tomorrow's strike.  Watch out at Peterborough General Hospital, at Addenbrookes in Cambridge and at Hinchingbrooke, we will be there.  We are supporting the junior doctors whose voices need to be heard if we are to keep an NHS at all let alone a 7 day a week one.  We just think that Jeremy Hunt has got it wrong and although we may look like quiet and gentle grandparents given to gardening and meditation, tomorrow we will be summoning up the blood and tightening the ancient sinews and marching to battle with Shakespeare's words (slightly altered to suit) ringing in our ears!

Report on 70 year olds say we are the best! Cambridge Granny proves it is so.

The baby boom really started in 1946 but those of us born in the years after the end of the second world war as well as the 10 years after 1946 have been declared happier, more cheerful, more confident, optimistic, relaxed and useful than generations before us.  This even takes into account the common chronic illnesses which may come along.   Dr Mai Stafford, programme leader from the MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing and University College London said "on average, levels of wellbeing increased during people's sixties.  We found that one in five experienced a substantial increase in wellbeing in later life".

A Cambridge grandmother is proof of the freedom a determined baby boomer might have. Although born just before the boom,  Janet Todd, after a long career as a successful academic combined with being a wife and mother, has just completed and launches her first novel next Tuesday.  If you are near Heffer's bookshop in Cambridge  at 6.00 pm she will be signing the book A Man of Genius, described by Natasha Solomons as "a mesmerising story of love and obsession in nineteenth century Venice: dark and utterly compelling."

When I met Janet, she said that writing a novel was a wonderful freedom after the rigour of academic life and researched biographies.  I think her life is an example and gets to the heart of the freedom which today's baby boomer might find.  I put it down to this; having worked hard in a disciplined way throughout a successful career, that once freedom from the constraints of those disciplines dissolve, the skill acquired combines with the innate creativity and whoopee a new voice might be born.

I will be one of the first in the queue for a signed copy and then I will rush back home to find the dark secrets hidden in the romantic setting which is Venice.

Socrates knew! Where have all the Grandpas gone?  So many Grannies and Grandpas disappear before you expect which makes you think about where the have gone and what happens when they get there. Grandpa and I think about this because observation says that it going to be us before too long! We already think in terms of our absence. We wonder who will want those things we have treasured. We hope that we can pass on safely what we received from our own Grandparents. We wonder what the future holds for us and for those who have been part of our lives. There are some wise people who seem to know and they say that when you do the dying, you aren't there, you are already busy choosing where you go from here! You, the apparently dead and gone will be facing major decisons!! They, the wise, like Socrates say that you may choose to go back to the world you have left or you might choose a totally new life. If you are drawn back to your old life, you should remember that what we think was perfect in that life, was in fact rather flawed. Parenthood presented not only the perfect new baby, it meant worry about schools, health and morals. It kept us awake at night! That lovely garden which we tended had outbreaks of carrot fly, frost, drought and tomatoes which ripened when we were away. We still think in an unreasonable and dotty way that going backwards might be the best option. The wise say that it isn't, they say go go go for freedom from repetition and I say that meditation is the best way to do this!

Lee Kuan Yew could, you can too wherever you are

Grandpa and I are travelling in the Far East!!! Singapore and Thailand have been our home for nearly three weeks.  We have had the pleasure of family, the pleasure of grandchildren, the pleasure of Christmas, the pleasure of presents and the pleasure of food.  We are literally soused in the pleasure of holiday and now we are soaked in sun oil, salty from the sea and feel like a very expensive packet of crisps.  

Lee Kuan Yew

Father Laurence Freeman OSB

And what you are wondering has happened to our meditation?  Well it is alive and pretty well really and the reason is this.  We had an extraordinary bit of luck in meeting a meditating person in Singapore who had an extraordinary tale to tell and this is it.  He and his wife meditated, they were Catholics and had met Father Laurence Freeman.  He, Peter Ng worked closely with Lee Kuan Yew, the long time Prime Minister of Singapore who is credited with taking Singapore from a third world country to a leading first world economic and thriving nation.  Lee Kuan Yew died last year but in his last years, despite being agnostic, he took on the discipline offered by Christian Meditation.  You can hear him in conversation with Father Laurence by clicking on the link.  The striking thing about this conversation is that it was his extremely clear mind and enlightened thinking which made meditation reasonable.  You can also hear Peter Ng speaking about introducing Lee Kuan Yew to meditation

Peter Ng and Lee Kuan Yew meditated in Singapore and when they travelled so we thought we could take time off from our two weeks of pleasure and meditate twice a day too.

Enjoy the film, we did!

Ambition and Spiritual Life

Dr Eve Poole

Jeremy Sinclair

Eve Poole was one of a panel of speakers addressing this question at Just this Day in London in November.  Click on her name or her picture to hear what she had to say.  She also has a live journal, a blog, Eve's Commonplace which is a marvellous window onto a well used life. The other speakers, Jeremy Sinclair and Rosalind Wyatt are also available to listen to via You Tube, just click on their names and hey presto you may learn more about where ambition fits into spiritual life or you may, like me, end up questioning your own life, its spiritual aspect and where ambition sits within that reality.  I have come to think that ambition is just a name for the creative driving force

Rosalind Wyatt with someone who recognises creativity!

which is part of every being and part of what makes them particular.  Eve is a wonder, a young woman with charm and intelligence and with many interests and talents.  The world has been charmed by her and no wonder.  She uses that special charm to connect with people in an easy way and then to simplify what they need to hear, what they need to be able to understand and helps them to realise their own ambitions in an ethical manner.  That to me is what she must have been made for by the Creator who is the One and only one who knows what and who the world is going to need.  Listen to her and you will smile and come away a bit clearer about what ambition might be. Jeremy Sinclair is interesting too.  Admitting to knowing that he wanted to be successful, he explained that success is perhaps just wanting to do things well, to do a thing as well as you are able to.  You can find out whether he has done that by finding out who he is!  That is your Christmas test!
Rosalind Wyatt is an artist and when she talks, you are right with her at the end of her pen or her brush or then her needle and you feel the way that ambition has taken her to create works which are beautiful, careful and which reveal the fulness of human nature.  You can find out about her and what she does by listening to her recent interview 

I have just listened to these three again and what I hear is an expression of each speaker,  an expression of spirit, an expression of the ambition of the One we call God.  He or She didn't put us here to do nothing, he made human beings in his own image to do the best they could for one another and to use every inch of their creative talent to do it with.  Besides for which he made us able to smile and to make others smile too so even if you aren't a chief executive or a brilliant artist or musician, you have the ability to smile and to make others smile too.  Go on, you know you can and you probably know you should.

Being happy just by yourself

Do you think you could be happy without your own place to live?  Do you think you could be happy without a family?  Do you think you could be happy without what you think your life is?
Here is Isabelle, a modern day renunciate with the Brahma Kumaris.  She looks happy and she is happy and when you meet her you are happy too.  Hear why she is happy and why giving up the things of the world doesn't matter to her by clicking on this link.  She is leading a meditation and reflection on the meaning of being a soul right in the centre of London at St Martin-in-the-Fields.