This morning as I walked along the lakeshore, I fell in love with a wren and later in the day with a mouse the cat had dropped under the dining room table. In the shadows of an autumn evening, I fell for a seamstress still at her machine in the tailor’s window, and later for…
We are living in interesting times. There are a lot of challenges. However, it strikes me that as a country and as a human race there has never been more opportunity for positive transformation. This is the same in our practice, in our lives and in the world – challenge is the catalyst for positive…
The washing never gets done. The furnace never gets heated. Books never get read. Life is never completed. Life is like a ball which one must continually catch and hit so that it won’t fall. When the fence is repaired at one end, it collapses at the other. The roof leaks, the kitchen door won’t…
My heart is full. I write this in a fully mindful and awake state still feeling the buzz of the Members Weekend coursing through my body – it’s an energy thing, not from the coffee I had this morning but it feels similar! and I feel such gratitude flowing out from my lamp-lit heart; the…
Recently I have become aware of activities that I do that become a complete immersion, away from my habitual, incessant thinking patterns. Anything that is powerful enough to enable me to become totally present and not drown in my ruminations about the past, worries about the future and self-criticism comes along like a sigh of…
Life at the moment feels a bit like a dream, with the days falling through me. I have been practicing a lot because we have been facilitating the MSc year end retreat. This is great, as Choden and Kristine are co-facilitating. This means that when I am not teaching myself I get to…
In our mindfulness training we learn how the mind has a tendency to be negative. Rick Hanson calls this a ‘negativity bias’. He explains how negative thoughts stick to the mind like Velcro, and yet positive thoughts slide off like Teflon. Over evolution, our minds were trained to react to threats more than opportunities. Rick…
My dear auntie Jean in London has been sending me photos of rainbows she encounters on her daily walks; rainbows drawn on the pavements, pinned in windows and hung on gates; a spontaneous phenomenal creative response to the personal, local, national and global crisis we find ourselves in. The images themselves appear as symbols of…
I hope that you are all faring well as we settle into our fifth week of lockdown. I am curious about how adaptable we humans are and how many of us have now settled into a new more limited routine of life, with its pleasures and hardships. I have had many unexpected lessons in impermanence…