In this world of the spiritually blind…

After Shakyamuni’s enlightenment, his first words were to someone called Upaka, to whom he said ‘In this world of the spiritually blind I go to Benares to bang the drum of the deathless.’  All of us – all humans – as we grow from infancy look in the mirrror of our parents, and take on board pictures of who they are and who we believe we are in relation to them. Rather like going to the opticians for an eye test, we end up with many lenses colouring our vision without even knowing it, we just take it for granted. Read More

‘God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer….”

In this time of an almost complete lack of leadership in the UK, I found myself listening to Robert Kennedy’s speeches : he is marvellously articulate; he quoted these words on the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination, from his favourite poet, Aeschylus: “God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”
It takes a lot of humility and courage to realise that we suffer because we are looking at the world through a viewpoint we experience as ‘me’ Read More

Learning to bear the beams of love….

William Blake writes that “we are put on earth a little space,. That we may learn to bear the beams of love…”
I have had times in meditation when the blinkers of the ‘mind-forged manacles’ (another quote from Blake)  fall away, and felt like a sinner welcomed into heaven, hardly able to believe my luck. This love is always there but we get so wrapped up in our sense of a seperate ‘me’ who believes the world is out there and antithetical to us, that we rarely experience grace. Read More

The Touchstone (By RL Stevenson)

This is a wonderful story by RLS – it points to the clear mirror of the heart we all possess but which is usualy covered over with images and pictures accumulated around a  sense of a seperate ‘me’.

“THE King was a man that stood well before the world; his smile was sweet as clover, but his soul withinsides was as little as a pea. He had two sons; and the younger son was a boy after his heart, but the elder was one whom he feared. It befell one morning that the drum sounded in the dun before it was yet day Read More

The Child’s Dilemma

Fairbairn is one of my heroes  – as a child we have no choice but to greedily eat what our parents put in our mouths. But often we felt poisoned, but because we needed them so badly, it was easier to believe there was something wrong with us, and they must really be perfect.  It can take a long time to understand this situation, to feel our hunger, and dare to STAND our need and not just blindly swallow down what others offer. Read More

Why hope often leads you to frustration

All of us find ourself longing for some kind of fulfilment, which so often seems to be disapointed at every step – since we find ourself already looking through a telescope of what is usually blind hope, we fail to see how much we often sacrifice ourselves on this altar (and alter!) and end up feeling cynical and frustrated. . Aldous Huxley once defined cynicism as someone who wouldnt take yes for an answer…
There is another dimension of being we cannot find by looking that lies right under our own feet, that is available when we can dare to feel disapointment, or sadness – doesnt sound great, but it enables us to stand our need, trust our own perceptions, and deal with the weirdness of Life Read More

Healing – by not going somewhere else!

Therapy can take us on a relentless journey – if we really want to glimpse how we can heal ourselves and others, we are forced to put our trust in the depths of our own heart –  that it contains potentials we have not begun to dream of – but we cannot open this up by trying to get somewhere else.
The following is quoted by Joan Tollifson (herself  an amazingly courageous explorer of our ineffable birthright who was forced to confront Life without a  right hand) – from Joko Beck:

Joko said: “Practice is not about having nice feelings, happy feelings. It’s not about changing, or getting somewhere. That in itself is the basic fallacy. But observing this desire begins to clarify it. Read More

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