When friends go without saying goodbye

I only met Wendy on a couple of occasions. Both times I was amazed by her lightness and her absolute goodness. Teaching meditation means that sometimes people's personal stress comes up for them. Wendy was incredible to have around whenever this happened in a class because clearly here was a lady who had so much more on her plate than most people could even imagine and yet she came through shining. But she always listened with perfect compassion. She was incredible like that.

The saddest thing about most of humanity is that only others can truly see how magnificent we are. We are the last to appreciate our own being for the beauty that it contains. It reminds me to make sure that my loved ones know what a difference they make to my life. I wish in particular that Wendy could have known how deeply she touched my heart and inspired me.

If Wendy has taught me anything it is that we can choose to fill life with goodness and hope and magic and love. The only thing that stops us is ourselves. We are the only ones that see ourselves as not worthy, we are the only ones that see our lives as insignificant. We can make another choice though: we can choose to see ourselves as others see us, we can choose to see ourselves as God sees us.

With perfect love Wendy, fly free.

Just for this moment...

I got inspired to write something after reading a passage from someone complaining that in the 40 years of their meditation practice they hadn’t experienced so much as a peak experience, let alone lasting peace or enlightenment. It made me laugh, really in sadness mixed with amazement because for a long time they have completely missed the point of their practice. They haven’t been meditating. Essentially they’ve been going through the motions because they lost the first principle of meditation: Be innocent in this moment. In doing so, they missed the lasting peace and the enlightenment. See, the searching, the looking, the expecting – all of it hides peace from you. Any kind of searching, wanting or trying puts a big cover over God, even when the searching is noble, even when the trying is for a spiritual result. These things and freedom are mutually exclusive; they cannot exist together. Rather innocence, presence, and contentment are the signposts of God.

All true spiritual practice is the practice of letting go all the habits that take us away from our Self. As we do that in awareness, we are in the presence of Truth. It is the being aware of deep awareness exactly as it is, right now. The peace, the freedom, the joy - all the rewards of meditation come from stopping and getting off the mind train that only knows the future and the past and judgement and comparison. The beauty of a spiritual practice comes from the ever expanding realisation that you can afford to stop, you can let go of everything you have been chasing. You find that there is nothing else right now, no one to impress, no such thing as fame or fortune, no reputation or image or possession or future to secure, no past to defend, no argument to win, nothing but stillness to rest in. The relief is amazing. It’s just like I used to feel in the school holidays, I’d wake up in the morning and feel this contraction: “Oh no- I have to go to school” followed quickly by this release and joy as I realised I didn’t have to go anywhere, that there was nothing to be done right now.

By the way, this resting and contentment and allowing has nothing to do with holidays – it is completely internal. It has nothing to do with the circumstances of life. You still have things to do, decisions to make, responsibilities, commitments, you still have to wake up on a Monday morning and go to work, if that’s what you choose to do. But you are living life from a completely different place, one of joy, lightness and clarity. Those of you who practice everyday know what I’m talking about. The day is the same, except you are not. In this experience of internal rest you are active in that you feel inspired to do things, you have desires and you carry out your plans, but in this state of true non-attachment you simply are not concerned by the ups and downs or as to the outcome, because you are so present.

This moment is full of potential. Being completely full of presence is not abandoning hope and your dreams, it does not mean that you stop living, that you stop caring, that you stop feeling. It is being completely real, completely authentic to yourself without the madness that has taken over most of the world. It is stopping being what you think you should be, what you think is appropriate, it is stopping guessing what the other person wants to hear and instead it is accepting You, exactly as you are right now, saying and doing and being You. In this way the potential of you is limitless, released from the very box you put yourself in.

So if peace or happiness or freedom from limitation is important to you then rest in this moment. Pretend that this moment is the only moment there is. Allow yourself this moment, be attentive to your own presence and attend only to the needs of this moment. When you use your meditation techniques, be aware and be content, allow the experience to unfold as it will. Practice meditation not to get anything, but to lose your fixation on judgement, on the past and the future, on the shoulds. The experience you are having is the only one possible to you right now. You don’t have to lose yourself in it the experience, but you don’t have to deny it either. Instead go beyond it. Go beyond the chaos of the pushing and pulling and rest in the Self, free of expectation, free of neediness, free of loss, free of heartache, free to be whoever you are right now.

Surrender - part 2

A bunch of meditation teachers made a recording recently of what their experience of surrendering everything - every thought, feeling and action - to the Stillness was like. For me it was amazing. It reminded me on so many different levels of playing with surrender myself.

I hadn't realised it, but there was a subtle effort to secure an experience I thought I wanted. I know the silence well, but there was a lack of contentment in that experience. There was expectation that somehow, sometime (hopefully soon!), my experience was going to change, get bigger, get more profound. This was frustrating because the experience I was having in any given moment rarely met with expectation.

Instead, it's amazing the difference in allowing the silence to be exactly as it is right now. To simply rest in whatever is there. Instantly my experience of stillness and of life became so soft and embracing. There is an immediate quiet joy and gratitude for my experience and for my life. I love it.

It's also so much more obvious to me now how surrender is one big game of seeing how innocently I can approach every moment. To see the mind setting up expectations and play with simply ignoring them.

I feel so grateful for the ease of this. As opposed to rigidly trying to be still, relaxing and allowing the stillness to be is so much easier and graceful. So much better than forcing and controlling.

I love it!