If you are interested in funereal matters only, this post may not be useful to you; it is intended for those who are thinking about mindfulness meditation. As my reader may have noticed, for me the two are very closely related.
So instead of rambling on as usual, allow me to list for you some resources that might prove useful should you wish to embark upon some mindfulness training; even if you have already done so, there may be some additional resources for you in this list.
I'll start with a quote from Wikipedia: "Jon Kabat-Zinn (born June 5, 1944) is Professor of Medicine Emeritus and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn was a student of Zen Master Seung Sahn and a founding member of Cambridge Zen Center. His practice of yoga and studies with Buddhist teachers, led him to integrate their teachings with those of Western science. He teaches mindfulness meditation as a technique to help people cope with stress, anxiety, pain and illness."
(Now don't you go into a spin because there's stuff there about Zen; mindfulness meditation as it's usually taught has no religious content unless you want it to, and I'm not going to argue with you yet about the meaning of the word "spiritual." JK-Z's achievement is to draw from a Buddhist tradition something from which I would imagine just about any belief system can benefit from. His work is pragmatic, medically-orientated and - inspirational. And he has not set himself up as some tedious self-appointed guru with a non-existent degree from an offshore university and the only answer to life, the universe and traffic congestion. I expect you know the sort of people I mean.)
So:
J K-Z's big book is "Full Catastrophe Living." That's the big coursebook, I understand, aimed at people with depression or chronic pain. I've not read it.
I have read his "Wherever You Go, That's Where You Are," and it seems to me an excellent starting point - it has been for many people, I'd guess.
"The Mindful Way Through Depression" is a team effort, and a very high-powered team it is, including J K-Z, and a leading UK proponent, Prof. Mark Williams, Oxford University. The other two authors look like hot shots, too. It includes a CD of meditation guidance. I would expect it to be interesting and helpful even if you are not (clinically) depressed, and I'm about to start it myself, despite being irritatingly cheerful most of the time
There is a fair-sized mountain of books about meditation. The few I've looked at seem to me pretty useless unless you are already half-way to being a Mighty Serene Being, Zen Master, Mindful Sage etc already. As I've noted before, they generally say "Sit quietly with your legs crossed." (Ouch! I'm out of here already...) "Empty your mind..." (But if I could do that, I wouldn't need your book, O guru!) The above books are very much not like that.
Matthieu Ricard's background is the upper echelons of the French scientific establishment but his current way of life is that of a Buddhist monk. He has written a book simply called "On Meditation," which I want to read, having heard him discussing it on the radio. I have read his book called "Happiness," and that might be useful to you. I'm not with every word he writes, but so what? We're magpies, picking up the shiny bits that help us, wherever we find them.
Susan Blackmore is a remarkable woman, an expert on consciousness, with a powerful interest in the findings of neuroscience, and a desire to see how much of them she can merge with her exploration of Buddhist meditation techniques. Her book "Ten Zen Questions" is, in the best sense, demanding. You do not have to be interested in Buddhist doctrine as such to get a lot from it. Her little book "Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction" I found fascinating, though it's not directly about mindfulness. She is a heroic explorer of her own head, and therefore of yours and mine.
You can get meditation CDs by J K-Z, and no doubt other mindfulness proponents too. They are very helpful - essential, I'd say, if you can't get to a course near you.
But your best bet is probably a course, with a real live tutor and interactions with other students. This will probably be doing it, not learning about it, it should be quite demanding and, I hope, very rewarding. The next best thing may be an on-line course that I'm told you can purchase on the "Bemindful" website of the UK's Mental Health Foundation.
But of course our major resource is ourselves, just as we are, today and right here. We simply need some help to experience and see that clearly. I hope the above stuff may help people to do so.
Incidentally, I hope any Buddhists reading this (?) are not offended by my reassurances that this mindfulness business doesn't require you to be a Buddhist. I don't intend to be in the least scornful about those who follow the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, and those who can master the true rigours of Zen meditation training- only of those who pretend to do so, and mislead the rest of us.
As it happens, I've got a lot of time for some strands and aspects of Buddhism, but that's neither here nor there - the point is that JK-Z and colleagues have developed something from Buddhist techniques that is of huge value to people with not the remotest interest in anything they might see as "religious" or "spiritual," and I don't want them to be put off helping themselves because they shy away from religions. It is, of course, of huge value to people with religious beliefs too, Buddhist or whatever.
The other reason for being cautious about the relationship with Buddhism is my experience of a watery sort of Buddhismlite back in the sixties - mindfulness is nothing to do with a cultural veneer of orientalism, a sort of fey wishfulness about chilling out, man, an interest in the mysterious East just because it's not the familiar West. (There may have been - were, I'd say - good reasons for so many young people taking the journey East, actual or metaphorical, in the 60s, but let's not pursue those just now.)
Mindfulness is rapidly gaining ground as a mainstream medical treatment, many doctors now see it as a valid treatment option, and there aren't, apparently, enough properly trained teachers to meet the need. It's also of great value to those of us who are not in distress, but simply want a better balance, more calm, in their thoughts and their lives. And who want something to help them deal with the realisation of their own mortality. Which is about where I came in.
So the books, CDs and online course may help bridge the gap until there's a course with a place near you, and you've managed to put the money aside to enroll (£180 - £200, typically, for an eight to ten week course. I found it worth every little penny. It doesn't suit everyone, but if so, you'll find that out early on - before enrolling, if you get the sort of excellent guidance I got.)
I get no comission out of all this, you know.....
Later today, this post is taking herself off to the Med for some pre-winter sunshine for a couple of weeks, and will once again take up the threads of mindfulness and funerals thereafter. Vaya con whatever dios or nondios you subscribe to. Go with The Flow. Be mindful. May the Force...etc.
Saturday, 11 September 2010
Thursday, 9 September 2010
Our Ineradicable Faults?
In a comment on my last post, Charles referred to what he sees as a fault in himself which he had always seen as ineradicable - a lack of mindfulness, getting carried away by a full heart, that sort of thing. Actually, the people who scare me are those whose hearts never do fill, and who do apalling things with great calmness - but anyway, I want to develop Charles' prompt a bit, because it very much relates to mindfulness practice, and a lot of other things too.
Something a mindfulness course seeks to develop in people is an acceptance of themselves. Here's a paradox, then.We might well join such a course to be different,to move on, to improve, to develop something in ourselves; it may be a relief from pain or depression, a greater calmness and emotional balance, less fear about the ending of life, relief from anxiety in an over-stressed and rushed working life. But then the course tells us - or rather, seeks to develop in us - acceptance of who we are, just as is.
Almost looks like a classic paradox. Remember the sheet of paper which has written on both sides "The statement on the other side of this sheet is untrue"?
I don't think the "change me/accept myself" thing really is a classic paradox as in the example above, unless you bang away at it with your powers of reason. In any case, surely the point about a brain-teasing paradox is that it defies reason - in which faculty I am generally a great believer, incidentally, so I'm not walking away from reason into a comfortable cloud of alternativism for its own sake. I think this self-image puzzle works like this, and it's very simple.
Through guided meditation you can relax the muscle, as it were, of your self-critical attention, and accept your thoughts and feelings just as is. You may also be able to accept people in the session who would normally drive you swiftly towards the exit and a large G&T. So it can help you to be less quickly judgemental about others. Outside of meditation, you will of course sometimes need to exercise both your self-critical muscle and your judgemental muscle in dealing with others. Fotherington-Thomas is not the goal ("I forgive you molesworth for those uncouth words...") or you will get ridden over. But. The practise of mindful meditation creeps up on you somewhat. You may find that you are changing, not by trying with naked willpower at the point of contact, but simply because you are calmer about your self-preceived flaws. You can change youself by accepting yourself just as you are, not by trying to change yourself, or giving up on yourself. So that's the paradox - you change yourself by not trying to change yourself.
Dammit, this stuff sounds so bland when you try to write about it. That's because it's experiential, not very yielding in terms of analytical categories or abstract concepts. But here's an example. Readers of this noble work will know that in my view, trying hard to empty the mind for meditation is like trying to chew your own teeth. The brain's job is thoughts,as long as it's conscious, thoughts in a great long string. So the simple techniques in a mindfulness class help you to hold your mind in one place, as it were, and when, not if, your thoughts start wandering off, you are encouraged to bring them back to that one place (e.g. your breathing, or part of your body, or the act of walking slowly.) Not to fight it or fuss about it - "I must try harder to meditate, I must try harder to.." - but just to return to base, no comment, no self-criticism. If you have to do that a hundred times in ten minutes- there you go, just do it and don't fuss. (That's the hard work bit.)
Little by little, that acceptance works outwards. A young mother practising mindfulness commented that instead of her usual swift, unthinking reaction to her teenage daughter, that sent both of them them off down well-worn routes of argument and recrimination and left her feeling crappy (daughter too, no doubt) she paused just a moment, said something a little different and more thoughtful, and domestic miracles ensued - no row, more constructive outcome, no feeling crappy about herself. That's not about willpower, trying to be different, it's actually about inhabiting the present moment and responding uniquely to it. That's a powerful thing.
The book title that drew me towards mindfulness: "Wherever You Go, That's Where You Are." Very simple. Unavoidably true. I'd add "whoever you are, that's who you are."
There are no ineradicable faults. There are only ways of feeling and behaving. We can change them by accepting them. In any case, a fault is a virtue when the context changes.
Something a mindfulness course seeks to develop in people is an acceptance of themselves. Here's a paradox, then.We might well join such a course to be different,to move on, to improve, to develop something in ourselves; it may be a relief from pain or depression, a greater calmness and emotional balance, less fear about the ending of life, relief from anxiety in an over-stressed and rushed working life. But then the course tells us - or rather, seeks to develop in us - acceptance of who we are, just as is.
Almost looks like a classic paradox. Remember the sheet of paper which has written on both sides "The statement on the other side of this sheet is untrue"?
I don't think the "change me/accept myself" thing really is a classic paradox as in the example above, unless you bang away at it with your powers of reason. In any case, surely the point about a brain-teasing paradox is that it defies reason - in which faculty I am generally a great believer, incidentally, so I'm not walking away from reason into a comfortable cloud of alternativism for its own sake. I think this self-image puzzle works like this, and it's very simple.
Through guided meditation you can relax the muscle, as it were, of your self-critical attention, and accept your thoughts and feelings just as is. You may also be able to accept people in the session who would normally drive you swiftly towards the exit and a large G&T. So it can help you to be less quickly judgemental about others. Outside of meditation, you will of course sometimes need to exercise both your self-critical muscle and your judgemental muscle in dealing with others. Fotherington-Thomas is not the goal ("I forgive you molesworth for those uncouth words...") or you will get ridden over. But. The practise of mindful meditation creeps up on you somewhat. You may find that you are changing, not by trying with naked willpower at the point of contact, but simply because you are calmer about your self-preceived flaws. You can change youself by accepting yourself just as you are, not by trying to change yourself, or giving up on yourself. So that's the paradox - you change yourself by not trying to change yourself.
Dammit, this stuff sounds so bland when you try to write about it. That's because it's experiential, not very yielding in terms of analytical categories or abstract concepts. But here's an example. Readers of this noble work will know that in my view, trying hard to empty the mind for meditation is like trying to chew your own teeth. The brain's job is thoughts,as long as it's conscious, thoughts in a great long string. So the simple techniques in a mindfulness class help you to hold your mind in one place, as it were, and when, not if, your thoughts start wandering off, you are encouraged to bring them back to that one place (e.g. your breathing, or part of your body, or the act of walking slowly.) Not to fight it or fuss about it - "I must try harder to meditate, I must try harder to.." - but just to return to base, no comment, no self-criticism. If you have to do that a hundred times in ten minutes- there you go, just do it and don't fuss. (That's the hard work bit.)
Little by little, that acceptance works outwards. A young mother practising mindfulness commented that instead of her usual swift, unthinking reaction to her teenage daughter, that sent both of them them off down well-worn routes of argument and recrimination and left her feeling crappy (daughter too, no doubt) she paused just a moment, said something a little different and more thoughtful, and domestic miracles ensued - no row, more constructive outcome, no feeling crappy about herself. That's not about willpower, trying to be different, it's actually about inhabiting the present moment and responding uniquely to it. That's a powerful thing.
The book title that drew me towards mindfulness: "Wherever You Go, That's Where You Are." Very simple. Unavoidably true. I'd add "whoever you are, that's who you are."
There are no ineradicable faults. There are only ways of feeling and behaving. We can change them by accepting them. In any case, a fault is a virtue when the context changes.
Saturday, 28 August 2010
Nursing, living and dying - Ian Miller, mindfulness and Flow
You might think that meditation practice is a long way from the urgency, mess and pain of a busy emergency department in a large hospital. What Ian has done, it seems to me, is to show us that to survive and do a good job in such an environment, you need total immersion in what you are doing. If you can't achieve a relaxed concentration on this task, and then the next and then...but let the urgency of the whole situation throw you off balance, you will a) probably make mistakes (and we don't much like the idea of mistakes in A&E, do we, people - especially not if it's us groaning on that trolley!) b) burn out under the huge stress of it all and get cynical and exhausted. He writes of vertical workers, and horizontal workers. If you want to find out what he means, do visit his blog.
Ian tells us that "Mindfulness is a way of learning to relate directly to unfolding experience."
That doesn't tell us how to get there, but it sums up neatly enough the way being mindful enables you to be totally absorbed in the reality of what is happening in front of you, as opposed to letting in the dozens of possibly relevant but not in the least helpful thoughts that are just waiting to fragment your clarity of awareness.
Anyone who has consulted a really good medic will have felt that calm concentration, as they watch you, listen to you, and think/take in absolutely nothing but the you that is in front of them at that moment. Such people are likely to be healers, not just doctors and nurses. They can allow the reality of a patient to absorb their consciousness.
Ian then relates this necessary mindfulness to a concept new to me - Flow.
I quote from his website again: "The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term Flow to describe this state of engaged activity. Total immersion in the present moment produces an energized focus in which the doer of the action and the action itself merge. Time may condense or expand, tasks are accompanied by feelings of calm or joy, complex activities seem effortless."
At this point, I began to get unmindfully excited. Things connected, bells rang.
Great writers describe the way a story sometimes seems to take over and almost write itself; they talk of a character that simply walks off and does what s/he wants on the page. (They also point out that is not always, or even often, like that!)
If you enjoy jazz, you will know that sometimes the same musician can be improvising nicely enough, other times the instrument seems to be playing them and the music is in a different league (one said to me that it was better than sex when this happened - well, he'd know...)
If you enjoy cricket, you will have seen some of that quality in Broad's batting yesterday and today - great batting looks unhurried and entirely right, whereas in fact I believe that the delivery from a fast bowler leaves you, when it bounces, about 1/3 of a second to decide what stroke to play - except that's not a decision, it's the whole highly trained person responding instantly and in totality to the situation before them. "Time may condense or expand..." A great goal in football - ditto. Good defenders suddenly go into slow motion around the striker, there's only one place for the ball to go, and it does.
Great dancers make it look easy. They seem to hover for a moment. They don't reach an arm up, their limbs seem to float. "The doer of the action and the action itself merge." Can we tell the dancer from the dance, the musician from the music?
Of course these people are "technically" masters, disciplined and fantastically hard-working - but that alone can't do it. A classical musician once told me there is no such thing as "pure technique," that doesn't make music, it is necessary for music to happen - which is a live thing. What does do it, is mindfully addressing the moment, it's the Flow.
Most of us aren't masters at anything, but we can develop our mindfulness, we can allow the Flow to develop in less complex and challenging circumstances.
Maybe people who can manage a degree of mindfulness in life and work, maybe people who have at least sometimes felt the Flow, can face their own mortality more calmly, live more fully, with awareness of death enriching rather than constricting their lives?
Calmness is catching, just as panic is - you can see that in any stressful situation. Mindfulness also enables fellow-feeling and compassion (more of this big idea later.) A degree of mindful calm is a valuable thing in a funeral ceremony, especially if something goes wrong - the bereaved family will forgive you anything except getting in a state. They need your calm. How much more important this must be in a busy A&E. How wonderful it is when we read of it in a disaster situation, where a calm centre saves lives (though sadly, not always that of the unselfish and calm person him/herself)
More another time on how to develop this much-vaunted mindfulness. because when the pressure is on, it's a bit late then suddenly to decide to be mindful!
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
mindfulness in a funeral
It is, I would guess, ill-advised to enter a mindfulness meditation when one is ministering at a funeral...but mindfulness is not, I think, entirely about meditation practice itself. It is also about understanding, feeling, in a particular way about - well, you know, time, life, death, mortality, the present, and so on...
At some point during a funeral ceremony, I usually find myself up front on my own looking at a coffin, whether it is by a graveside and people are arranging themselves whilst the undertaker does a bit of business with ropes and bearers, or at a crem whilst people are still filing in. I could look elsewhere, but that would look odd, and I don't want to.
If I get it right, it's a moment of strong focus on NOW. There's usually some tension underneath it. (will Sam in the control room fade the music as requested? or - if it rains and blows as hard as it did on the way here, will anyone hear anything and how soon can I get them back under cover without indecent haste? or - I didn't know X was going to say anything, I hope we don't overshoot, it's a busy morning at Slime Green Crematorium - you get the picture)But that focus, a hard look at the coffin for a minute or two, can cause all that to drop away. "What if" evaporates, "should I have..." dissolves, "when should I..." disintegrates, and I'm left with a powerful feeling of the present moment in a sort of super-reality. Hard to explain. Daresay other celebrinisters have similar experiences.
So it's not a meditation. I think it comes from a changed view of the importance of the right here right now, the need not to worry about anything else - and it's a real help, I'm grateful for it.
At some point during a funeral ceremony, I usually find myself up front on my own looking at a coffin, whether it is by a graveside and people are arranging themselves whilst the undertaker does a bit of business with ropes and bearers, or at a crem whilst people are still filing in. I could look elsewhere, but that would look odd, and I don't want to.
If I get it right, it's a moment of strong focus on NOW. There's usually some tension underneath it. (will Sam in the control room fade the music as requested? or - if it rains and blows as hard as it did on the way here, will anyone hear anything and how soon can I get them back under cover without indecent haste? or - I didn't know X was going to say anything, I hope we don't overshoot, it's a busy morning at Slime Green Crematorium - you get the picture)But that focus, a hard look at the coffin for a minute or two, can cause all that to drop away. "What if" evaporates, "should I have..." dissolves, "when should I..." disintegrates, and I'm left with a powerful feeling of the present moment in a sort of super-reality. Hard to explain. Daresay other celebrinisters have similar experiences.
So it's not a meditation. I think it comes from a changed view of the importance of the right here right now, the need not to worry about anything else - and it's a real help, I'm grateful for it.
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
A Painful Funeral
A crem funeral followed a few days later by the burial of the ashes in a little wooden casket.The crem was no worse - and certainly no better - than most of them, and the burial site was in a de-consecrated churchyard in a very beautiful position, mountains behind, salt marsh in front, huge skies. Ancient beautiful little church. A favourite place of he who had died, since childhood.
Why do I single it out? Because the young man who'd died was in his late thirties, and his partner was also a young man in his late thirties. Hardly unique, but I had seldom seen such raw grief. The family of he who had died were neither rich nor sophisticated, not particularly eloquent, and united in their grief with the surviving partner.
The funeral was a "good" one, insofar as the big and important things were said, the death was faced and directly addressed, the life was, as we like to say, celebrated.
I remember one critic of the life of the composer Benjamin Britten saying that homosexual men were in fact would-be pederasts who sublimated their desires by accepting as second-best a relationship with an adult male (the arrested development/neurosis view, one might say.) Others not entirely sympathetic to a tolerant view of homosexuality have written of it as though it were simply a matter of promiscuity and easy satisfaction. (Underneath this view may lie a prejudice that homosexuality is not the "real" thing.) And it might be natural to think that a tolerant view of sexuality and gender is more likely amongst city-dwelling middle-class well-educated people than amongst working-class small-town not especially well-educated people.
All this crew, on the evidence of this funeral, were talking nonsense.
I have seldom seen such pain, from the partner every bit as much as the family.
I'm straight, as it happens and for what that's worth, so this isn't a heart-felt personal appeal, based on my own sense of identity, for enlightened views of gay sexuality.
Except - perhaps it is. I speak as I find.
I have seldom seen such raw grief at a funeral.
Why do I single it out? Because the young man who'd died was in his late thirties, and his partner was also a young man in his late thirties. Hardly unique, but I had seldom seen such raw grief. The family of he who had died were neither rich nor sophisticated, not particularly eloquent, and united in their grief with the surviving partner.
The funeral was a "good" one, insofar as the big and important things were said, the death was faced and directly addressed, the life was, as we like to say, celebrated.
I remember one critic of the life of the composer Benjamin Britten saying that homosexual men were in fact would-be pederasts who sublimated their desires by accepting as second-best a relationship with an adult male (the arrested development/neurosis view, one might say.) Others not entirely sympathetic to a tolerant view of homosexuality have written of it as though it were simply a matter of promiscuity and easy satisfaction. (Underneath this view may lie a prejudice that homosexuality is not the "real" thing.) And it might be natural to think that a tolerant view of sexuality and gender is more likely amongst city-dwelling middle-class well-educated people than amongst working-class small-town not especially well-educated people.
All this crew, on the evidence of this funeral, were talking nonsense.
I have seldom seen such pain, from the partner every bit as much as the family.
I'm straight, as it happens and for what that's worth, so this isn't a heart-felt personal appeal, based on my own sense of identity, for enlightened views of gay sexuality.
Except - perhaps it is. I speak as I find.
I have seldom seen such raw grief at a funeral.
Tuesday, 17 August 2010
Cropredy Mindfulness
I've been drying out, over the last couple of days, after my visit to Fairport Convention's Cropredy Festival, at the village of that name near Banbury. (If those names mean nothing to you, other perhaps than "Banbury," I'll add a brief paragraph at the end of this post to whet your appetite...)
The Met Office were heroically incomepetent on this occasion, forecasting light showers and dry periods Thursday, and cloudy with sunny spells for Friday and Saturday. In fact, the showers were heavy and frequent right through the weekend, which made many of us cross because we came underprepared. On Saturday night there was a torrential downpour complete with lightning. The site turned muddy and a bit squalid (though nothing like Glasto mudbaths of yore.)It really would help if all us peace and love newagers stopped dropping litter into the mud.. but that's another story.
Festivals are a strange and interesting environment to me, but I'll get to the point soon, so for now, just to say that the intense throng (only 20,000, but a small arena), the evil weather, and middle-class late-middle-aged neuroses about the best time to visit the chemical toilets, (really not so bad, comparatively speaking) how to keep relatively clean in the mud, how to eat something nice that didn't cause repeat visits to aforesaid loos,anxiety over the integrity of the tent, combined to produce in your reporter a fine mix of tension and exhilaration.
How to maintain a degree of balance and calm, so as to get the most from this event?
Mindfulness.
Not easy in this context, but I can report a couple of modest successes. One brief period where I managed to feel entirely in the present moment, in my tent, at a safe distance from Rick Wakeman - only about five or ten minutes, trying to think only of my breathing, bringing my thoughts back every time they strayed. Seemed to help a bit.
Another moment: after a splendid breakfast at the village hall (what lovely people)I wandered into the large and beautiful old church and sat down. As my regular reader will know, I am not a Christian, but one would have to be exceptionally insensitive not to find in such a place an inherited calm, the result of centuries of ritual, spirituality, tranquil thought. It was not difficult to be present and undistracted in there. Not for long, though - a little girl came in with her dad, she just wanted to see what was inside. All fine. I didn't feel like shutting these people out, so "hello," and on with the day.
A different moment - the excitement of being close to Bellowhead at full throttle. Totally absorbing, and in a sense entirely present, but not the reduction of thought and feeling that you get from mindful meditation. So - a different sort of presentness.(Have you seen them? Dangerously good, brilliantly theatrical, unique.)
Lastly, in the middle of what to me was, I'm afraid, a horrible "Celtic" rock "opera" (sorry boys) about King Arthur - the storm and rain smote us. Just when I was deciding that I would never attend another outdoor festival, and wishing all heavy rock guitarists eternal incarceration in sound-proof rooms, IT happened with my doing almost nothing: instead of grumbling about what should be/might have been/won't be/wasn't, I was there, not caring about what might happen, not categorising or assessing the experience, just being there, with these people, now. I held on to that for a bit. It felt like freedom to me.
Then the Arthurians cleared off, Fairport were left to their own excellent devices, we had "Matty Groves," "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" (I get closer to tears with that as the years go by, a moment of finely-wrought sentiment) and finally and forever, "Meet On The Ledge."
Brief moments of mindfulness that enriched the weekend and helped me to get the most from it. Not the regular meditation set-up, just the best I could do on the hoof. It still helped.
I'll try to write abit more about this business of being in the present, another time.
Note: Fairport Convention - the band that more or less started the "electric folk" or "folk rock" genre. Many lineups down the years, and some truly exceptional talents (Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Simon Nicoll, Daves Pegg and Swarbrick)they can play and have played almost anything. "Folk" is a pallid term for this music. They have run a festival in the Oxfordshire village of Cropredy, near Banbury,for thirty years. They have an excellent relationship with the village. (The festival originated in a scratch gig at the village fete - two of the band lived there then.) The festival is limited in size, very well-organised, has a very wide range of music (this year brilliant jazzer Martin Taylor, young traditional guns Breabach from Scotland, singer/songwriter Thea Gilmour, Mabon from Wales, Status Quo for goodness' sake, Little Feat, Fairport themselves etc etc - so not really just a folk festival but plenty of folk, folkesque and traditionally-derived music. Very good value at £85 or so. No or very little crime, and so far as I could see, no drunken fights etc. A powerful tradition of meeting up with friends year after year. If you don't want to camp, you can B&B in banbury. If you've a narrowboat, it's on a canal. Excellent and very large bar - Wadsworth's 6X. Nicely sloping arena field. If you want to know more, go to FC's website. If you're already bored - sorry. Even funerealists and would-be meditators have to let their hair down sometimes...
The Met Office were heroically incomepetent on this occasion, forecasting light showers and dry periods Thursday, and cloudy with sunny spells for Friday and Saturday. In fact, the showers were heavy and frequent right through the weekend, which made many of us cross because we came underprepared. On Saturday night there was a torrential downpour complete with lightning. The site turned muddy and a bit squalid (though nothing like Glasto mudbaths of yore.)It really would help if all us peace and love newagers stopped dropping litter into the mud.. but that's another story.
Festivals are a strange and interesting environment to me, but I'll get to the point soon, so for now, just to say that the intense throng (only 20,000, but a small arena), the evil weather, and middle-class late-middle-aged neuroses about the best time to visit the chemical toilets, (really not so bad, comparatively speaking) how to keep relatively clean in the mud, how to eat something nice that didn't cause repeat visits to aforesaid loos,anxiety over the integrity of the tent, combined to produce in your reporter a fine mix of tension and exhilaration.
How to maintain a degree of balance and calm, so as to get the most from this event?
Mindfulness.
Not easy in this context, but I can report a couple of modest successes. One brief period where I managed to feel entirely in the present moment, in my tent, at a safe distance from Rick Wakeman - only about five or ten minutes, trying to think only of my breathing, bringing my thoughts back every time they strayed. Seemed to help a bit.
Another moment: after a splendid breakfast at the village hall (what lovely people)I wandered into the large and beautiful old church and sat down. As my regular reader will know, I am not a Christian, but one would have to be exceptionally insensitive not to find in such a place an inherited calm, the result of centuries of ritual, spirituality, tranquil thought. It was not difficult to be present and undistracted in there. Not for long, though - a little girl came in with her dad, she just wanted to see what was inside. All fine. I didn't feel like shutting these people out, so "hello," and on with the day.
A different moment - the excitement of being close to Bellowhead at full throttle. Totally absorbing, and in a sense entirely present, but not the reduction of thought and feeling that you get from mindful meditation. So - a different sort of presentness.(Have you seen them? Dangerously good, brilliantly theatrical, unique.)
Lastly, in the middle of what to me was, I'm afraid, a horrible "Celtic" rock "opera" (sorry boys) about King Arthur - the storm and rain smote us. Just when I was deciding that I would never attend another outdoor festival, and wishing all heavy rock guitarists eternal incarceration in sound-proof rooms, IT happened with my doing almost nothing: instead of grumbling about what should be/might have been/won't be/wasn't, I was there, not caring about what might happen, not categorising or assessing the experience, just being there, with these people, now. I held on to that for a bit. It felt like freedom to me.
Then the Arthurians cleared off, Fairport were left to their own excellent devices, we had "Matty Groves," "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" (I get closer to tears with that as the years go by, a moment of finely-wrought sentiment) and finally and forever, "Meet On The Ledge."
Brief moments of mindfulness that enriched the weekend and helped me to get the most from it. Not the regular meditation set-up, just the best I could do on the hoof. It still helped.
I'll try to write abit more about this business of being in the present, another time.
Note: Fairport Convention - the band that more or less started the "electric folk" or "folk rock" genre. Many lineups down the years, and some truly exceptional talents (Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Simon Nicoll, Daves Pegg and Swarbrick)they can play and have played almost anything. "Folk" is a pallid term for this music. They have run a festival in the Oxfordshire village of Cropredy, near Banbury,for thirty years. They have an excellent relationship with the village. (The festival originated in a scratch gig at the village fete - two of the band lived there then.) The festival is limited in size, very well-organised, has a very wide range of music (this year brilliant jazzer Martin Taylor, young traditional guns Breabach from Scotland, singer/songwriter Thea Gilmour, Mabon from Wales, Status Quo for goodness' sake, Little Feat, Fairport themselves etc etc - so not really just a folk festival but plenty of folk, folkesque and traditionally-derived music. Very good value at £85 or so. No or very little crime, and so far as I could see, no drunken fights etc. A powerful tradition of meeting up with friends year after year. If you don't want to camp, you can B&B in banbury. If you've a narrowboat, it's on a canal. Excellent and very large bar - Wadsworth's 6X. Nicely sloping arena field. If you want to know more, go to FC's website. If you're already bored - sorry. Even funerealists and would-be meditators have to let their hair down sometimes...
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
A Few Non-Definitive Notes on Mindfulness
Preamble: Earlier in this young blog's life, it was mostly about funerals good and less good, undertakers, attitudes towards death and funerals, and it often revolved around "The Good Funeral Guide," that fine work. It attracted excellent and helpful comments from a particular circle. Now it's more about mindfulness, for a while at least, and the comments have fallen away somewhat (partly because it's holiday season, even for Charles!)although it's still getting plenty of hits, relatively speaking. I'll definitely return to funereal matters again and from time to time. Meantime your comments are always welcome, whether we agree or not, but today? today we have a bit more mindfulness. Last time: what it isn't and why I was drawn to it, today: a little on what it is.
First, please help me and yourself by stripping away from the word "meditation" all associations with trying to be coool, looking different, scoring points by being in touch with the mystic East. Scrub round the patchouli, ditch the beads etc (nothing wrong with them, but you get my drift.)
Let's just remember the core meaning: meditation is thinking in a concentrated way about something, and staying with it. That's the same in Los Angeles, Leicester or La Rochelle, OK? In Beijing, Bangalore or Bolton. Whether you're wearing a kaftan, a Paul Smith suit or nothing at all. Whether you're lying on your back, sitting on a stool, walking slowly along or even in the goddam lotus posture (how it hurts- can't be doing with it.)
So: mindfulness is a training in meditation techniques.
It teaches you ways of training your mind to stay in the present, and when (not "if") your mind wanders off into memories, fantasies, anxieties about the future, what-ifs etc etc, it encourages you simply to bring your thoughts back to the present. It encourages you not to feel a failure when your thoughts wander, not to worry if you nod off for a bit (no big Zen monk to whack you across the back with a stick - the stick is calm persistence over time.)Just do it by doing it.
No mantras, no scriptures, no formulae.
So you just empty your mind? Well no, that's fantastically difficult without years of training (the Zen monk stuff.) But you encourage your mind just to stay where it is, on the object of your thoughts. These objects vary according to the particular meditation you are engaged in. Often it's your breathing. It might be each part of your body in turn. Etc. Simple, though not necessarily easy.
It warns you against magical expectations, against hoping that something dramatic and sudden will happen.
It encourages you to stop wishing you were different. You are you, it says, that's exactly where you are and who you are, and you can't be anyone else than yourself, so - that's what you work with and on.And if you stay with it, you find you are less pissed off with yourself, less likely to judge yourself unnecessarily harshly when there's no need to.
(This stuff is quite hard to write about, I find, in a general way, it's easier to describe some of the exercises, which I might do another time, though there are many people easily available who can do it better than me, and I'll tell you about them.)
I find - and people who practise mindfulness generally find, if they stay with it - that it helps me avoid slipping into long-established responses and routines that are actually unhelpful, even if they feel good at the time - you know, the instant "that's just typical, you always...." stuff that gets you no-where much except watching a door slam shut.
I find it is calming, and not just when you're meditating.
It's no magic bullet - e.g.I still get beside myself at the selfish, aggressive and dangerous driving that blights our roads, but perhaps a little less often. I still take the wrong things too seriously, but maybe not so frequently and deeply.
I'm emphasising the "no magic bullet/no instant cure/it's hard work" line because we're all a bit tired of marketing bullshit, I think. Acutally, I think mindfulness is a really great thing, and it can, and increasingly is, helping a large number of people, including those with serious difficulties.
If you practise mindfulness, or know about it, do tell me if you agree. If you are new to the idea, do let me know if this is making any sense at all, please!
First, please help me and yourself by stripping away from the word "meditation" all associations with trying to be coool, looking different, scoring points by being in touch with the mystic East. Scrub round the patchouli, ditch the beads etc (nothing wrong with them, but you get my drift.)
Let's just remember the core meaning: meditation is thinking in a concentrated way about something, and staying with it. That's the same in Los Angeles, Leicester or La Rochelle, OK? In Beijing, Bangalore or Bolton. Whether you're wearing a kaftan, a Paul Smith suit or nothing at all. Whether you're lying on your back, sitting on a stool, walking slowly along or even in the goddam lotus posture (how it hurts- can't be doing with it.)
So: mindfulness is a training in meditation techniques.
It teaches you ways of training your mind to stay in the present, and when (not "if") your mind wanders off into memories, fantasies, anxieties about the future, what-ifs etc etc, it encourages you simply to bring your thoughts back to the present. It encourages you not to feel a failure when your thoughts wander, not to worry if you nod off for a bit (no big Zen monk to whack you across the back with a stick - the stick is calm persistence over time.)Just do it by doing it.
No mantras, no scriptures, no formulae.
So you just empty your mind? Well no, that's fantastically difficult without years of training (the Zen monk stuff.) But you encourage your mind just to stay where it is, on the object of your thoughts. These objects vary according to the particular meditation you are engaged in. Often it's your breathing. It might be each part of your body in turn. Etc. Simple, though not necessarily easy.
It warns you against magical expectations, against hoping that something dramatic and sudden will happen.
It encourages you to stop wishing you were different. You are you, it says, that's exactly where you are and who you are, and you can't be anyone else than yourself, so - that's what you work with and on.And if you stay with it, you find you are less pissed off with yourself, less likely to judge yourself unnecessarily harshly when there's no need to.
(This stuff is quite hard to write about, I find, in a general way, it's easier to describe some of the exercises, which I might do another time, though there are many people easily available who can do it better than me, and I'll tell you about them.)
I find - and people who practise mindfulness generally find, if they stay with it - that it helps me avoid slipping into long-established responses and routines that are actually unhelpful, even if they feel good at the time - you know, the instant "that's just typical, you always...." stuff that gets you no-where much except watching a door slam shut.
I find it is calming, and not just when you're meditating.
It's no magic bullet - e.g.I still get beside myself at the selfish, aggressive and dangerous driving that blights our roads, but perhaps a little less often. I still take the wrong things too seriously, but maybe not so frequently and deeply.
I'm emphasising the "no magic bullet/no instant cure/it's hard work" line because we're all a bit tired of marketing bullshit, I think. Acutally, I think mindfulness is a really great thing, and it can, and increasingly is, helping a large number of people, including those with serious difficulties.
If you practise mindfulness, or know about it, do tell me if you agree. If you are new to the idea, do let me know if this is making any sense at all, please!
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