An Irish Blessing

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
May the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

Beannacht
John O'Donoghue

New

There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new.

There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.

Meister Eckhard (1260 - 1328)

Time and routine

In the traditional calendar of the Church this week is the last week of the year, and this evening, as light fades, the New Year begins. This older calendar probably measures time closer to the natural seasons and the rhythm of nature, even though this year, on a beautiful late autumn day like today, winter seems quite far away.

As in many other areas of life, we have a choice as to how to see and use our time. One understanding of time at this period of the year suggests that that there is not enough of it, that we need to hurry up now, that there is a lot to be done to prepare for the holiday celebrations. Today the shops were full with people, as the Christmas shopping festival makes its demands on our use of time. On the other hand, the traditonal church calendar and the way of nature suggests that this is a period to slow down, reflect and restore.

One way or the other we have to find a way to punctuate time and place value on how we use it. Like many I know, I struggle constantly to find a way to nurture my inner life while at the same time juggling time pressure in the face of the various demands of work life. It is easy to commit ourselves to this culture's insistence on product and action until it exhausts us and we forget why we even do them in the first place. We tell ourselves that things are too hectic and that we need rest. We say that we will do better tomorrow and we do not.

One way of staying grounded in the face of our busy lives is the familiarity of routine. Routine connects us to one essential thing, our place in the universe. Morning and evening, season by season, year after year we watch the sun rise and set, beginnings and endings follow on one another inevitably. To establish a routine of meditation allows us resist the demands of more pressing events. The hard fact is that nobody really has time for meditation. The time has to be made. There will always be more something more pressing to do, something more important than the apparantly wasted time of mediation. Our focus is not on how to feel right for meditation, or whether we are too busy or whether we can meditate correctly but to just show up and meditate. Period. How else can we work out the real meaning of time? If it is just for rushing and work, what will we do when work is done? What is the point of leading a useful, successful life, if we do not live a meaningful one?

Thanksgiving

Today is a good day to cultivate the practice of being grateful, noticing what is good in our lives rather than noticing what is wrong. This practice helps us to wake up to all the gifts around us each day, as well as connecting us to a stream of basic goodness inside ourselves and in others. What little things could we be grateful for today?

"We often ask, "What's wrong?" Doing so we invite painful seeds of sorrow to come up and manifest. We feel suffering, anger and depression and produce more such seeds.

We would be much happier if we tried to stay in touch with the healthy, joyful seeds inside of us and around us.
We should learn to ask "What is not wrong?" and be in touch with that".

Thich Nhat Hahn, Peace is Every Step

"Practicing gratitude consistently leads to a direct experience of being connected to life and the realization that there is a larger context in which your personal story is unfolding. Being relieved of the endless wants and worries of your life's drama, even temporarily, is liberating. Cultivating thankfulness for being part of life blossoms into a feeling of being blessed, not in the sense of winning the lottery, but in a more refined appreciation for the interdependent nature of life. It also elicits feelings of generosity, which create further joy. Gratitude can soften a heart that has become too guarded, and it builds the capacity for forgiveness, which creates the clarity of mind that is ideal for spiritual development. The understanding you gain from practicing gratitude frees you from being lost or identified with either the negative or the positive aspects of life, letting you simply meet life in each moment as it rises."

Philipp Moffitt

Fibromyalgia

The widespread pain of fibromyalgia is hard to treat, but a small clinical study published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics shows that meditation may deliver lasting benefits. 39 women with fibromyalgia attended the 8 week MBSR Programme, focusing on deepening mind-body awareness and cultivating acceptance of parts of their condition that they were unable to control. At the end of the Course - and at a three-year follow-up - the women in the Mindfulness group coped better with pain than those whose classes included relaxation training and exercise.

The MBSR Programme included elements on managing stressful situations, which National Fibromyalgia Association senior medical adviser Patrick Wood M.D. considers important. "Fibromyalgia pain is often triggered by some sort of stressor" he says, "so learning to handle stress better can make a big difference in terms of symptom experience"

Feeling positive

The most direct way to boost positivity, says Barbara Fredrickson Ph.D, author of Positivity, is to live in the moment.

If you can be present to what you are experiencing right now, whether you’re walking the dog or eating a sandwich, you’ll dramatically increase your chances of feeling positive. “ Our interpretations of our immediate circumstances define our emotions” she says “and we have a lot more choice about those interpretations than we give ourselves credit for”. Direct your focus to the now (the story your son is telling, a bite of freshly baked bread) she says, and you’ll have less room in your head for distracting, negative thoughts. What’s more, you’ll feel more grounded and resourceful when tackling the many challenges you face.

Sharing

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares".

Henri Nouwen

Fog

The weather changes frequently in Ireland, sometimes we have four seasons in one day. As a result it is the most frequent topic for conversation when you meet people, at the bus stop, or in the supermarket queue. Yesterday saw rains in England which were described as a "once in a thousand year event". We all want good weather, just as we all wish for smooth sailing in the rest of our life. However our experience is that the weather changes, that we call some types good and some types bad, and that there is very little we can do about it.

Today here in France we have thick fog. Like all other types of weather this can be a useful metaphor for the mind. I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that I see things directly and clearly, but rather see them through the filters of my own physical, mental, and emotional conditioning. In the past weeks I have come to see how much energy I spend in preparation for or worrying about future events, many of which never came to pass in the manner imagined. It is as Mark Twain said, "I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened". However that does not prevent me from thinking that I see the clear real horizon in front of me, when in actual fact I am looking through the fog of my own interests and fears. A lot of my energy goes into not what is actually happening in that moment, but into the anticipations of what may happen in the future.

One of the traditional reasons for meditation is the cultivation of clear seeing.

When we practice meditation we are strengthening our ability to be pay attention instead of walking around in the fog that we’re usually in. It is one way of trying to see the world clearly, and not staying lost in the wanderings of our minds, no matter what the changing "weather", changing moods or experiences. We try to sit under all kinds of circumstances, whether we are well or sick, whether we're in a good mood or down, whether we feel our meditation is going well or is completely falling apart. In this way we develop a consistency and see that meditation is rather about staying with ourselves, in this moment. Clear seeing starts with becoming aware of some of the habitual patterns in our thinking, our defense mechanisms, and the ways we rehearse life rather than live it.

"This is an essential discovery: our experience of life and the world is strongly flavoured by our own internal cycles of mental weather - sunny, foggy, rainy, sunny, misty, cloudy - and around and around we go: jealous, proud, anxious, craving, excited, deflated. When we look closely we see that we have deeply ingrained habits of distracting ourselves from the present."

Gaylon Ferguson Natural Wakefulness

More on illness

"Our lives are a mystery of growth from weakness to weakness, from the weakness of the little baby to the weakness of the aged.

Throughout our lives we are prone to fatigue, sickness and accidents.

Weakness is at the heart of each one of us.
Weakness becomes a place of chaos and confusion
if in our weakness we are not wanted;
it becomes a place of peace and joy
if we are accepted, listened to
appreciated and loved.

If we deny our weakness and the reality of death
if we want to be powerful and strong always,
we deny part of our being,
we live an ilusion".

Jean Vanier Becoming Human

“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.”

Helen Keller

Being With

Illness

These days there is a lot in the news about illness and pandemics. Closer to home, I have been aware of persons who are ill, recovering from operations or close to death.

The news of an illness can surface anxieties, including how we are supposed to respond. These can also touch into an unconscious, deeper anxiety about “ceasing to be,”. Like all emotions, that anxiety can actually be useful and instructive. One of the principles of Mindfulness practice is that negative emotion—when we turn toward it rather than run away from it— is itself the path.

We try and work with noticing the initial apparent unpleasantness of negative emotions. This initial feeling tone is somewhat illusory. The actual “taste” of anxiety is in the just a sensation, like the sourness of a lemon; our initial response tells us that it is bad, but actually it’s just what it is. Like a lemon, anxiety has its uses. These strong emotional states can often be our best teachers.

Mindfulness of illness can teach us so much at a deeper, fundamental level. When illness affects us directly it makes us slow down, and be more attentive to the ongoing wonders that we take for granted. We can see the individual moment of our lives through the perspective of new priorities. We can also be challenged in the way we feel the need to be in control of our lives, to constantly hold ourselves up. Illness helps us see that much of life is out of our hands. Ill people need to let themselves be held by others - by the medical staff, by their families, by the support of friends. At times we too need to receive and learn how to be vulnerable. We learn that not all of life can be measured in achievements and outcomes, but often just waiting in silence can be the best work we can do.

"A waiting person is a patient person. The word “patience” means the willingness to stay where we are and life the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there".

Henri Nouwen, A Spirituality of Waiting

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and different medical conditions

Scientists have reported that the MBSR Programme may keep people with HIV healthier longer. A 2009 UCLA study published in the journal Brain, Behaviour and Immunity found that the Course helped people with HIV maintain immunity. In the study, 48 HIV positive people (43 men and 5 women) with T cell counts of between 600 and 700 were assigned to 2 groups, one of which did an 8 week MBSR programme while the other got a basic instruction in meditaion without any encouragement to practice on their own. After 8 weeks the MBSR group saw their T cells remain high while the other groups plummeted. The drop was expected but not the relationship between mindfulness meditation and T count: "The more people practiced" said lead study author David Creswell, Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, "the better their T cells did. That indicates that the more you practice, if you do it on a weekly or daily basis, the better your outcome".

"This study provides the first indication that mindfulness meditation stress-management training can have a direct impact on slowing HIV disease progression," continues Creswell. "The mindfulness program is a group-based and low-cost treatment, and if this initial finding is replicated in larger samples, it's possible that such training can be used as a powerful complementary treatment for HIV disease, alongside medications."

Another area studied is the effectiveness of MBSR in working with stress and other conditions in cancer patients. A study carried out by Linda Carson and Sheila Garland at the University of Calgary looked its impact on a number of mood-related symptoms in those who suffer from cancer. They found that, in general, sleep disturbance was significantly reduced and sleep quality improved. There was also a significant reduction in stress, mood disturbance and fatigue.

More Lessons from Saint Martin

“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.” Jung

The most famous event in the life of Saint Martin occured when he met a poor man begging on a very cold day. The beggar was shaking and blue from the snow but no one reached out to help him. We are told that Martin was overcome with compassion, took off his expensive cloak, cut it in two, and gave the half to the beggar. Later that evening he had a dream in which Jesus was wrapped in the cloak, and said "Here is Martin who has clothed me"

These early stories may be based on historical events but also can have a symbolic meaning. A beggar covered in sores and nearly naked disturbed most of the people who passed by and shunned him. His presence and appearance bothered them. We have many instances today where we are bothered, as individuals or as a society, by those who are different, by strangers, by conflicting views, by different cultural practices. These can give rise to fears and to the desire to exclude these people or their opinions from our sight and our surroundings. In times of fear, such as the current economic climate, it is easy to look to blame others, to find someone outside and project the negativity onto them.

I think the beggar in the story can also be seen as the weak, needy or wounded parts of our inner selves. We can be are uncomfortable with parts of our own life and history. We too can have wounds and injures caused by others or by our own life history.These parts of our lives can become our shadow side - all that has been split off, unrealized or every potential that has never been developed. We all carry with us a histroy of neglected, unrealized, underdeveloped talents and possibilities that can be there, begging for our attention. Or there can be parts of our lives that we are actively afraid of or uncomfortable with, such as addictions, repeating behaviours or powerful emotions which arise from time to time. We feel, at times, panic, anxiety, loneliness, anger and a lack of safety.

Today's fast paced society means that we have plenty of opportunity for looking away, for rushing by. Even more so, we have strong habits of not wanting to experience the unpleasant, or preferring to turn away. Or we can project an underdeveloped or disowned part of yourself onto another person. Consequently the deep message in times like these go by without our full attention. In these difficult moments, it can be easier to avoid looking at our inner world and focus our attention outside ourselves, or perhaps rushing to find a fix for what appears to be wrong.

What Saint Martin's example prompts us to do is firstly not to turn away or rush to fix but to turn towards, to recognize our own suffering, our own wounds and the places that scare us in our lives. He then shows us to extend compassion to our poor and needy selves - after recognizing our wounds and suffering, to respond to them with love. This means not looking away, not seeking distractions when offered the opportunity to be present for our own pain, or the difficult moment that scares us. The practice is to try and be open to all emotions even those that are frightening and to hold them first in simple attention. Understanding and caring for the shadow aspects of our lives is a path towards wholeness.

As Rumi said:
Don't turn your head. Keep looking at the bandaged place.
That's where the light enters you.

Some effects of stress

People prone to negative emotions and stress may be 40% more likely to develop mild cognitive impairment, according to a study in Neurology. The authors hypothesize that a lifetime of stress could adversely affect the part of the brain responsible for regulating memory. To stop stress weakening your brain, researcher Dr Paul Nussbaum, from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, recommends devoting 30 minutes a day to calming activities such as reading or, at a minimum, aim for 10 to 15 minutes of meditation.

Learning from nature

"O to be self-balanced for contingencies,
to confront night, storms, hunger,
ridicule, accidents, rebuffs,
as the trees and animals do"

Walt Whitman

" All things, the grass as well as the trees,
are tender and soft while alive
When dead, they are withered and dried.

Therefore the stiff and the rigid are companions of death
The gentle and the kind are the companions of life"

Lao Tzu

Heading home

"There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outline all our lives".

Josephine Hart

Today I head home for a few days. For an Irish person the sense of connection with Ireland often remains strong, no matter how content they may be in another country. "Going home" evokes thoughts of crossing a familiar threshold, being greeted by friends on familiar ground and repeating well-worn rituals.

However, the word "home" in itself can bring up all sorts of emotions and thoughts. In it memory and imagination are intertwined. It has a crucial role in the construction of our identity and our sense of self. Elements of the self, both internally as we present it to ourselves and externally as we present it to the world, are continually in dialogue with some entities, one of which is the place in which we live. For a lot of people in Geneva, who have moved away from their original home and the community of family and friends who were there, this can give rise to difficulties in defining exactly who they are. There is an ongoing dialogue between what is internally contructed and what is externally imposed.

Often related to this is the sense of belonging which the word "home" calls to mind. It moves beyond our actual experience of our place of origin to a need for continuity and connection with others. Deep down, all of us wish for something to call home, a place to relax without pretension, a place to share a bowl of food at the end of a hard days work. Any reflections on coming home also touch on the sense of being "away" and how acutely we experience that within ourselves. Where is our sense of belonging ultimately coming from?

Saint Martins Day

Today is the Feast of St Martin, traditionally seen as the start of winter. It was a day for feasting, because tomorrow marks the start of forty days preparation for Christmas. These forty days were a time of reflection and a simplification of activity and intake.

This is in marked contrast to the modern emphasis for this period, one of speeding up, of acquiring more, or consuming.

Nature has its periods of growth and its periods of rest. After the glorious colours of this autumn with its clear, brisk days, the quiet of winter begins to sneak up on us. All seems still and peaceful, but it is a necessary part of growth and underneath much is going on. In this, nature becomes for us a symbol and a model in its beckoning our inner life to rest, reflect and simplify. The Cistercian monk Thomas Merton reminded us of the value of "winter, when the plant says nothing.” There is a time for us also to slow down, to say little, to wait and watch.

"Our task is to find a balance, to find a middle way, to learn not to overextend ourselves with extra activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. The key to finding a happy balance in modern life is simplicity"

Sogyal Rimpoche, Glimpse after Glimpse

Desert

In most of the great religious traditions we find references to the desert. The desert is a vast space, where the absence of growth and the presence of silence removes the person from normal distrations and allows them focus on what is really necessary. These traditions see people being purified in the desert and given a new perspective as they prepare for a new phase in their life or in their mission. In the Old Testament, the Prophet Hosea states that God says that "The desert will lead you to your heart where I will speak"

The desert is also an image for our inner selves, seen as a time for deepening or as an symbol for certain periods in our life. We can experience times in our psyche when nothing seems to be moving or growing in us, when we seem barren and dry, or when familiar ways no longer seem to work. We enter our own deserts and are given our own opportunity to re-evaluate what is important and simplify things down to what is really needed.

One basic principle of the inner life is that our problems become the very places where we can discover greater wisdom and love. One Eastern Tradition has a training practice entitled "Making Difficulties into the path". However, prolonged periods of difficulty or dryness, - desert periods - when we are faced with harsh conditions, with a removal of our usual points of reference or with no sustenance, can be very frightening. Our difficulties can seem to be increasing because we no longer hide from them or from ourselves. We can no longer follow our old habits of fantasy, escape or distraction. Consequently, we can become afraid and doubt if we can ever find security or direction. Often we can panic and not trust that our own empty and desolate moments can be moments of deeper growth.

The secret of the desert is learning to lose, to let things go, to simplify. Periods of dryness or darkness are challenges to stay with ourselves, to gently observe. The desert teaches us the importance of slowing down, the need to pay attention and to look more deeply. Difficult periods can be, as the Prophet says, a time for journeying deeper into our own heart.

Now

"The biggest risk is to trust
that these conditions
are all that we need
to be ourselves"

Han Hung

Jung on Patterns

"Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent." Carl Jung

Factors which can lead to stress come from many sources. They can be due to external circumstances such as the current economic situation or being far away from family and familiar supports.

However some factors are internal, such as those caused by the patterns or conditioning we have built up over the years. Thus we may have learnt that we need to push ourselves hard in order to get attention and worth, and this manifests in our life as a compulsive, driven focus on work or success.

There also seems to be patterns that have been passed on to us, unconsciously, when we were very young. Jung's observation prompts us to consider how where and how our caretakers were stuck in their development, and how this can becomes an internal paradigm for us also to be stuck. Jung goes on to say: “The child is so much a part of the psychological atmosphere of the parents that secret and unsolved problems between them can influence its health profoundly. The participation mystique, or primitive identity, causes the child to feel the conflicts of the parents and to suffer from them as if they were its own. It is hardly ever the open conflict or the manifest difficulty that has such a poisonous effect, but almost always parental problems that have been kept hidden or allowed to become unconscious"

Without developing some non-judgmental, gentle capacity for awareness of these influences on our inner life we can fail to transform or integrate them into who we are. Thus even into adulthood, our psyche can remain trapped and unconsciously serve the agendas and the lacks of others. In this way we can fall short of achieving our own potential and end up repeating patterns in relationships and in our work life. An awareness of these repeating schemes seems to frequently happen in mid-life when some of the paradigms adopted up until can fail. It was in this period of our lives that Jung said that we need to "decently go unconscious".

The first step in doing this is to slow down, to make space, to stop the constant flood of information and activity that assails the mind. Making space for art, for meditation, journaling and reflection are all ways we can be kind to ourselves and develop a greater understanding of the factors that lead to our freedom. Slowing down in meditation quickly reveals the first type of internal stressors - our compulsive repeating conditioning - and can perhaps go on to heal some of the unconscious processes which have left their mark on our inner lives.

Living in the Present

"To live each day as if it were your last, you would be trying to remedy all the mistakes you had made,

If you live each day as if it were your first, you are freed from all obligations, all guilt, all the regrets, all the things unsaid."

Katrina Repka & Alan Finger Breathing Space for the Modern Woman

Winnicott and Space

British Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote about the importance of a holding environment for the person when she or he is an infant. This is the psychical and physical space where the infant is protected without knowing he or she is protected. This creates a sense of stability and safety. At that early age the relationship between the infant and its environment (caregiver) is the primary and most important reality. Within the context of this relationship, Winnicott spoke of potential space which serves as a bridge between interior experience and external reality. The function of this space is to be a bridge between the multi faceted realm of interior, or unconscious, experience and the time-and space-bound realm of external, or conscious, experience.

Some studies of the effects of meditation are focusing on its effects on those parts of the brain which are laid down in those crucial early attachment experiences between the child and the caregiver. It may be that sitting in silence revisits and nourishes neural patterns related to a sense of stability and attunement.

"Sitting in meditation is essentially simplifying space. Our daily lives are in constant movement: lots of things going on, lots of people talking, lots of events taking place. In the middle of that, it’s very difficult to sense what we are in our life.

When we simplify the situation, when we take away the externals and remove ourselves from the ringing phone, the television,the people who visit us, the dog who needs a walk, we get a chance to face ourselves…"

Charlotte Joko Beck

Walking the Dog

"One of the best ways to learn to be mindful is to take the dog for a walk. Dogs are always in the moment. They can take the same walk for 10 years and still experience grass in an entirely new way each day. They're not worried about the past ("Why didn't my people give me some of that chicken they had for dinner?") or the future (" I wonder if my people will give me any chicken when we get home?"). All they think about is what is right in front of them: the smell of the grass, the basset hound in the yard next door, the squirrel in the tree across the street"

Alice Domar & Alice Lesch Kelly: Be Happy without being Perfect: How to break free from the Perfection Domination

Supporting others

"Each day we can take the time to quietly hold others in our hearts and wish them well. Any particular day it might include someone who has been helpful or inspiring to us, someone we know who is ill or feeling alone or afraid, someone who is experiencing triumph and joy, or someone we are about to meet with some trepidation. Taking just 10 minutes a day to reflect in this way is a powerful path to transformation"

Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness and the Left Prefrontal Brain

Richard Davidson, one of the world's foremost brain scientists and named in TIME Magazine's as one of the world's top 100 most influential people, has done considerable research on the effect of mindfulness practices on the brain. He specializes in research on brain function related to emotion, both in normal individuals and those with, or at risk of, depression and anxiety.

In his research on brain function in anxiety he noted:

The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally distressed -- anxious, angry, depressed -- the most active sites in the brain are circuitry converging on the amygdala, part of the brain's emotional centers, and the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region important for the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.

By contrast, when people are in positive moods -- upbeat, enthusiastic and energized -- those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity in the left prefrontal cortex.

By taking readings on hundreds of people, Davidson established a bell curve distribution, with most people in the middle, having a mix of good and bad moods. Those relatively few people who are farthest to the right are most likely to have a clinical depression or anxiety disorder over the course of their lives. For those lucky few farthest to the left, troubling moods are rare and recovery from them is rapid....

Davidson found that some Tibetan monks who had meditated for many years had the most extreme values to the left of all the people that he studied.

In research on meditators versus non-meditators, he noted significant increases in left-sided anterior activation in the meditators compared with the nonmeditators, the pattern previously associated with positive affect. He found that regular mindfulness practice over a period of just 8 weeks significantly increased immune system functioning and additionally increased left-brain activity (furthermore, increases in the left-brain functioning directly mediated the increases in immune system functioning.

The overall results from Davidson's mindfulness research provides evidence for the use of meditative practices to reduce negative mood states - and furthermore shows that positive mood states are more likely to become a part of a person's natural state if they meditate regularly.

Facing up to Loss

Traditionally, in the Christian yearly Calendar, November is the month for remembering those who have died.The roots of this tradition are probably found in the basic human awareness of the approach of winter and the shortening of the days. As well as reminding us of the impermanence of all things, including our health and life, it helps us reflect on the other losses which we face at times in our lives, such as when faced with change, or sickness or having to move. The most basic practice in these moments is to be aware of the feelings these losses provoke and not to run from them.

"On some basic yet very deep level all of us feel fundamentally alone, and until we face this directly, we will fear it. Most of us will do almost anything to avoid this fear. Many, when faced with the fear of aloneness, get extra busy, or try to find some other escape. Ultimately, however, the willingness to truly feel the fear of aloneness and loss is the only way to transcend it. It’s also the only way to develop intimacy with others, because genuine intimacy can’t be based on neediness or on the fear of being alone."

Ezra Bayda

Pause

Today, Sunday, is a Day of Rest. There is a lot of wisdom in the religious traditions which set aside times and rhythms of rest. The Bible tells us that God rested on the seventh day, and even allowing for the anthropomorphic nature of the description, we can see that this contains a deep truth. It is clear that God did not rest because of tiredness, but to show that a rhythm of work and pausing is somehow deeply related to our holiness and our wholeness. The Hebrew word for "rested" can sometimes also mean to touch ones soul, drop into one's breath, or can refer to the inner being of the person. When we pause we create the space to drop into and nourish our inner being.

This is increasingly needed in a society where an emphasis on work, productivity and speed has thrown it completely off balance. It focuses on purpose and mistakes that for meaning. Pausing allows us touch the sources of meaning in our lives. Letting busyness go and entering into a space kept empty nourishes us. It is not wasted unproductive time. On the contrary, doing nothing may be the most important work we can do.