Tag: spirituality
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What’s your intention?
There’s a chair that I move around my garden. Sometimes it sits next to the Rowan tree that Graeme planted, other times it sits next to my blackcurrant bush, and this week it has been sitting underneath the tree that has been shedding leaves. The chair acts as a reminder for an intention I have…
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The practice of not knowing
The older I get the less comfortable I am with assumptions and presumptions. I mean, they are not inherently bad, but they can get things wrong and they often lead me astray. In fact, just a few months ago I had assumed that my mother would feel confident in a room full of new people.…
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The right side of the bed
I would say that the Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh was my first mindfulness teacher. Now, I have never actually met him. I did see him once from a distance, (at an event), when he came over to Ireland in 2012. Instead, my mindfulness journey began through sitting with a sangha, or practice community,…
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Making space
For as long as I can remember, I have always been chasing space. Space to read, space to paint, space to watch a sunset, space to meditate, space to write, space to sew, space to sit in a sunbeam streaming through the window. You get the drift. It’s not that I have never had the…
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My safe place
There’s a meditation practice that I guide from time to time that is taken from the Mindfulness Association’s Level 2 course: Responding with Compassion. It’s an imagery practice called Safe Place. Pinning down its exact origins can be tricky. For instance, I know that it is a meditation that is also used in Compassion Focused…
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Disturbing the peace
A few days ago, I received a lesson from a duck. I was on my daily walk and I stopped to watch a number of mallards as they appeared to be peacefully swimming along the reeds of a slow moving river. They were casually foraging for food when I noticed this one duck repeatedly pecking…
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Against the grain
There is a Buddhist teacher named Pema Chodron who has famously declared that, “to be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest”. I remember when I read this for the time, a droll smirk formed on my face. Accompanying this smirk, my internal dialogue muttered the word, ‘Great..’.…
My Silent Place 