Shiva's and Metta's Mother's Sutra

So it's been a few days since i last posted, but it does NOT feel like a few days at all. It feels like a few minutes have passed and in between then has been sheer blind panic. After the course, and writing all that stuff about LERVE, i promptly fell very ill. The symptoms were flulike so i can only surmise it was flu, but if i was more honest i'd say it was a flu of the mind. I just could not move nor think and at about 7.30 in the evening, just when i was about to sleep, i thought i would never ever lift my head from the pillow again. I just could not cope. However, the next day dawned, and i did sleep all through to 6 am, and i felt greatly better. I still had that infernal cough, but i did feel like i had been re-membered and ready to go once again. I leave for Singapore then Sumatra on the 27th of June. And will be back at the end of August. I will be keeping two blogs no less - this one and one for the work i'm doing in the rainforest. One is probably going to be mor...

I must admit i did the retreat this week with some trepidation and insouciance. Which may sound incompatible, but one could easily disguise the other. I felt on both accounts having a retreat thrust upon me, and then wondering what the heck i had to learn. As usual i was surprised on both accounts and i must learn how to distinguish between genuinely healthy intuition that says, this is not a good idea, and the barrier that says, don't really want to do there because it makes me uncomfortable. But it would be a good idea to do so. Anyhow, the best exercise i had was the Thinking Feeling and Willing exercise which made me utterly confused. I thought that i was very much ok with my feeling life. That i was a great feeling person. I knew what my feelings were and that i was comfortable with them. It turns out that i am least ok with that part of myself. The adjectives that kept popping up were unfulfilled, dissatisfied, uncertain, denied. This is terrible, i told myself, and then the ...

The latest exercise we're doing is in positivity, and what i have discovered is each person brings their own self to the way the exercises are done. Which seems simple enough but is never obvious to me until we share what we have done or what our exertions have revealed. For instance, i would never EVER in a million years imagine that equanimity or positivity is about achieving some sort of constant lobotomised being. Well i say lobotomised, which is really quite unfair, because some people are perfectly able to live in what i think is a lobotomised state of never doing anything wrong, breaking the law, or getting creases on their linen trousers. I am not one of those people. I belong to the messy, screwed up, ramshackled sliightly woozy bit of humanity which tries their best. So what i bring to equanimity and positivity is that these are excellent tools is not the right word and i have not discovered what the right word is, companions perhaps, they are great companions which enabl...

Everyone has left. When I say everyone I mean ma, jac and the two kids. I have forgotten hike silent the house can be. There is some tidying up to do, just rearranging things to where I am used to having them, but that will happen slowly. And now the next two weeks will be about getting ready for the holidays. I am eight days late. Which is a biit interesting, but it might just be stress. It better be. Now that I've written this I'm sure I will be here tomorrow. I have so many things to do, but just can't be bothered. I need to write that essay. Friday's lesson was an introduction to pure thinking,l which is where we are supposed to be heading. Pure thinking is not the usual analytical intellectual system of thought which is abstraction and deadening, but thought, clear headedness suffused with love. How exactly it works is now not to be taught, but experienced. In the last few months as we have dine our exercises I am discovering opportunities to practice. Not rising t...

It's been a busy two weeks of mostly eating... eating all the time. With Ma and Jac here, i have put on at least five pounds. Hopefully that will all come off when i start regularly running again! I've had a spate of disastrous shite lately. Starting with the incident and slowly moving towards work related stuff. It has since passed, but it has really tested my nerve and equanimity. It's important to peel back in this case and say what is the most important thing/ things in life. Family, friends, time spent with people you love - work? Lucky if you can do work that is meaningful - beyond that, nah, don't sweat the small stuff. So i'm not sweating the small stuff because my sense of self does not come from work. It's great that i can do work that i do think is meaningful. Anything more than that, i'm not going up against the machine, not going to go into places i don't really want to. It just ain't worth it. Today it is not raining. In fact, not only ...

We went to Cafe Conor yesterday... the first photos i took during this trip! Jac and Als... Aurelia with the bacon waffles... Ghin doing what he does best! Oisin looking delighted at the cheats he has copied Ma At the Ulster Museum... note the purple wheelchair... It’s been a busy morning, with stuff to be arranged. At this moment i am trying to do the following, in no particular order: 1. Write a 2,000 word essay on child development from the ages of 0 – 14 years 2. Prepare for the Sumatra trip 3. Get stuff at work sorted... still waiting on people to get back to me on so many things 4. Work out travel and childcare arrangements which the kids are in Singapore on their own for a month 5. Try to think about where my life is heading That’s all. That should be fine. I’ll have all that licked sure by the end of the week. Surely there must exist some kind of organisation thingy which will help me visually place all this and then shout at me very loudly when i look i might be slippaging. Th...

I have forgotten what it is like to go shopping with my family. They charge into shops, including the giant Tescos, like it's been booked out entirely for them, and discuss what should be bought at the top of their voices. Sometimes across whole aisles. Sometimes they shout at each other if they have become hidden and out of sight. At Avoca, Alex tercapaied a whole cup of latte, resulting in my mother screaming at the top of her voice and me disintergrating with embarrassment as i tried to mop the floor. Which can be a bit tricky. At this complicated cue several people stood up from their seats and left. AND I DIDNT BLAME THEM. We are now preping a BBQ. Well i am prepping a BBQ while Ma and Jac and her kids are at Nisa buying more stuff. This is despite the fact they have spent the whole morning at St Georges Market followed by Avoca and then Tescos. Oh they're back!....

I have come to the conclusion i am a DREADFUL judge of character. Dreadful. I have no idea about human beings. No idea how things work in people's heads, how things really are with them. And it is then impossible to tell what the hell is going on. I was chatting with a friend today about things which have happened recently and telling him how things had been panning out, and he very sweetly told me, so you made a mistake, you embarrassed yourself, you screwed up... welcome to the real world. To how the other 5.5 billion of us live. You see this is why we have friends. Friends help you feel better when you can't help yourself feel better anymore. Apart from the fact that it is one of the most important reasons we are on earth. To have friends. So i modify my opening sentence, i am a dreadful judge of character except when it comes to my friends. The sun finally came out around 1 pm today. It was like someone threw a switch. One minute it was shite, the next it was sunny. I went ...

Working with an NGO can be a soul destroying process. Putting aside all the usual dysfunction that goes with the nature of human beings, there is also the niggling feeling that not everyone really cares about what you are doing. It doesn’t matter that you have more than a million members or that you have kick ass lobbyists and advocates. Somehow you just cannot complete with the glamour of evil that big businesses have, and the air headedness of politicians. You know the short term gainness of their world view, the inability to step up to the plate, to do the courageous thing, the right thing. Look at the Machurian Candidate for god’ssake. When i watched it i thought yep, dat’s George Bush. Anyway, today when i was driving to work, i hear that the UK government will be the first in the world to consider the economic value of the ‘free services’ that nature provides us. We often use the words delighted in our press releases. The ‘RSPB is delighted’, so-and-so is delighted, we are all ...

It's really funny... my family are now telling how life is so cheap in Northern Ireland. It's really cheap to eat out here they opine. Look it only cost £35 to feed all of us at Balloo House. This sudden strange onset of i know not what has been brought about by what can be termed Exchange-Rate witchery. When i first moved here the exchange rate was $3.30 to the pound. Today it is just over $2. This means that EVERYTHING is about a third less than it used to be in 2001. To them of course. To us it means sod all. Six years ago the lagu was totally different... six years ago i was told that it was pointless eating out because it was just not worth it. And the food here is crap they said. Now my sister tells me that the food here is prepared with passion and the chicken tastes really good. It's all very strange. So far i have brought them to Alan's farm, then Balloo house, and then we stayed home and just minded the kids. I don't have the largest house in the world, so...