A love affair with trees

feel connected

I’ve been really feeling the changing of the seasons this week as we passed the equinox. I love the misty mornings, the softness of the light, the changing of the colours of the trees as they withdraw all the goodness back down into their roots to store for next spring. The giving back of nature with berries, crops and harvests. Just as the equinoxes are a time of balance, of day and night, light and dark so they can be a time to reflect on the balance in your life. A time to consider what you take from life and what you give back to the world and those around you. The autumn equinox, as a time of fruitfulness, is the time to reap our own harvest, take stock, learn from our mistakes and preserve our resources for the winter ahead. It’s not by chance that cultures, religions and communities around the world celebrate the changing of the seasons. Seasons connect us to nature and the natural rhythms and cycles of life, the cycle of day and night, the movement of the moon and of the sun. If you reflect back on your life you maybe able to recognise patterns that equate to seasonal rhythms - the springs and summers, the autumns and winters of your life. So just as we see the cycles of nature and the seasons, so too in our meditation we come back time and again to the cycle and rhythm of our breath, following each in-breath and each out-breath: the perpetual life supporting cycle of our breath. So take some time to practice balancing your breathing as you prepare for your meditation. Come to your natural breath as you sit or lie in your meditation posture, observe each breath and then gently start to count to 4 as you breathe in, and 4 as you breathe out. Not forcing your breath but just counting to match it, as you balance the in-breath and the out-breath. As you observe and bring your awareness to breath you may find it gradually starts to deepen, to slow - adjust your counting to match. Still count to 4 for each breath but make the counting slower. Take time to reflect on the balance in your life. Are there areas that are out of balance? What do you need to adjust to nourish yourself? Embrace the feelings that the new season awakens within you and the changes you observe, remembering that this is just another phase in the rich cycle of life, and that each season that passes will come again.

I often find that my meditation brings with it a sense of clarity or insight about some issue I’ve been struggling with - or something that I hadn’t even realised was an issue! So meditation is great way to find answers, but I always suggest to people not to come to their meditation with an expectation. Expecting an answer - ‘Today I’m going to use my meditation to work out what to do with my life’ - and you will almost certainly be disappointed. Your meditation will help add clarity to a muddled life, but come to your meditation expecting a specific end result and you probably won’t find it. Come to meditation with an open mind, don’t expect anything to happen, just let what occurs occur. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use meditation to help you in a focussed way. So we often talk about ‘sitting with a question’. To simply think about a question on which we would like some clarity and spend some time sitting with it. The classic meditation question is “Who am I?”. This is one that you can pose over and over again. It is the question that can help you find inner meaning and belief in your true self. But there may be other questions that work for you - “Where am I going?”, “Which path should I take?” “How should I respond to this situation?” The technique is simple. Simply sit in your usual meditation posture, bring your focus to breath and when you are ready to begin your meditation just pose the question in your mind - you may want to say it out loud. And then just let the question sit there for the duration of your meditation. You may use the same question over and over again, or you may wish to choose different questions. A few tips to choosing the question. Let it be open - not one that just has a yes or no answer. Avoid using ‘why’ questions - why questions tend to become circular - the ‘yes, but why’…refrain of a small child! Why questions can also create defensiveness rather than openness. The same with meditation questions - you are much more likely to find clarity and insight if you phrase questions with What? Who? Where? How? So choose your question and simply sit with it in your meditation. And just be open to seeing what happens without expecting a miracle!

Have you ever been lost? Did you ever have that feeling, maybe as a child, of deep panic that you were completely lost - a physical (maybe feeling sick) and emotional (deep down fear) feeling. Maybe you lost a parent’s hand in a crowd, or friends ran away and left you. It might just have been a fleeting feeling until you realised you were safe and not actually lost at all. Do you still sometimes have that feeling now, as an adult. Maybe life has taken an unexpected turn and left you searching for your way. Maybe the whole lockdown experience has left you feeling lost and struggling to find your path. Bereavement, grief and loss can all create that feeling of being lost, just not knowing where you are going or how to find your way. Meditation can help with that lost feeling. You can embrace it from a place of safety. Being lost does not have to be scary, it can be totally liberating. Imagine yourself on a path, allow yourself to be open to where that path is going to take you, don’t have any expectations about your end point. Just enjoy the journey. Meditation does remove limiting assumptions - usually built on past experience. So if your experience of being lost is one of anxiety and fear allow your meditation to let those feelings melt away - to open your heart to being able to wander freely, without fear and to just find your own path. In your own time. Worrying about where your path is going is like being on a fabulous holiday and spending the whole time thinking about all the jobs lining up when you get home. Let life and your own imagination show you the way on your journey. So take some deep breaths and open yourself up to wherever your wanderings might take you.

We all need places that we can call our own, that we can retreat to when we need some space and time to be alone. But during lockdown that can be difficult. A friend recently posted her summing up of recent weeks : Me: “I’m going to drink a cup of tea, in the garden, on my own,….” Middle child: “Ha, you’ll be lucky….” So how can we find a space that is our own? I’ve been borrowing an idea from one of the wonderful DailyOm courses: Blast Your Brain Fog Away - where you create your own Dharma Den: https://www.dailyom.com/cgi-bin/courses/courseoverview.cgi?cid=867&aff=0 Dharma: in Hinduism - the internal and inherent nature of reality, in Buddhism - universal truth of the nature of reality. So we create a den in our minds, our perfect imagined reality of a place that we feel safe and secure, where we can feel our self compassion and love ourselves when the world around us seems too chaotic. It’s not hard to create your own Dharma Den, you don’t need to be a seasoned meditator, you just need to have a sense of imagination! I did this with one of my lockdown Zoom meditation sessions the other day and had this lovely feedback: “Rachel, thank you so much for my exquisite gift of creating my Dharma Den on Monday. I was out in the garden yesterday afternoon for a final hour of relaxing making the most of the warmth. I was deeply cocooned in my den when my partner came clattering through! At least it made me realise how deep I'd been in my den!“ So, just sit in a comfortable position and shut your eyes. Bring your attention to breath for a while and then imagine your perfect place that you would go to, to be alone, to meditate, just to be. Where is your Dharma Den? Is it inside or outside. Is it an open place or enclosed? What is the light like - bright, dark and cosy, soft and suffused? Is the light constant or does it change? Are there colours in your place? What is the temperature - how does the air feel? Fresh and cool, warm and soft, chilly and cold so you have to wrap up warm. Remember everything is possible in your Dharma Den - there are no limitations to your own personal reality - things can exist in your Dharma Den that would be contradictory in your usual world! Is there sound in your Dharma Den - music, the sounds of nature, running water…? Is it still or is there movement in the air, a gentle breeze, the feel of the wind? How does your place smell? Perhaps your favourite flower fragrance, or an earthy smell, woodsmoke or the smell of the sea? How do you feel in your perfect place, open and expansive, light and airy, grounded and connected? What other features characterise your Dharma Den? Anything at all. The rule is - there are no rules here! Now you’ve created your Dharma Den - just sit with it for a while and then find a space for it in your mind. A space that you can always go when you need to, to be in your Dharma Den for as short or long a visit as you need - and remember time has no boundaries in this space either, so a few seconds out of the real world could be several hours of contemplation in your Dharma Den! Imagine your own Dharma Den and enjoy your time alone there.

I sometimes hear people talking about meditation as an escape, but is it an escape? When we meditate regularly we start to strip away all the delusions we may have about ourselves and our world; meditation brings us back to reality, our own reality - not the reality that the outside world imposes on us – so in that sense it is not escaping at all. But it does feel like a blessed escape from the chaos of the day for that moment you sit in your quiet place to meditate, at that point you can leave your worries behind and escape from them for now. So should you try and escape from emotions when you’re meditating? We hear so much about quieting the mind, clearing away negative thoughts in meditation, that I think there is a danger that we think we have to suppress or run away from our emotions. But sometimes our meditation can throw up emotions, it’s not about going into a meditation looking for, or trying to find the source of an emotion, but sometimes you just feel an emotion - stress, anxiety, sadness, fear - arise in a meditation. When you feel emotion rising in your body or a feeling of energy somewhere during your meditation don’t use your meditation to draw you away from it - use it to approach it, embrace it. That way you will feel it melt away as your inner spirit takes over from your conscious mind. Recently I felt anger rising - a strong physical sensation around my heart space, I could feel my heartbeat getting faster. So I just focussed my breath and mantra there - not analysing it or trying to find its source, just approaching and embracing it, and before long a feeling of huge calm replaced the anger, washing over me. I didn’t have to do anything at all. I don’t know where that anger came from, there was no need to analyse it or rationalise it. I just let the meditation do its stuff. When this happens not only will you feel the emotion fading into a place of calm and stillness, but the next time you feel that emotion in your day to day life it will become much easier to not let it overwhelm you, to leave the angry words unsaid, to smile and feel a sense of ease. Recognised emotional benefits of meditation include feeling more stable, more centred, being able to respond to emotions rather than react to them. In other words to be in control of our emotions rather than them being in control of us. We’ve all experienced situations where an emotional reaction makes us say or do something that we regret immediately afterwards. Meditation will help with that, you will increasingly find yourself being able to positively deal with emotions and respond in a measured, thoughtful way, rather than react through fear, anger or anxiety. “Of course, it makes sense that meditation can affect our emotions so deeply — when we train to be less in our head and more aware of the present moment, we’re better able to distance ourselves from negative thoughts and emotions, and feel better in the moment” https://www.headspace.com/meditation/benefits So don’t run away from your emotions. Allow your regular meditation to help you increase your positive emotions.

I have been reflecting recently on silence in meditation. Meditation leads us to profound stillness enabling us to reach a place of inner silence, to stop the chattering of our minds.So does it help to be in a place of silence - is there such a place? The simple approach is to stop talking, turn off pesky mobile phones and find the quietest place you can. The first time I experienced prolonged silence as part of a retreat with other people, I found the silence to be a great relief to me. It was at a very difficult time in my life and the opportunity not to have to speak, to explain, to communicate was somehow very liberating. We were using the Buddhist based practice of ‘noble silence’ which is where stopping talking is often encouraged from the time of the last meditation in the evening to after breakfast the next morning. https://oneminddharma.com/noble-silence/ . We were encouraged not only to not speak, but to have no non-verbal communication either, eyes would be kept lowered, and there would be no attempt to communicate except where essential. On the first couple of nights after going back to my room I would tend to listen to music on my headphones – to ‘fill’ the silence. But it didn’t take me long to start to enjoy the silence itself – not just the absence of communication. Similarly I would often read, but again after a while I would find that I didn’t need the ‘escape’ of the written word and someone else’s world but enjoyed just being in the silence, using the silence to expand my thinking. The more I experience silence the greater my ability to enjoy and appreciate it more strongly. On one retreat near the western coast of Portugal once silence from the humans fell usually only the sounds of nature could be heard at night and in the early morning – the birds, crickets, a veritable cacophony of frogs on some nights (!), the sound of the distant ocean if the wind was in the right direction, and the sound of the wind itself. I found that the more I experienced the silence the more I appreciated other sounds, particularly early in the morning when I would tend to arrive in the meditation room before anyone else and start my meditation earlier. This period of silence – and the absence of communication with others – deepened my meditation. I would approach the morning meditation with a feeling of calm and inner quiet already present in body and mind, finding it much easier to more quickly get deeper into my meditation. Silence becomes noble when it’s an inner silence. Thinking about my experience of silence in meditation – has encouraged me to revisit a book by Sara Maitland - A Book of Silence: A journey in search of the pleasures and powers of silence. One of the things I have found about silence since deepening my meditation practice is the difference between communal silence and the silence of solitude. I consider myself to be a fairly outgoing and gregarious person, I like to have people to talk to, but more recently I have become more and more comfortable with solitude and quietness. This doesn’t have to be as part of my meditation, it can just be a solitary walk (although I am rarely unaccompanied – having Max my dog with me!). However I equally find great strength and solace through group meditations – communal silence – experienced though my own meditation teaching. Sara Maitland talks about ‘silent religious communities…for whom the silence around them enriches their own’. It is this enriching experience of meditating in silence with a group of other people that I have been struck by, we have often commented on the feeling of energy (and yet quietness) that we have all experienced in the ‘communal silence’. Sara also discusses the types of silence. Her experiences echo mine that whereas initially silence of human interaction serves firstly to enhance awareness of natural sounds: wind, water, birdsong; it is ultimately the ‘interior dimension to silence, a sort of stillness of the heart and mind which is not a stillness but a rich space’. It is this that I find in meditation: my inner silence that opens up a vast awareness of myself and that in itself provides the space for spiritual development. Another element of silence that I’ve become aware of and that Sara Maitland discusses is that you do not always have to seek silence – it can be accessible at many times and in different ways She talks about there being ‘bits and pieces of silence being woven into the fabric of each day…some were just there, waiting for me as it were’. So whilst sometimes it is important to create that ritual that allows silence – finding the right place, muting phones , taking walks where I know there won’t be other people – it’s also possible to just grasp moments of quiet and silence and ‘move into them as swiftly and quietly as possible’. Sara Maitland’s spent weeks in solitude and silence on the Isle of Skye – reading about her experience has both made me more aware of how important and profound silence is already in my own life, but also made me want to explore further the experience of longer periods of silence, whether this be through longer silent meditative retreats or simply spending time in solitude (with dog!) in a remote environment. So why not find your own silent space. Just sit there in quiet and calm and enjoy the sense of peace it brings. Something to meditate on!