Welcome to my first blog post!
I'm starting anew, which offers a chance to savour that balance-point between the ending of past projects and the starting of a new journey. I'm noticing the effects on me of the last few years of running Ridgeway Mindfulness - the pattern of planning and running courses, figuring how to recruit those ready and able, coming up against administrative brick walls and other practical and personal difficulties .... and then, hearing the stories of participants and witnessing with them the shifts in mind-states, practicing meditation with them,. Giving myself space to reflect on all of this allows me to feel the reverberations in body, heart and mind, so that, in moving forward, I can truly start with a felt-sense of where I am now. I know my start point. I know this moment.
All experience changes us, and it's an act of self-love to tune in to the effects of life's demands, what we've given (or had taken) and what we've received and been nourished by.
For all of us too, devastation sometimes visits as part of our experience, where everything crumbles to dust and all we can do is to sit amidst the smoking ruins, see what the desolation feels like, find a grain of kindness and say, "Well this is how it is now", and patiently await the green shoots that will surely arise from the ashes.
On a less dramatic level, we can, at any moment, choose to start anew. Every time we catch ourselves lost in hopeless thought, or in an internet search-maze, or caught in a vicious cycle of panic, or a mindless, dulling routine, we can choose to step back, notice the effects of these last few moments - body, mind, heart ..... take a few breaths .... and reconnect , with heart - refreshed for the next few moments of our life's journey.
“When it comes right down to it, our entire past, whatever it has been, however much pain and suffering it has included, becomes the very work of inhabiting the present moment with awareness, equanimity, clarity and caring. You need the past that you have; it is raw clay on the potter’s wheel. It is both the work and the adventure of a lifetime not to be trapped in our past or our ideas and concepts, but rather to reclaim the only moment we ever really have, which is always this one. Taking care of this moment can have a remarkable effect on the next one and therefore on the next one, and therefore on the future - yours and the world’s.”