A short video on creativity, mindfulness of God & The Wakeful One
A link to my video on You Tube about creativity, mindfulness of God and my new book Putting On The Wakeful One – attuning to the Spirit of Jesus through Watchfulness.
Practising natural #mindfulness through swimming
One of the things I’m researching is what I call natural mindfulness. One of the things mindfulness is is natural states of mind, that can also be traits, something we inhabit in our ordinary, everyday life.
In these mindful states of mind we are responsive rather than reactive; open rather than closed in our thinking; able to hold and consider a number of options; and witnesses of our afflictive thoughts rather than victims.
One of the best ways to cultivate natural mindfulness is to learn to inhabit our bodies again: one of the benefits of this is because the body is always in the present moment- a key aspect of being mindful.
Whilst I have been in Spain, first, on retreat at El Palmeral Retreat House and then on holiday I have been practising with mindful swimming.
As we swim we can come to our senses, feeling, sun, wind and water on our skin; noticing our breathing, seeing the patterns of light and bubbles in the pool, experiencing our hearing differently as our head is in the water, scenting the smell of the water and what the breeze brings to our senses.
We can feel our muscles at work in our legs and arms, the impact on our breathing of the repeated lengths. We are swimming not on auto pilot, or merely to do a certain number of lengths, but to find a mindful state of mind.
As we swim we can exercise our muscle of attention. Focusing on our senses and the body, streams of awareness within us; as we do that with one part of our aware mind we notice when another part of our mind wanders, what it wanders too, before bringing it back to our focus of attention.
I noticed that I could feel and let go of emotions like the bubbles trailing behind me. As swallows swooped down in free flight to drink, it was a symbol of drinking from the pool of awareness.
Swimming in the pool of awareness enables us to navigate our day and experience it in all its fullness.
One swallow does make a summer..a bird of hope
I understand that swallows fly at a lower band of the sky than swifts and martins, and are therefore, particularly adapted for flying as aerial insect catchers.
That makes sense of why they were swooping so close to me as I stood watching them in the early evening sun. As well as feeling the sun and the breeze on my face, I felt love, joy, envy, hope and most intriguingly, possibilities – feeling the swallow’s freedom within me. I call this the free running mind. According to Angela Turner, an expert on swallows, they are called ‘birds of freedom’ in Hebrew.
The swallow to me is symbolic of the spirit, the soul within, both individually but also that of a congregation, or even a nation. There is an impulse for good deep within that rises up in times of crisis, along with hate and poison for some. The swallow with its epic migratory journeys and ability to return ‘home’ is a picture of hope for us.
If something that Horatio Clare, another writer on swallows, weighs ‘little more than a full fountain pen’ can travel from Africa to the UK, then, I know I can persevere far beyond what my automatic scripts tell me. We need something to pull us out of the brain’s negativity bias!
Hope opens up the mind, whereas, fear closes it. As Shakespeare put it, ‘True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings.’
Becoming more mindful on retreat at @el_palmeral retreat house
Here I am at El Palmeral Retreat House in Spain, which is a very friendly house. Before I came out I dreamt that there were orange trees here, and when I came out and found there were I was delighted.
Wandering around the little orange grove I was struck by the picture of oranges on the floor, decaying and drying out, and the vibrant ones still on the tree.
I know there are times when I felt like the orange on the ground, isolated and lonely and in need of friends and community. I also know what it is like to feel like the orange on the tree, connected vitally to sources of life. Those sources of life include friends, family, community and God.
We don’t always feel able to re-connect because of our state of mind. Then we often need someone to reach out to us, who has mindfully noticed what we are feeling. But also mindfulness practice can help us find another state of mind where we can see more clearly ourselves.
One of the ways we can find more mindful states of mind, contemplative and open states of mind is to come on retreat. The hope is that we have opened the door enough on retreat to keep it open when we return home.
The mole-hills in the lawn of our mind and what to do about them
All these mole hills have been dug by one mole! The warden of Penhurst Retreat house, and I am sure I am not exaggerating told me they recently had 82 mole hills in the lawn, and thought they had an infestation of moles…it turned out that it was just one mole!
One afflictive thought can be like that in the nicely manicured lawn of our mind. We bash it down, suppress it, repress it, try and solve it with rational critical thinking but it keeps popping up even more, just like a mole.
Paradoxically when we realise it is just a thought, notice it and name it, it begins to dissolve. We don’t need to get in a mole-thought specialist to deal with it! And suddenly the lawn of our mind is back to normal…until the next afflictive thought pops up…
Mindfully tucking our head under our wing for a rest
These are some of the geese at Penhurst Retreat Centre in West Sussex, a beautiful and rural part of England. Sometimes when we are on retreat we realise we just need to tuck our head under our wing for a while. And that’s ok.
As we do so we can also find as an act of grace and loving kindness, that the larger wing of God tucks us over with His fearless and loving presence, like a mother hen with a chick.
Suddenly we find we can sleep and rest peacefully. And we wake remarkably refreshed by that encounter with the ‘full reality’ of God.
Going to Lee Abbey 14-18 November 2016 to lead the Mindful Christian retreat
Lee Abbey Retreat The Mindful Christian
Please click on the above link to get to the details for my retreat there 14-18 November 2016
mindful paths to peace article via @RetreatsUK
This is my article in Retreats 2016 which can be ordered from @RetreatsUK:
http://www.retreats.org.uk/retreatsjournal.html.
If you want to know more about retreats next year it is the best one stop guide!
shaunlambert.co.uk 