January group meeting

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Our first meditation was a body scan type practice using the first (Buddhist) foundation of mindfulness - the body - to access present moment awareness. Henry Shukman emphasises dropping effort and allowing access to our inbuilt ability to come into an innate, calm zone of awareness. We spoke of the value of mindfulness to help regulate our nervous systems, especially given our full-on activity-driven lives - inner and outer - surely a good motivator for practice! Beyond our neurobiology  … mindfulness may also bring us to a wider awareness of our interconnectedness with all things, which Thich Naht Hanh (who died a year ago) called Interbeing. We mentioned Iain McGilchrist ( one time psychiatrist) - author of ‘The Master and his Emissary - the divided brain and the making of the western world’ who also recently had a huge book  published - ‘The Matter with Things .. our brains, our delusions and the unmaking of the western world’ ( say no more!). Recent brain research appears to demonstrated quite dramatically the differences between our left and right brains and arguably how our attachment to left brain reductionist, rationalistic, world - dominating thinking has dominated & driven western culture for the past millennium or so ..  Ancient wisdom/ spiritual traditions and indigenous native cultures have, it is argued, espoused a wider, more spiritual nature-based world view which aligns more closely with the right brain inclination to context and meaning. A parallel world view - though very differently evidenced - is to be found in Karen Armstrong’s ‘ Sacred Nature - how we can recover our bond with the natural world’:  ‘ When people in the west began to separate God and nature in modern times, it was not just a profound breach with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom: it also set in train the destruction of the natural world’  Karen uses Wordsworth to illustrate a more intimate & meaningful bond with nature, quoting from Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ -        And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime  Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,  And the round ocean, and the living air,  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. A motion and a spirit that impels  All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.   Our final short practice was one of Diana Winston’s natural awareness ‘Glimpse Practices’ where we may tap into ‘awareness of awareness’ without effort, and this could be via many different routes. In this one, after focusing for a short while, and turning attention to whatever is happening in the moment .. thoughts, sounds sensations … and naming it  ‘just this’ - before dropping the question:  ‘ Is it okay to be aware of just this?’