Living Mindfulness

20/03/2023

https://nextdoor.co.uk/p/7nrTW82FGJ5N?utm_source=share&extras=MTc1OTIyMDE5NDM5NTU%3D

Welcome to Bishops Stortford’s ‘Climate Cafe’ 7pm to 8pm What is a Climate Cafe? Many people feel deeply concerned about the climate an...

06/01/2022

to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go

― from Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

These beautiful and deeply wise lines from Mary Oliver invite us to reflect on the certainty of loss of all we hold most dear. This might feel depressing at first, but to truly recognise and accept this can be a path to fluidity and ease, a path into valuing what we have while we have it, so that we can fearlessly inhabit the rare beauty of this world.

24/12/2021

Community Meet up and Meditation
Second Tuesdays of the month at 7.30pm to 9pm. An opportunity to meditate together, listen to a dharma talk and discuss meditation practice, Buddhism, and the stresses of living in these challenging times. No experience of meditation needed.
Any inquiries welcome. I look forward to welcoming you to the group.

If you would like to join or have any enquiries please contact me here or email me on joseph.mishan@phonecoop.coop

24/12/2021

Apologies for the long interruption in services!
I am considering another meditation group for next year, pandemic permitting. In the meantime here's a poem to celebrate the recent winter solstice.
The Calling
In quiet moments
Between thoughts
A distant echo of a long forgotten song
Shapes itself in the insubstantial air
Breeding dark movement
And shades of form
Which whisper around the edges
Of the windows and the walls
Bringing shadow
In the long hours of the day
And the great beasts gather
Drawn to the leap of the living fire
Fur and feather
Remembering their places
Summoning the sacred cry of the wild
And the circumference of the dance
Grows wider
Fingers of light play around your heart
Bringing prayers, supplications
And soft growing incantations
While the pulsing of your temples
Loosen the strings of your mind
Words burst and fly outward
To burn with wild incandescence
In the mountains of the sky
And swallows come to play
In their looping joy
In the fires
Of your heart

24/04/2021

As I write I am looking out onto a beautiful clear sunny day. The birds are singing and the flowers are looking alive and vibrant. Trees are coming into fresh green leaf full of juice, fueled by the natural urge to grow and become.

How do we meet this effulgence with the joy and life it invites in us? Can we be here for this beauty? How present are we to this moment - the only moment we are truly alive in?

Meditation is an invitation to presence. An invitation to meet ourselves and our world, with its heart-breaking beauty and heart-breaking pain, with clarity and love. Each breath an invitation, each breath an announcement of the astonishing fact of conscious life on this blue green planet.

And our love for ourselves, for this Earth and all the myriad forms of life on it can be born in one moment. This moment. If we can be truly here for it.

07/04/2021

https://sangha.live/deep-dharma/martin-intro/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Share+meditation+with+your+friends+++family+%F0%9F%92%93&utm_campaign=Martin+Intro+to+Meditation+Course+Email+%234

A very worthwhile course from an experienced teacher for those new to meditation or wanting to start a practice.

In the mind of the expert there are very few possibilities, in the mind of the beginner, many possibilities.

-Zen master Shunryo Suzuki

This month-long course of daily practice will be led by renowned meditation leader, and founding teacher of Sangha Live, Martin Aylward. Using his 30+ years of meditation practice and extensive teaching experience, he will guide you through meditation basics with clarity, insight, and inspiration.

This month-long course of daily practice will be led by renowned meditation leader, and founding teacher of Sangha Live, Martin Aylward. Using his 30+ years of meditation practice and extensive teaching experience, he will guide you through meditation basics with clarity, insight, and inspiration.

03/04/2021

Martin Aylward writes in his blog:

Love and Dust

With the fragile condition of our eco-system finally breaking through into the mainstream news cycle, we can easily be overwhelmed by the loss of biodiversity and permafrost, the pollution of earth, air and oceans, and the attendant insecurity and danger to life on earth. We might struggle both with the information itself – the amount, the content and the ramifications – and with our emotional response, or what is increasingly being referred to as ‘climate-grief.’

Our lives unfold in constant exposure to loss and grief. Everything is already turning into dust, ourselves included. Whether looking at our own mortality or at the larger picture of our planetary life, conventional culture constantly loses sight of this truth, either in denial or overwhelm. Dharma practice on the other hand, turns our attention towards the heart of our fragile, precious existence. Contemplating endings is a way to honour the mystery and beauty of tis fleeting life, and a way to find the courage, the will and the love to do whatever we can.

Because we naturally protect what we love, and in the end, love is the only relationship to life that truly makes sense; it is love that resolves our sense of unease, helplessness, and separation; love for all the beauty and blessings, and love in the face of inevitable loss and grief. Love that can tolerate discomfort and disagreement; love that cares, and responds; love that allows us to keep our heart open, even when it’s heavy.

13/03/2021

Blog post by Wes Nisker Viapassana meditationTeacher

Over the last two hundred years, scientists have been finding more and more evidence to show that we humans are part of the evolutionary process, having emerged from the life stream as descendants of a long lineage of beings. This is an extremely radical notion, contradicting most of what we believed about ourselves for many previous centuries.

The evidence for human evolution is so overwhelming that it is now widely accepted as truth, yet somehow the implications of that truth do not seem to have penetrated to the marrow of our beings. Knowledge of evolution does not seem to have significantly altered our sense of who or where we are in the scheme of things, or to have changed how we feel about our lives and the world around us.

Vital to the growth of both a new spirituality and an authentic environmentalism is some method of planting the truths of evolution in the human heart. What is essential is to find a way to become intimate with our nature as nature, to somehow experience ourselves as part of natural processes, inseparable from the rest of creation.

Fortunately, a time-tested manual of deep ecology practices is preserved within the Buddhist tradition. This is the meditation series known as the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.

As we progress through this series of practices we can systematically experience the most basic components of our being: the physical elements of the body; the process of breathing that fuels our existence; the nervous system that makes us sentient beings; and the mental life and consciousness that make us uniquely human.

As we investigate our identity through evolution, we finally come to the Buddha’s great discovery about human nature—what we now call our “Buddha-nature.” This aspect of our being is our innate wakefulness, which allows us to know ourselves and to see our interdependence with all things, our “interbeing,” as Thich Nhat Hanh calls it. Love and compassion for creation emerges from that understanding, as does deep respect and active care for the environment.

The ability to recognize and develop our Buddha-nature may be the very power that evolution has offered us as a new adaptation, our next survival technique. Mindfulness could be considered the opposable thumb of consciousness! The meditations of the four foundations will strengthen our Buddha-nature, and lead us to a more integrated sense of our “natural” identity. The four foundations are Buddhist deep ecology. And, who knows? Through their skillful use, we just may be able to give evolution a helping hand.

06/03/2021

Very much worth doing if you are new to meditation ...

NEW: Sangha Live's intro to meditation course!⁠
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🧘🏽‍♀️ Access the power of meditation through a month of daily guided practice & interactive sessions. 🧘‍♂️⁠
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This introductory program will led by world-renowned meditation teacher, and founding teacher of Sangha Live, Martin Aylward, from April 12-May 9.⁠
⁠
Regular meditation practice can help us to feel less stress, and more peace; to engage more mindfully in our work and personal relationships; and to live our lives more freely, and more fully.⁠
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This 4-week course will include 10-15 minute video lessons each day (M-F) and live group Q&A sessions each Sunday, all guided thoughtfully by Martin.⁠
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The cost for the course is $90, with limited bursary application available.⁠
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There’s no better time than now to start on the path of awakening — and by the end of this experiential course, you’ll be well on your way 🙏🏽

» Learn more: http://bit.ly/3sQVNR3

P.S. Tag a friend or loved one below who might be interested 😊

01/03/2021

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

This poem - Lead - from Mary Oliver reminds us that a broken heart is a gateway to an open and undefended relationship to the world. Open to the 'ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows' of this world. It is a big ask that it 'never closes again' but we can nevertheless cultivate sensitivity and receptivity, so that we can truly live our brief moment of life on our one precious blue-green planet. As we sit in the act of meditation we invite this closeness, this sensitivity and receptivity to all that we encounter in our world. And only then, when we feel that kindred spirit with all things, will we be truly motivated and truly strengthened to stand for what is calling for our protection and our care.

26/01/2021

Here's a daily morning sit that I have been finding very helpful.

https://sangha.live/daily/

Its at 7am UK time for one hour: a brief talk followed by about 20 minutes to half an hour meditation, and then open for questions. Those new to meditation are welcome.

It's run by Sangha Live and is free although contributions (dhana) are welcome.

Wake up and breathe in community each Monday through Friday Join us every weekday for a 60 minute guided meditation and short teaching. Here are three great reasons to join: 1. Build the daily habit ⁣⁣Building the habit of sitting daily for just five days will transform your practice. It may fee...

20/01/2021

ON FAITH

A quote by Dr Martin Luther King:

“Faith is taking the first step even when you can't see the whole staircase.”

The word 'faith' is usually strictly avoided in western meditation circles. This is understandable, as for some it can be an old-fashioned word loaded with religious overtones and very last century.

But what do we lose by avoiding the word? According to the Cambridge English dictionary the word refers to 'great trust or confidence in something or someone' .

I would submit that a sense of faith does develop as a result of the meditation. And this is the faith in something beyond ourselves; not in the sense of a deity (although this might be the case for some), but a faith in the fruits of the process that we are giving ourselves to.

We start to understand that we are not the masters of our own house in the quite the way we believed. We begin to experience breadth and depth beyond our habitual small sense of self; breadth in the sense of a sensitive connection with the world including perhaps the non-human world, which was not available to us before. And a depth of silence and stillness that arises when we stop and listen deeply.

This is faith in the process of this seemingly simple (but hard to do) practice we call mindfulness, which we might perhaps better call heartfulness. Faith that this practice of sitting or walking with alert and relaxed consciousness leads us into areas of experience, and reveals truths, beyond what we ever dreamed were possible for us.