Meditating on pain; arguing with the boot

So, I have been meditating on pain.  Not out of choice (because that would be a bit perverse) but because one meditates on whatever comes up really.  I was lying there, in bed, wondering quite how to get through the night, and I thought about how pain is a message.  Pain is simply the way our body tells our mind that something is wrong.   So I acknowledged it, thanked it for letting me know all wasn’t quite right (okay, not remotely right), and promised I’d sort it out in the morning.  But it didn’t go.  So I furrowed my brow and said, ‘Okay, body, what’s this pain about then?’  And my bodymind threw out an image of a sort of dark cloud that coalesced into a boot which kicked me in the guts again and again.

‘Ouch,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ said my bodymind.  ‘Ouch indeed.’

‘So you’re not going away?’ I said.

‘In the dreams you won't be having, baby,’ it said, and ramped up the pain factor a bit, just to show who was boss.

Well, screw you, pain, I thought.  But, of course, becoming tense and angry just made it ten times worse.  So that was when I figured I might as well meditate it.  I mean, pain is just our mind, right? It’s just messages from the brain.  So there must be an override switch, right?  And meditation works pretty well for emotional and mental pain, so why not physical?  After all, where does one end and the other begin, huh?  The boot laughed and said, 'Just our mind? Just messages? Just?  Just? JUST?'

I tried breathing it away but that didn’t work – the breaths were too long, they stretched too far. So I took the focus smaller and smaller, into each moment.  And started wondering what exactly a moment is; how small it can be.  My focus shrank smaller and smaller still.  And smaller...  Until, suddenly, there it was – no pain.  Just a sensation.  And this is nothing new but it struck me that pain is a time construct – a combination of past memory and future fear.  Rather like music.  More and more these days, as I listen to music, I find myself thinking how funny it is that we can ‘like’ a song, a piece of music, a symphony, a whatever.  When really all we ever hear in the ‘now’ is a single note or even just a part of a note.  It is purely our mind, flicking back and forth over time past and future, that creates a hologram of the whole piece of music.  And, of course, that goes for everything really – every poem, every book, every meal, every drink, every joke, every dream, every kiss, every orgasm, every day, every year, every life.  Every thing.  Strings of moments that we tug together to create meaningful ‘wholes’, chunks of time that become events or things. 

Again, nothing new.  All very Zen.  But, actually, very damn useful.  Of course, it’s hard to keep it going hour after hour.  I would struggle with pain-free meditation for eight hours.  But it bought me time.  It's buying me time. J

When winter won't let go

So. The cold continues to bite. Two of my fingers keep turning numb and white. As if I’m turning to ice. Why? I ask them. But I know the answer – the cold is not just physical; it echoes through my emotional bones.  And it’s not just me.  It seems that, right now, so many of us are enduring the bone-cold, a spiritual ice winter.  

You can say it’s the lack of light, the absence of sun, the harsh economic climate – you can claim a gazillion reasons.  And we hustle around looking for solutions, for sticking plasters, for ways to push away the cold, to make it back off for a little.  We can dose ourselves with alcohol or food, we can cry Prozac, we can distract ourselves in a hundred different ways. Me? I fight the urge to swathe myself in blankets and dogs and huddle the fire – I make myself go out and exercise like a loon.

But then, I wonder. What do we lose when we seek to avoid?  Life is a process; a circle; a spiral. Yes, we can blitz ourselves with positive affirmations; we can go Zen and remind ourselves that it’s not really real, hence it doesn’t really matter but…  Is that missing something?  Is this process just a case of existing, of passing time in as pleasant a manner as possible?  Sometimes I think so.  But then thinking…can be overrated.  So what do I feel?

I go back to Alchemy. Calcination. Dissolution. Separation. Conjunction. Fermentation. Sublimation. Radiation. Seven steps. Circling. You reach the end and start all over again, just on a different coil of the serpent. And it’s not just you, or I – it’s us. “The human heart is the crucible of the cosmos.” I can’t remember who said that but it chimes – our inner lives are not our own; they belong to the cosmos.  If we want to change the world, we start with ourselves. 

Is the world served by squashing down bad feelings; by denying them; by refusing to countenance anything except light and bright as ‘good’?  I don’t feel so. If we push away the ‘bad’ it festers – not just in us but in the world around us.  It’s like foisting our dirty laundry on the world, leaving our smelly socks in the hallway.  Bad housekeeping.

The dark nights of the spirit and soul (yes, I feel they are two different things) are not mistakes, not aberrations, or so I feel – they’re not signs that we’re not good enough, not spiritual enough, or whatever.  They’re a vital part of the process.  Sometimes we have to be cut off from everything that gives us joy, everything that makes life seem worthwhile – every height has a corresponding depth. No?

So what do we do?  Nothing much. Abet the feelings, amplify them even – we so rarely listen to the messages written in the body.  Our bodies, our subconscious (the two in cohoots, or maybe the same?) are trying, I feel, to communicate with our conscious minds all the time. Yet we refuse to pay attention.  Sleep. Breathe. Daydream. Wonder where the body and mind wander. Try a secondary process (if you're primarily visual, turn your images into sounds; if you're a musician, maybe you need to move, to work with the somatic?).  But mainly...wait. 

Well, that’s what I do. Hmm.

I don't have a clue, I really don't...(Part 7,562)

Gorey understands... 

There are some days when I really truly don’t have a clue. I seriously wonder what on earth I’m doing.  I look in the mirror and wince.  I think about the rest of my life and wonder…why?  Why?  It’s not depression.  At least I don’t think so.  It’s simply a total complete lack of comprehension.  Nothing makes any sense. 

In Greece I had reached a sort of peace.  Before that, I’d tried pushing; tried again and again to make things happen; to prod and poke the universe into some semblance of (what seemed to me to be) order. It hadn’t worked. Just left me exhausted and sad at my failure.  I couldn’t figure out what it was all about.  But in Greece, watching the waves, I kinda got the Zen thing. I was content just to let go, to allow what would be to be. To let life unfold whichever way it so wished.  I decided that there were no choices to be made.  And that was fine.

Yet some days it isn’t fine.  I guess it’s allowable to have bad days.  I just freaking wish I didn’t think so much. Wish I didn't feel so much. 

‘I don’t get it,’ says Adrian frequently.  Not now, exactly (sort of), because he’s not here (he’s in a five star hotel in St Petersburg with a butler…actually this does make me smile). ‘I mean, why d’you think about these things?’ he has said, frequently (and doubtless will say again).   And, come to think of it, given I wrote this some time back but didn't post it until now (?), he isn’t even there now – he’s on his way to Norwich.  Possibly.  Depending on when you read this, of course.

But that’s it, isn’t it?  What?  Where? When?  As everything we think of as real is just energy converted into signals converted into a mental representation of experience?  As time is purely created in the temporal lobe of the brain and is not really objective in any way, shape or…time?  As infinity is about everything happening all at once?  And love?  Simply a response created in the mind by chemical reactions in the brain?  Based on what?  What do we mean by love?  Is it simply a crutch?  A panacea? A story we tell ourselves?

Adrian’s right of course.  Thinking, puzzling, probing…just makes us unhappy. 

‘Why do you put yourself through it?’ he says. 

‘Don’t you ever think about this stuff?’ I say. In wonderment.

‘Nope,’ he says.

I need a head transplant.

Anyhow. Today I walked the dogs up to the hill fort.  And for a few minutes the sun was shining and the world looked very beautiful.  I sat down on a log and drank in green.  And I believed in the moment, in just being, in being conscious, present, connected, in this precise second.  And thought, why wait until I get home to meditate – why not do it here and now?  So I did.  Breathing in green.  Trying not to think about how the world is really colourless and odourless and tasteless.  And it was fine.  Just fine.

And then Asbo bit me.  J

Zen and the Art of Tightrope Walking

Every so often (actually quite a lot) I get sick of the sound of my own voice. I bet you do too (mine, that is, not yours). So I shut up and let someone else do the talking.  Hence this is one in a very occasional series of My Favourite Blogs. Every so often I come across a blog which I love so much I have to force it on other people.  

Not that long ago, I *met* Vivienne Tufnell on Twitter. If I recall, she mentioned Susan Howatch (a favourite author) and I followed a link to her blog, Zen and the Art of Tightrope Walking. I read the post – about the wonderful Starbridge novels (c’mon TV people, now there’s a series just crying out to be made) and then poked around a bit more and emerged several hours later with ideas buzzing all over my head.

You only have to look at the sidebar of the blog to see why it drew me in: dreams and dreaming; magic and mystery; parable and poetry; depression and anxiety. What’s not to like?

How does she describe herself? “I’m a writer and poet and a longterm sufferer of depressive illness. I try to keep smiling but sometimes I fail.” Ah, this I get.

“I write about life, I write about what is important to me. I write fiction and poetry and I ought to warn you that some of what is billed as fiction is true and what is billed as….non-fiction may actually be something else entirely.” Ah, any journalist would attest to this. And our ‘fiction’ always finds us out. ;)

Her blog is one of those places I go when I’m feeling out of sorts with the world; when I want to be taken out of my head and into someone else’s. I love the breadth of her posts and the humanity and the sheer poetry of them.

Above all I love her aromatic meditations/visualisations. She has written a whole series, taking a specific scent as their starting place. Scent is powerful – it hits the limbic brain (the oldest, most primal part). It can stir up forgotten emotions, lead you down curious pathways. It bypasses the conscious mind and the ego.

Her subjects range from everyday scents (orange, bread, chocolate, vanilla) to the seasonal (snowdrop, pumpkin, bonfire) to the exotic (sandalwood, amber, myrrh). I’d love to see these gathered together in a book (any smart editors or publishers reading?). I’m also badgering Vivienne to put them out on YouTube. You can find a selection on her blog – click on meditations on the sidebar titled Things to Read and See.

Explore, enjoy...what catches your eye might be quite different from what catches mine. But I will leave you with this, as a taster – one of my favourite posts.

The texture of silence

Silence has texture.

You don’t realise how different those textures are until you stop to listen.

There’s the broken glass, bleeding edge texture of the awkward silence that falls in the ringing aftermath of a fight. You can feel the sharp fractured edges as the shattered peace falls to the ground like glass bird-scarers in an old fashioned kitchen garden.

Then there’s the hungry salivating silence of expectation, that bated breath hush, like the dying tones of the dinner gong where only vibrations and eagerness remain.

And finally there’s the silence you find in holy places, where worlds meet and touch and even overlap. You walk in and are struck by the depth of the quiet, self conscious suddenly of the creak of a door or arthritic knees, yet any sound you make rapidly vanishes, absorbed into the deep silence as a stone dropped into an underground lake. The ripples spread out to infinity and are lost, and the silence returns. It has the texture of the finest velvet, rich and soft as forest moss. When you let yourself be still, you can hear the silence over the roar of traffic or the bustle of a busy kitchen, like a kind of celestial white noise.

When you find a place where this sort of silence prevails, cherish it. Hold it in your heart, explore that texture in your mind till you understand that beyond all the sounds of the world, from the discordant roar of aircraft, the inanity of human chatter to the melody of springtime birds and the wind in the wheat, this silence is the song of the spirit that plays on whether we choose to hear it or not.

Win an XBox Kinect and YourShape

I’ve never got computer games. Never even went on Space Invaders or PacMan. Just don’t get the fun of fiddling with knobs (so to speak). I’ve watched a succession of consoles wander in and out of the house and never felt remotely tempted to pick up a joystick and join in. Okay, so once I let James persuade me to wield a light sabre in Star Wars and actually I did alright – mainly by adopting a wild spinning and slashing action.


I thought I’d like the Wii Fit but it fell short somehow. I didn’t like being confined to the balance board and coordinating nunchuks just got on my nerves. James loved it of course: mainly because he got a kick out of topping me in everything. Except for Zazen. Seems I can sit without moving a single muscle for a very long time. Who knew? 100% every time. Ker-ching.

Then along came Kinect. Some of my mates had been over to LA for the launch of this last year and had raved about it but, even so, it didn’t really register. But James had one for Christmas and I watched him play. No controllers. Just him in front of the TV.
‘You wanna have a go, Mum?’
‘Hmm, mebbe.’ (nose deep in my new Kindle)
‘C’mon. Even you can do this.’

So I stood up and it scanned me. Plotted out all my bones. Shit, do I really look like that?

You know what? It’s huge fun. We played all sorts – ducking, diving, jumping, sliding. My favourite is the one where you wave your arms to fly up to the ceiling (been trying to do that in real life for years).

Then we tried Your Shape and that was a bit of a revelation too. I’ve done aerobics classes for years, absolutely years, and I thought I had pretty good technique. Wrong. Because the Kinect is tracking your actual skeletal structure (actually I don’t want to think about how it does that too much) you can see exactly where you’re going wrong.

Is it perfect? No, of course not. But it’s damn good. I broke a serious sweat on the cardio class and the trainer is kickass on muscle toning – the squats were an absolute killer. Loved the cardio boxing and I’m impressed that it tries to persuade you to end each session with a Zen stretch.

Now, if they could just find a way to get Assassin’s Creed running on Kinect, I might really be a lost cause.


What? Oh, the competition....sorry. If you have an Xbox and would like to try out Kinect, here’s your opportunity. Ubisoft, the game developer, has promised that one of you lovely lot will win a Kinect and a copy of Your Shape. Read on....and good luck.

Here’s the official blurb bit...(not written by me - how did you guess?) 

Diary of a Desperate Exmoor Woman has teamed up with game developer, Ubisoft, to give readers the chance to win an Xbox Kinect along with a copy of Your Shape: Fitness Evolved.

Your Shape's groundbreaking camera tracking technology completely changes the fitness experience, providing users with an unprecedented level of accuracy and efficiency. Unlike other games, Your Shape’s proprietary Player Projection technology puts your body into the game for the ultimate fitness experience. You will physically interact with virtual environments in ways you’ve never seen before and you’ll be captivated by unique and exciting visual effects that respond to your movements and impact.

To be in with a chance to win all you have to do is view the Your Shape Discover Your Shape (‘Toned Body’) video clip on their home page at http://yourshapecenter.uk.ubi.com/ and then come back here to answer the following simple question:

Question: How many new classes does Your Shape’s Cardio Boxing Platinum offer?

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Post your answer in the comments below...

Please note that the Xbox 360 console is NOT included in the prize bundle.  Also, sadly, the prize can only be sent out to a UK address.  The competition will close on 10th February.