I've grown wiser.

By this I mean that, ten years on in my growth, I find life less satisfying for two reasons.

 Firstly, I'm more acutely aware that the good times and the bad times don't last so I'm less liable to cling to them in attraction or revulsion; they come in through the back door, have their wicked way with me and then blow out the front porch in style.

Secondly, I tend to disidentify with the me I take myself to be. The personality I identified with in 2000 is just a landscape of clouds hovering within the clear light which I AM. As such, I crave less because I have a sense of completion when in this state.

Interestingly, I don't despair at life's unsatisfactoriness (i'm sure I've not spelt that right) as I thought I might back in 2000. Because unsatisfactoriness is not a state of revulsion; it is neutral as in 'nothing touches the space that I AM; it only passes through without touching, like clouds'  and so unsatisfactoriness is, indeed, liberating. And it makes life a bit of a hoot.

Quality psychotherapy and the resolution of my abandonment issue has been instrumental in engendering this sense of completion, transcendence and unsatisfactory nature of my existence. I used to act out my mother's fear and inability to look after me by not loking after myself (drugs, booze, emotionally unavailable women, incessant intellectualisation to distance folk thereby depriving me of friendship, career sabotage on occasion....the list goes on....) all of which disturbed my concentration enough to delay my level of meditative attainment significantly. My therapist, a wonderful woman called Judi Ledward, helped me sort this out over a seven year period. There's stil some work to do I think but I no longer act out (ten years ago I would be diagnosed as a borderline neurotic though now I'm just plain neurotic).

Profesionally I'm higher up the tree with a Training Directorship in the works sometime this year and a growing supervision practice and articles in the pipeline.

And the stubble currently adorning my face (I'm typing this whilst my bath fills...shaving in the bath is such a luxury) is greyer than it was at the turn of the century. But I'm still fit as a butcher's dog; amazingly so for a man of 51. Women look at me and fall to their knees in lust.

Oh and of course, I'm more modest and less competative and less childish than I've ever been. I bet I'm the most modest bloke on the whole Gaia network. Bet I'm more modest than yooooooouuuuu nyah nyah......

Happy nu decade folks.

Jon xx

I wish for you precisely what you wil get.

And what you will get in any and every moment is this;

You will be given an opportunity to unfold in any and every situation you find yourself in, whether this is short-term (an illness or bout of amazing sex), long-term (your marriage or bankruptcy) or micropically thin, timeslicewards (eg the opportunity to focus on lovingkindness or lust).....everything you have or will experience is an opportunity to either unfold, awaken and expand or to sleep the sleep of the banal and contract....

If you develop strong concentration and insight in your practice, you will awaken to this fact and act more often than not in the direction of your unfolding growth. If you take what I say at the level of undeveloped insight and morality, you will be stuck weighing options at an intellectual level and therefore will be prone to flounder.

Developing concentration and insight will attenuate the fear you know you have and the fear you fear you have but don't know about. We all carry fear of the 'outside' at some level to the extent we experience ourself as a discrete organism for we are wired to stay tremulously on the lookout for possible sources of danger. Cultivation of lovingkindness will pacify this fear and strengthen a positive, humorous attitude to life which set the conditions for strengthening concentration and insight. These latter qualities are more cultivatable in the fertile soils of fearlessness, less so in victimhood and paranoia.

Everything you experience can help you to wake up. Everything. Allowing yourself the kind of vulnerability by which you can take the risk of the impact life is continually making of you is a gradual softening process achievable through correct (not woolly) meditation, quality psychotherapy, bodywork and morality. "The meek will inherith the earth" sayeth the King James Bible. Translate this back into the original Aramaic and retranslate into modern idiom and you get; 'Fortunate are those who have softened the rigidity within for they are thereby more amenable to the recuperative powers of Nature (or Spirit)".

Those early Christians knew a thing or two. Take the risk and soften up. Feel what life is giving you in each moment. Develop concentration as the lens through which you experience the environment and your internal process in a clear and precise manner. Use your developed insight to process and see through this vast Display. Feel, think and act in accordance with your deepest nature as disclosed by your insight. Note how this accordance strengthens your morality, concentration and insight to better process the next instant to soften to because the world didn't end as you softened up and you can stay vulnerable unto yourself. (Note that vulnerability is an internal recognition and has nothing to do with leaving yourself open to attack from dysfunctional others.)

I also wish that in order for you to do all this, you eat and sleep well and regularly, respect others as you wish to be respected yourself and refuse at all times to exploit yourself, others or the environment.

There's a tough and wonderful decade ahead, folks. Let's make the most of it and use this network to support one another in The Great Work.

May your life be your retreat.

Love and blessings.

Jon xxoooxx

Wel I'd just love to tell y'all abut how enlightened I am and that I can see beauty in a pile of steaming dog poo but each time I take the plastic bag to my pooch's freshly-laid turds I am often overwhelmed by nausea even though I tell myself that the poo and my retching are all manifestations of Spirit.....

So no beauty there. I find beauty in the Brittany Spears calendar I've pinned to the wall of my secret den.

Okay, I don't have a secret den (the Brittany Spears calendar is pinned up in our lounge).

Okay okay, Beauty I find beauty in truth. Which makes this blog pretty ugly since I have no craving for BS (ironic initials, those) and I do not retch at the smell of dog poo.

I find elegance in all forms beautiful....my partner's graceful carriage, my mid-speed calligraphy, Lewis's grinning and high giggle when I tickle his feet. There's a deep congruence here between the flow of life and it's signature in those moments...which is one nicely nebulous definition I have of beauty and one which bypasses all the  aesthetic  sophistry which I don't have time or inclination for at the mo.

I've sent Flautus, my Healing Angel out on countless missions over five continents to love-bomb the warmongers into peaceful submission which takes a lot of psychic jet-fuel I can tell ya...

Essentially most of my energy goes into using my life as a retreat wherein I use myself as an instrument which engages others in ways which either persuade them to meditate or enhance their own practice or at least helps them clear obstacles to engaging in a meditation practice. According to Ken Wilber, meditation is the only practice capable of transforming ethnocentric worldviews into a worldcentric one....I'm a bit skeptical about this statement (where's the proof?) but I cannot think of a better way to live as a post-postmodern bodhisattva on an increasingly unstable planet.....what enables me to remain relatively balanced on the tilt-board of my life is an alignment aong the axis of my sadhana of morality, ethics and wisdom. 

The decision to regard my whole life as one long retreat.....on the mat and med cushion I borrow kundalini from the Kosmos I think of as lying 'outside' me and then use it for the welfare of others in as many moments as I cease to become mindless in....and the more I can do this, the less kundalini fuel I need because I become the fuel and all life is fuel, is process, hanging in the Vast Open Emptiness which I AM...and then there is no balance because there are no polarised opposites (like Outside me and Inside me) to be balanced...

I guess we gotta define the terms in this question first in order to avoid that goulash-of-a-blog thang that results of the dreaded Terminology Meltdown.....

I understand Soul to refer to that subtlest encapsulation of a separate self which is drawn in purest filigree upon the Canvas which is all-pervasive Spirit.

Put another way, my soul may be touched but Spirit is ineffable....and if it's ineffable, then ya can't 'f__' it.

The impossibility of answering this question...i.e. how can I elucidate that which I'm not aware of....makes it tempting to skid off the straight-arrow Cartesian track and meander into thoughts concerning the lower left quadrant of the Johari Window (stuff known to others but not to self eg;   Rex; 'You're angry, Pete"   Pete; 'NO I'M FUCKING NOT!!!!!!') which Gurdjieff referred to as our Chief Feature and founded the Fontainbleu community around, in order that folk could point that sort of stuff out to one another in order to free up that condensed libido for more constructively mindful activities.....

It still frightens me, this prospect of people knowing stuff about me that I cannot see...my son and partner occasionally point in the direction of my shadow in a gentle and teasing way; my psychotherapy clients do as well, generally in more challenging ways...

I'm chided for dissociating around issues of sharing space when stressed so `i guess I don't know that at times I seek to avoid intimacy...well, I know it as an intelectual fact but I'm not connected to it in that way Heinz Kohut refers to so eloquently as 'experiencing-near'....  

I set the intention of building up a yoga centre as firmly as a bishops seal in a chunk of drying wax......

May you live your whole life as one retreat you lovelies you.

I would, without doubt, reservation or procrastination, endeavour with all my willpower or at least whatever is available to me in whatever moment from Mahashakti, to curtail that extremely egregious, distasteful and downright boring habit I possess of investing heavily-embeded sentences with prolixilated neologisms thereby expanding simple messages hyperbolically into whole paragraphs full of...well...bullshit....

And replace them with simple sentences like this one. They need not be gramatically perfect; they can begin with a conjunctive or a preposition.