When there's no stress/threat to myself or others, partcularly those close to me whom I love.....in this uncontracted state I gotta be really really vigilant for those medusalike tendrils of narcissism that creep in through the keyhole of my Shadow Door and puff me up like a hairy little dog wired up to a van der graaf generator.....when threatened I deflate and contract and hold fast to the supportive rigging of  those nearest and dearest to me and allow myself to fret but breathe deeply rather than fuss...I've had quite a bit of this given that I have sunk everything I have financially into the Calderdale Yoga Centre (opened yesterday) and am now broke in the midst of a recession....

...but over the storm of my lifecruise, the Sun that I AM shines on and on and I sit daily in the patch where the clouds part and the warmth descends through my spine to enable me to take yet one more day at a time in the knowledge that my fretting is the laughter in my soul gone stale with ego identification like ice in a thick bladder of a balloon that sits in a field and dreams of flying as if it could do that without any help from Self or partner or pals

Oh that would be me...I have a Christlike aura around me and a halo like an astral headtorch.....all the little animals come sit by my side being fed by my radiance of peace and love.....corporate heads have been known to break down and weep and kiss  my feet once they have gazed upon my benign countenance......

Maybe though it's the fact that I carry a load of fresh meat and gras dripping from my belt when I walk the glades..... and the semtex I strap to my chest whenever I attend board meetings....

I dion't know who is the most caring person I know.....people who really care from a place of pure worldcentric volition are not readily distinguishable from folk who trick themselves into thinking that they care when in fact they are doing their deeds to please the infernal internal critic within.....or from folk who pretend to care out of a sense of subtle self-interest...or narcissistic pride....for example, a lot of sixties Vietnam protestors were not that  impassionned about the atrocities as much as the issue of their being drafted into Hell although their motivation would not be discernable as dissonant within the harmonic chorus of  outrage......

Deeds to me are important but their motivation lends me a clue as to the extent of their conditionality....unconditional caring is liable to be something somebody will be doing even when I'm not watching.....if all of us recognise this fact, we can stop hiding behind stiff masks of self-righteousness and move more deeply into the work of exploring the limits of our compassion so that we may remove them so that our boundries ever shatter into subtlelevel stardust and collapse into the open gravified spaciousness of pure emptiness.   

Performance art really floats my boat......why only last week I was walking down the street with Tam, my Queen of Hearts...and I was seized with a fervent desire to strip all me clothes off and cover me hands and feet with black treacle and declare us The Duff Hand...Queen of Hearts and Five of Spades.....

My art collection lies in a large at fder and contains Lewis's drawings from 18 months onwards.

I found Contentment hanging out in the mall with Atonement.....Attie had just finished a spell of hard work in the Multikosha Gym and was sipping a guilt-free Sprite and telling Connie the fable about the tortoise and hare and Connie sat serenely dining on a single peanut and chewing slow as an Ekman training vid.

I was proud of my father, who worked his way up from being a docker (stevedore to you american cousins) to running Cardiff Docks...al in a meteoric ten years.....

His secret was good delegation....Al Capone knew this one, too....you delegate yourself out of any task other than careful delegation.....and if you do it right, all your subordinates will feel respected that you trust them with the responsibility.....and work hard for you...and this my father did with consummate skill....he came home at 5;30 each evening and never talked about his work or looked stressed...and this was the most valuable lesson that he ever taught me because I do not stress out in that neurotic way either.

This hapened literally half an hour ago......I'm having a whale of a time taking myself off to my new yoga centre at 6 am and doing my practice before breakfasting with my son....and a crew of Hebden Bridge yogis are turning up for their own sadhana and things are pretty grovy and there's love in the air......

Anywys, whilst in paschimottanasana (seated forward bend) it suddenly clicked regarding how to engage the internal energy locks (bandhas) without compromising either the breathing or the physical configuration of the posture....which resulted in an ease and interiorisaton the depth of which I've never before experienced in a forward bend.....awesome as the thre moonsets of Trantabogga but you need a tardis for that one....

Sat aslant on some desert pediment in Utah maybe cos it's hot and dry which counterpoints the flooding in this neck of the woods.....ah desert music..Harold Budd...Steve Roach......Wyole Coyote........

I'd be studying the teacher, probably....lust and caracterological intrigue as new variables in the equation....

Subjectwise, I'd go for economics which I 've never formally studied.....twas economics or chemistry at school and I chose foolishly.....if economics is the study of incentive, rather than the movement of bulked-up trash-diet industry-barfed fecal matter through the intestines of marketforce and jurisprudential infrastructure then I guess I have a good foundation in psychology and buddhism since knee-jerk attachmen and aversion...buying and selling....are actions of our brutish nature or delusion or ineluctable consequences of those thar metaphysical marketforces.....so therefore study the contrary-but-not-contradictory strands of human nature or delusion or markets and you begin to cement the groundwork of the economic thang into awareness....uh...sorry crap metaphor but anyways....uh

Actually I still am in schoo;..I'm doing a Samye Ling Buddhist study course anda course in classical yoga philosophy with Georg Feuestein which, taken with all the psychotherapy lit I gotta keep on top of, makes me glad that God blessed me with a brain that soaks stuff up with speed.

I would see health and wellness as being terms for two sides of the same Coin....from the outside looking in, my judgement of another may be that s/he is healthy.....from the inside out, that same person may have the subjective experience of feeling well...

Looking out we see form...looking in we contact the empty centre of our being...as the Buddha taught, these are of One Taste....and our experience of this One Taste is of Love...the One Hand Clapping...the Unstruck Sound (Sanskrit; 'anahata', the name for the Heart Chakra) the sense of Complete Unity felt as Satchitananda.....and feeling well / being healthy  is fed by connecting with this experience to ever-subtler degrees....

Be well folks, Jon x

Well I consider myself a grown-up who giggles and sings Cole Porter songs on me ukelele with a falsetto voice and whose favourite Wednesday evening treat is to tuck into a large dish of Ben and Jerry's with son and partner watching Lie To Me limbs akimbo in a puppy mash on our vast beanbag (we don't have a sofa but a giant splodge dominates our living room)......these and other pursuits keep my body and mind loose as spaghetti thrown in a space shuttle galley...childish?.....not in my books...childlike, yes.....

My father......he's a pre-Sixties guy....he seems to frown on this sort of behaviour as not being grown-up because in dad's universe, growing up meant keeping all the vulnerable bits on the inside and covering them with steel-plated character armour....the post-sixties generations started to dismantle this armour en masse which gave their bodyminds space to breathe and so to octoenarians like my dad, we're all running around like a bunch of kids half the time.....

My sense of growing up....and at 51 I am still growing up...is that it entails the experience of disillusionment...that I cannot control or contain or manipulate life in the ways which would narcissistically gratify me.....learning how to weather my disappointment like a solo yachtsman in a Force-Niner...this process enables me to open my vision...there are all you other guys out there just like me who have needs like me, who hurt like me, who have timeslices of joy and happiness like me....who are ALIVE like me.....and none of us can have everybody else serving our needs......and history and sociology and psychology and all the best literature are stories about what happens as a consequence of this....most of the best stuff we read is bildungsroman....

In the mdst of this disillusionment, we can find the joy of liberation because we no longer find a  need to be tethered to our desires and phoney want-wants...we can cut them loose like sandbags on our Zeppelin of Transformation.....all aboard....

Many of the passenger-pilots reside here on Gaia...if you've read this far (bugger me.. I'm on a roller tday....should be doing my website but I need a bit of whooppie sometimes) you're on the ZoT too no doubt....

We are all connected...I see God in your words and if I meet you in the flesh, I see God in your eyes.......this would not happen if I was too scared to let go and fly....I would anaesthetise myself on drugs, sex, rock and roll...come to think of it, I can't think of any 60+ rock stars who are anything like grown up...weellll okay Bob and Joni and Len....maybe others....Mick and Keef?...hmmm....

So; growing up;.... let go, grieve, find the joy in the last shed tear, open out and out and out like unfolding origami releasing tight form.....and live..

And have pockets of silliness hanging out of the trousers of wisdom.