zen Archives – Page 6 of 8

Life: sometimes we can forget why we’re here

October 1, 2017 by Andrew Marshall Leave a Comment

Sometimes life is good and, when all in our little world is going easily, we may be tempted to think we have got everything right. Perhaps we have. At the other end of the scale, when everything is going pear-shaped, we may wonder what we have done to deserve it. We all have better times and the not so good, but nothing stays the same. Life is like that.

Life is accepting the present moment wholeheartedly

Years ago, I belonged to a group that used to meet in a restaurant. It was a mediocre establishment that served as a handy venue to network, socialise and discuss various projects over lunch. The food wasn’t brilliant, being reminiscent of 1950s school dinners. A monotonously intoned grace at the beginning of the meal didn’t help. Some members would pull faces at the offerings set before them, and I confess sometimes I did, too. Then one day, the penny dropped. My attitude, though fairly normal, was wrong. Instead, I could choose to accept the food wholeheartedly, with a genuine rather than dutiful sense of gratitude, and then everything seemed to change. Later I learned that the same applies to anything in life – mediocrity is simply a value judgment that affects our perception. The lunches didn’t improve much but I did, and both the meals and life tasted better for it.

Embrace the clarity – is this life’s purpose?

In those moments of acceptance, there will be times when we experience clarity. Everything then is good. Everything will work out. Fear dissolves; discontent evaporates.

We all like to think we have a purpose in life but maybe this is it. Nothing grand, no heroic saving of the planet, just being ourselves and living fully and completely. Enjoy and embrace the great peace that comes and let it spread. It sounds like a plan. Maybe it is.

Too much to do? Not enough time? Mind like a chatterbox? The Art of Not Doing: How to Achieve Inner Peace and a Clear Mind can help.

Guts, bugs and zen: how and why they can change your life

July 22, 2017 by Andrew Marshall Leave a Comment

Guts are not a frequent topic of conversation but they have been very much on my mind this week. There is an enormous variety of bacteria that thrive in our guts which are a major factor in our quality of life. There is a very convincing argument that our modern way of life can have a serious impact on the bacteria – the biome. The health implications are extraordinary.

Your brain is in your guts

Practitioners of qigong may have heard the euphemism of the guts being our second brain. I first came across this years ago in Embryonic Breathing by Dr Yang Jwing Ming. In The Spark in the Machine Dr Daniel Keown clearly refers to it, too. According to Dr Michael Mosley in The Clever Guts Diet, there are indeed brain cells lining the whole length of the gut. If put together, they would be larger than the brain of a cat. Gosh. These are linked to the cerebral brain and there is constant communication between these two centres.

Guts and zen

The subject of the biome and its influence is very complex. It is the subject of an enormous amount of research by some very great minds. But it strikes my quite simple mind that if microbial secretions in our guts can strongly influence our moods and desires, then our view of life – how we see ourselves and everyone/everything else – might also be significantly affected by little lives we cannot see. Another gosh – are bugs playing with our zen? And maybe not only bugs?

What we need to do

The popular media is full of alarmist headlines. Their sole motive is to make us take a look at the latest story. But as you read this, you are still breathing, as am I as I write it. We’re okay, then, in spite of all. What we really need to do is stop chasing information and clear the head. Allow ourselves to become a little still. Then we can gradually become more aware.

Zen and the art of not doing

If we feel the body as it is, it will often deliver up the information we need to put things right. The intuition is brilliant if we let it percolate through.

Sometimes we will know that a certain food is not good for us, for example. We may intuit that we need more, less or a different type of exercise. If we really listen, we will know when we need fresh air, a change of environment or no change at all.

None of this is a replacement for professional medical help, of course. Nevertheless, we can learn a great deal if we allow our awareness to settle and expand before reaching for a remedy or phoning a therapist.

This is part of the art of not doing. Discomfort and bugs need not interfere with a zen approach to life. Indeed, they, and our guts, can teach us a great deal.

A zen approach to life is explored in The Art of Not Doing

Mirror, mirror in my head – the biggest liar of them all?

June 3, 2017 by Andrew Marshall Leave a Comment

The magic mirror in the tale of Snow White knew a thing or two. “Mirror, mirror on the wall: Who is the fairest of them all?” is not a question that is asked in our house. Our mirrors are not magic at all. In fact, as far as possible, we avoid them unless absolutely necessary. They don’t hide anything. They just throw back a reflection of “how it is”. But what about our internal mirror?

The mirror of consciousness

It is virtually impossible to describe consciousness in words, so the old teachers often used analogies. Consciousness is like a mirror, they would say, because it simply reflects what appears to it. A more modern analogy is that of a cinema or television screen. The screen does nothing. It is just the medium on which images appear.

So where do hate, love, anger and kindness come from?

There is far more kindness in the world than there is cruelty. But the message we keep seeing and hearing is that the whole planet is a disaster zone. Instead of seeing things as they are, we are influenced by what other people tell us or have told us in the past.

Our mirror is tainted. Smudges and scratches on the glass distort what we see. Not only do we see a narrow, partial picture rather than the whole, we become excited or upset at what we think we see.

Placing a judgment on everything is pretty exhausting. No wonder so many people become depressed. We need to work on it.

Start polishing

How do we clean the internal mirror, the one in our head? After all, if everything we see is wrong, surely it is just going to get worse?

Okay, it will take quite a while to have a highly polished reflector. But we can start the process right now. The immediate thing is not to add to the distortion and dirty marks that are already there. We simply interrupt the cycle of making judgments. (That may also necessitate changing our newspaper!) We stop shouting “hooray” or “yah boo” at everything we see or read about.

A mirror of peace

Eventually the liar will give up – because no-one’s listening. Accepting things as they are, and importantly not necessarily condoning them, we begin to develop a mirror of peace. And surely that can only be a good thing.

Thanks for reading this. If you liked it, you may enjoy my book The Art of Not Doing

Evening workshop 5th June 2017 in Staffordshire “Pacifying the Mind”. Details here.

Mind secrets: amazing space, amazing peace

February 17, 2017 by Andrew Marshall Leave a Comment

“Mind – what does it actually look like?” someone once asked me. They had just had their first experience of meditation. The question threw me for a moment as it came outside the normal ambit of practical questions, such as the best time to practise. I’d never thought of anyone assuming that the mind looked like anything. The natural response, which I gave a moment later, is that it doesn’t have any appearance or shape. It is rather like space.

Mind – can it be measured?

But the question arose because we have a habit of labelling everything as this or that. As an old scientist friend once told me, “According to science, if you cannot weigh it or measure it, it doesn’t exist.” My questioner wanted to be able to label the mind, or at least to quantify it.

If we turned the inquiry round a little bit, we might ask how space can be measured or weighed. A quantum physicist may have some good answers to that but in layman’s terms, you can only measure the distance between objects, not space itself. If you take the objects away, there is still space.

A conventional description of mind might be that it is the sum total of our thoughts, beliefs, perceptions and so on. Does that mean that if they stop, the mind ceases to be?

Mind – the illustrious container

Everything we see, hear, smell, taste or touch, we analyse. Because we analyse, we separate. This is different to that. Then we can filter it into our memory as beneficial or harmful, pleasant or unpleasant, neutral and so on. More significantly, by assigning quality to what we perceive, we regard everything as distinct from us.

If we look at a flower, it appears to be outside us. But all our observations, our perceptions and analyses take place within us. The only thing we see is a mental picture. If we look out of the window, all we see is within the mind. It is a mental picture.

Amazing space

If we stop thinking for a few moments, we may fleetingly experience the space-like nature of mind. Then the jumble comes back in. But if we make a habit of stopping, of observing without thinking, we will experience more of our space. And because space is space, we may be lucky enough to realise that the space of our environment – the “out there” – is one and the same as the space of the mind – the “in here”.

This is extraordinary. Then the mind relaxes, worry ceases, peace comes and bliss arises. That really is amazing space.

Rest: how to get what you really need

November 19, 2016 by Andrew Marshall Leave a Comment

Rest is not something we talk about very much, is it? We just keep on keeping on, like the rabbit in the Duracell advertisement. Rest, after all, is for wimps, the aged and the infirm. Real men and women keep going. The secret of success, whatever that is, is to push yourself and then push some more. Or at least, that’s the message that often comes across for aspiring high-achievers. So we become a little conditioned to the idea that rest is for the idle. Feeling guilty if we are doing nothing is the usual result.

Even nature has a rest

The trouble is, we lose touch with our own natural cycles. From where I’m writing this, I can see trees. Lots of trees. The funny thing about the majority of these trees is that at this time of year, they take some time off. And they don’t seem to have any emotional hang-ups about stopping and having a break. The leaves change colour and fall to the ground. There is much beauty in this and nobody has a go at the trees for being lazy.

Less than an hour’s walk from here are oak trees that are hundreds of years old. Centuries of growth and rest have ensured these mighty trees continue to flourish. There is enormous power in knowing how to be still, and nature knows this very well.

Cycles of activity and rest

Because our minds are so busy and our emotional side so complex, it is easy to lose touch with our natural stillness. Natural patterns of life fade and lose priority. But everything in nature has a cycle of activity and rest.

Our bodies require rest as well as exercise, and our minds do, too. For sure, we can keep going when we are tired. Most of us have to. But we also need to listen to what our body (including the brain) is telling us. If we ignore fatigue, nothing works as well as it should. A motor car might run without servicing and maintenance for a long time. For reasons of economy, many car owners run their vehicles in this way. It can be done. But eventually, things wear out. The car breaks down.

Isn’t sleep enough? Meditation can supercharge you

If we enjoy good quality sleep at night, we get several hours of rest. But sleep isn’t always enough in this noisy and hectic world of ours.

We can also experience a better quality of profound rest consciously from a short but regular meditation. It may be a simple one, such as sitting quietly observing the flow of the breath. Or we may use a mantra or visualisation. Whatever meditation we do, it will give our minds and bodies the nourishment of very deep rest. This is not instead of sleep but a natural adjunct to living a full life. Many people find that meditation improves sleep as well as our waking hours.

But I don’t have the time to do that

Meditation changes the quality of life but for some people it seems too far a leap. The usual reason is being too busy. (Refer to the first paragraph!) For those who are too busy, there is an easy practice that anyone can do, whether they meditate or not. Stop. Stop what you are doing for a minute or less. Turn the computer screen off. Put your pen or book down. Whatever it is you are doing, take a break for a few conscious breaths. Notice the breath as you breathe in and as you breathe out. Do it once, then a second and third time. Maybe once more for luck. It’s important that you stop to do this and breathe. That’s all. And it works.

More like this in The Art of Not Doing – How to Achieve Inner Peace and a Clear Mind

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Life: sometimes we can forget why we’re here

Life is accepting the present moment wholeheartedly

Embrace the clarity – is this life’s purpose?

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