meditation

April 6 – sky gazing

/ Kokuu / 2 Comments

“What were the skies like when you were young?
They went on forever and they, when I, we lived in Arizona
And the skies always had little fluffy clouds”

The Orb, Little Fluffy Clouds (Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, 1991)


From my long experience of chronic illness, I know the psychological impact of being confined indoors for extended periods of time.  I guess it would be more accurate to say that I know the psychological impacts on me, but many of the mental changes that I have experienced are shared with others in a similar situation.  With the current lockdown in response to the SARS CoV-2 pandemic, the effects of confinement on the general population are becoming increasingly noticeable.

While it is true to say that not everyone reacts in the same way to being kept inside, cabin fever is a well-known phenomenon, with the characteristic presence of irritability and restlessness.  I imagine many people are currently experiencing this, or noticing it in their partner, or others they are with in self-isolation/resting-in-place.

One of the things I have noticed about being shut indoors for long periods of time is that my mind becomes more closed in, more insular.  While the internet does give me access to the world outside of my door, I tend to stop thinking of life outside of my immediate vicinity. 

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March 27 – finding stillness

/ Kokuu / 2 Comments

Breathing in, I know that I am breathing in.
Breathing out, I know that I am breathing out.
Breathing in, this is my in-breath.
Breathing out, this is my out-breath.

— Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist Monk


I don’t know about you but my mind has been whirring lately, trying to take in all of the information about the current pandemic, and thinking about how best to protect my family and the world at large.  Also, what is the best way to kill a corona virus zombie?  My guess is a mixture of hand sanitiser and cutting the head off but that is purely speculation at this point.

My daily relief from this situation is through meditation, just letting myself sit with no goal other than just to sit, allowing my thoughts to do what they wish without grasping onto them. Continue reading →

March 23 – not knowing

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“Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?”

— Tao Te Ching 15 (translation by Stephen Mitchell)


“Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.”

— T S Eliot, from ‘Burnt Norton’


One of the three marks of existence identified by the Buddha is anicca – impermanence.  Nothing ever stays the same, although it may appear so for a time.

Human beings are mostly quite discomforted by this and generally prefer things to stay pretty much as they are, aside from minor alterations that they are either in control of themselves, or otherwise approve of.

When something like a global pandemic occurs, things are thrown up in the air in such a manner that human discomfortude (real word but don’t check!) is either turned up to 11, or we pretend that somehow everything is normal and everyone else is unnecessarily panicking (as the old rewrite of Kipling goes, “If you can keep your head when all around are losing theirs, you probably haven’t understood the situation”).

You may have felt, and noticed, that people are reacting to the spread of SARS Cov-2 in different ways, but mostly these ways have one thing in common – they are an attempt to regain control of the situation.

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March 2 – the trick is to keep breathing

/ Kokuu / 5 Comments

“Now how is mindfulness of in-&-out breathing developed & pursued so as to be of great fruit, of great benefit?
“There is the case where a monk, having gone to the wilderness, to the shade of a tree, or to an empty building, sits down folding his legs crosswise, holding his body erect, and setting mindfulness to the fore. Always mindful, he breathes in; mindful he breathes out.

— Anapanasati Sutta (Mindfulness of Breathing Sutra)


It is often said that our life on earth begins with our first inhalation, and ends with a final outbreath.  Between those two points are all of the joys and sadnesses that encompass a human life. 

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February 17 – mind mountains

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“The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.”

— Li Bai (701–762)

“Going to the mountains
Is like going home“

— John Muir (1838-1914)


Once I lived near mountains.  Coming-in to land at Zurich Airport, you could often see the tips of the Alps breaking through the clouds, in what feels like some kind of dream landscape.

At the end of Lake Zurich, the Alps are also there and walking to work in the morning, I crossed a bridge which gave me a view over the water onto the mountains behind.  Regardless of how many times I saw this, it was still stunning.

A couple of months before I became ill we had a work trip to climb mountains in the Bernese Oberland near Chur and I remember breathlessly trying to catch up with my 40 year old Swiss boss (I was 25 and pretty fit) as he strode ahead of me up a gully of snow.  By February of the next year (1996) I would struggle to walk to the bathroom and, in a well-worn metaphor, the stairs in my parent’s house would feel as hard to climb as those alpine slopes.

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