Monthly Archives: March 2025

Love and Impermanence…part (iii) – Happy Mothers’ Day every day!

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Offerings….
an eyeful, a heart full, a mind full of blossoms…

Blossoms arising for every mother…
springing directly as love from the heart …

For ours, in this life-time…
and each who is sharing
life in this world, although feeling… apart

For all sentient beings…
in every direction
our mothers of life-times,
where gratitude starts…

Blossoms of wisdom showing as teachings
Blossoms…of love… for each wandering child
to find peace and ease in truth’s generous welcome…
always an aspect, and never apart…

not weighed in the balance…
The mother we share as the basis for being
shows perfect reflections,
and never departs….

In one Macclesfield teaching James said to us ‘you’re fine as you are’…’you could be more you’… offering us the possibility of acceptance with an invitation to be curious…
and… ‘Your nature is completely pure’…’
Really!?… Yep, the buddhas are not liars… that is how it is…
But in ignorance of this, our dualising consciousness will be working with whatever concepts of ‘our nature’ and ‘pure vs impure’ bring to mind… in a vain attempt to try to match our sense of self with some extraordinary words…

And as we reify, attribute value by comparing and contrasting, and define ourselves and others according to ideas and activities….
all this ‘normal human’ activity acts like an on-going smoke-screen, obscuring the truth of the statement.

On becoming a mother I had the luck to come across a book by Penelope Leach which suggested that when the behaviour of a toddler seems problematic the disliked behaviour can be worked with… without interrupting love for the child.
It seemed that the invitation was for the parent to see that the child is in need of a creatively helpful response…to collaborate with them as they are, in the specific situation… rather than allowing judgment to trigger an automatic behaviour which may be familiar from their own childhood as a means of exerting control. Maybe instead of withdrawal of affection or some other punishment, to hang in there and be curious as to ‘how best to be for them’ at that time.

Similarly we can treat ourselves with this kindness and be curious and non-judgmental about what we are up to.
As we explore the talks we find that ‘being more you’ did not mean being more authentic to our notion of the truth of ourselves…and indulging this. Acting out onto others an impulsive expression of whatever arises in the mind is clearly not the height of our potential…but rather, ‘being more you’ is about coming closer to how we actually are.
And this opens us to the possibility of acting skilfully, ‘with finesse’, into the situation.

There are many dharma methods which may be helpful in re-parenting our anxious little orphan ego-selves… these transient shapings formed by linking constructs…the patternings with which we habitual identify as ‘Me’.
Each method, if applied correctly, produces a result….some may act as temporarily beneficial ‘holding patterns’ but all tend towards the Buddha’s realisation of the uncompounded the uncreated…the absolute truth of ourselves.
All unhelpful tension-driven activity may relaxed out of…in the arms of Prajnaparamita, in the wisdom of openness… from whence arises the true love of ultimate compassion.
With the teachings so generously perpetuated and carefully transmitted through time we have encountered what we need to be at home wherever we find ourselves, non-dual with the generously spacious hospitality of awareness and emptiness.
May we make good use of our rare opportunity…

Flowers for Mothers day and everyday:
The audio of Love and impermanence part (iii) is now published
The latest writings by James 23rd and 25th of March are essential for keep our boats on course and afloat in the increasing turbulence of this time.
In our time  the Radio 4 program (9am thurs 27th march) was about Maurice Merleau-Ponty…who was part of the movement known as phenomenology. The Phenomenology of Perception is one of the books he wrote…and ‘Wonder in the face of the world’ is a beautiful quote from that…
James once described the practice as ‘applied phenomenology’… you might find it an interesting program.
However his book ‘Love your Mother’ would be today’s recommendation : ) … the fund set up for anyone needing help to purchase books is still open.

The wishes were made in the morning…but posted in the evening!

Being happily ‘crocussed’ in spring time!

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Meeting up with a group of us, one sunny Saturday in Macclesfield, James said he had been ‘crocussed’ on his way there.

I remember sharing his enjoyment… and earlier had seen the grounds of the cemetery of the nearby churchyard, through which he had walked on the way. They were spangled with this amazing array of freshness…of shape and light, of colour…
The mind, metaphorically ‘mirror-like’, was momentarily filled with an un-mediated perception….a display including masses of what, in the English language, are reduced to the label …’crocuses’!

I’d suggest that revelation…no ‘thing’ in itself…yet stunning and heart-opening …was available in its fullness through receptivity…through presence.

In one of the macclesfield talks, maybe that one, I learned from James about how perception comes first and is direct…but is so quickly veiled by the secondary movements of abstract conceptualisation.
We make our own ‘sense’ of the perception through applying and incorporating an interpretational overlay … formed from whatever thoughts feelings memories associations come to mind in the moment.

Often there’s so much that we don’t even register what’s around when we’re walking… maybe hurrying… along the path towards ‘something’…
We’re busily thinking about what might happen, has happened, or is happening…maybe how something or someone else is…
So, partially abstracted from life, within the dimly-lit thought-cupboard, we’re distracted into giving our own meaning to whatever imagined absent ‘something’ which arises for me..

As we look… and then conceptually conceive ‘through a glass darkly’… the spacious bandwidth available for receiving and responding to ‘how it is’ is artificially constricted by our egoic pre-occupations.
And so we become more estranged from the ‘happenings’ of the broad experiential field of now – whilst also being a non-dual aspect of that field.

If this strangely estranged view…a view from a window in an encapsulation within openness… is the starting point for our engagement with others, then being able to respond into a situation from the fullness of our potential… appropriately, as required – is a very long shot!

And the more we believe that view to be more than situationally true for me, within relative reality … well, the world’s non-sense shows how that goes…

We happily have the luck to come across the dharma teachings and meditations which offer ‘de-encapsulation medicine’ free of charge!…
They can invite ‘bursting the bubble of self’… which sounds dramatic and painful…and something the ego wouldn’t want to do…but we have a nascent wisdom which moves us in that direction…
And we can see how actually…it’s locating oneself inside the bubble which is a cause of suffering and a painful constriction of our potential.

The teachings facilitate our softening and relaxing out of any circumscription, any fixed shape.
A release from the constrictions, being breathed by the life of the moment into….?… let’s see… : )

Evening-time now…the crocuses have closed their flowers…for the night : )

P.s. This post links with the previous one, of the new recording… part (ii) of Love and Impermanence

Love and Impermanence Part (ii)…the Open door of Emptiness

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The recording of Part (ii) of the chapter Love and impermanence is now available from the Audio/Video tab above, in The Open Door of Emptiness series.

If you were listening on Saturday 1st March to James’ teaching on ‘Effortful Selectivity and effortless non-selectivity’ you’ll maybe find the contents unconsciously resonating with the themes he explored.
If you didn’t get to see that live, then you might find that video complements this teaching and vice versa.
Each time a fresh expression …

In my experience these ripples of dharma act like the sea on my egoic sandcastle… a form built of and from the open sea’s shore …
As the tide comes in…each little ripple of arriving water has an impact on the apparently given stability of the structure…

At first the sand gets wet.. then dries as the water retreats…
But gradually, as ripple follows ripple…
the outer ramparts, rigid constructs… soften… and then slide into the sea…

Then the inner structures strictures or constrictions…the grasping at, and that which is grasped at…
give way to the truth… and all releases…

and freshly emergent experiences, in openness, arise and dissolve naturally…like the waves of the sea

P.s. There’s also a new post about being crocussed! …which comes and goes with this…