I have no plans to run meditation classes in Bristol.
Therapy is meditation, and meditation needs therapy
I don’t ask clients to meditate, and I do not teach meditation to my clients. I do however say to everyone that meditation is very, very valuable to support change.
All therapeutic healing rests on the foundations of meditation. The relaxation in life that acceptance brings, the existence of a depth in us that transcends dualities, the power of our consciousness to escape the bubble-reality of out minds we are convinced we we are trapped in; these I apply always and discuss frequently.
To a great extent, therapy is meditation. Much therapy is a kind of highly individualised guided meditation, helping the client to be consciously present with their feeling in this moment … and the next moment … and the next. Eventually, incrementally, perhaps over dozens of therapy sessions, the client comes to be consciously present with deep feelings previously unconscious.
Equally, but rarely acknowledged, meditation needs therapy. This is because if you enter into meditation, then one feeling after another, one belief about ourselves after another, will emerge into awareness and float through our consciousness leaving peace behind. Eventually, incrementally, we are likely to come to a layer of pain or confusion which it is hard to allow into consciousness. When that happens our meditation will grind to a halt and we will feel stuck – and that requires the support of a therapist to get through that layer.
The articles here are a random collection of posts from the blog on my old website. They’re not systematic, and they need a megaton of sub-editing, but I hope may still be of interest.
Western mindfulness totally misunderstands meditation
The first theme of these articles is that the West fundamentally misunderstands Eastern meditation – fundamentally, completely, totally. Meditation is not a breathing or gratitude self-help exercise intended to bring benefits at some future moment (though of course it will do so.) Even less is it a method to assist soldiers to kill with less stress.
All meditation is spirituality
Meditation is the enquiry into the uttermost inner depth of this moment. Meditation is intrinsically and inescapably spiritual. Western science is rightly proud of having got rid of physical miracles and the patriarchal scriptural authority religions they arise from. But Western science is fully awake to the mysteries that lie beyond physics and mathematics, the mysteries of the origin of existence and the nature of consciousness. Science however still fantasises of bringing these within the realm of physics and mathematics, a quest that will surely fail. The point and purpose of meditation is to live our lives fully present in this mysteriousness. Meditation is the spiritual search and can never be otherwise.
What meditation actually is
OK, so meditation is the spiritual search. Sounds good; sound big, too; how to do it? Well, meditation is equally a matter of a shift in our relationship with our moment to moment experiences, becoming conscious of each and every moment. Moment to moment we develop more and more consciousness, and the enlightened ones explain that that very consciousness is our spiritual nature. Here is a definition of what meditation actually is.
The word mindfulness has lost all meaning. I’ve coined the term “radical meditation” – don’t google that, I just made it up – to refer to the spirit of meditation that Buddha and all other enlightened teachers intend. It doesn’t refer to a particular exercise; the standard breathing and gratitude and other techniques that mindfulness presents are valid in all schools of meditation. Rather, it refers to the framework of understanding the techniques are embedded in: the quest to know “Who am ? – What am I?”; the search to encounter death head-on and to know what it is; the understanding that we can experience reality directly, not via the prism of our mind; the enquiry into what happens if we rest in this exact moment now without creating past or future. These things I am terming radical meditation.
While the calmness-exercise type of mindfulness predominates in news media, radical meditation is alive and thriving. These include the deeper regions of Buddhism, but also the relative newcomers to public awareness with popularised keyphrases like non-duality and non-dual meditation. Non-duality sounds complicated and different, but all real schools of meditation are non-dual whether they use that word or not: it basically means to be equally neutrally peaceful no matter what experience, “good” or “bad” is present in the mind. It further means to be in a state of consciousness where dual distinctions such as good and bad don’t even arise in the first place; everything is just as it is; it couldn’t be any other way.
I’d like to repeat at this point that all the articles I’m linking to here are random articles left over from my old website. They were written a long time ago and need a megaton of editing. That said here is a somewhat, or indeed highly, non-standard practical and pragmatic explanation of non-duality. After this improvised home-grown explanation, I think it’s only fair and honest to share one of the the most famous expositions of radical meditation by the great enlightened teacher Ashtavakra, the Ashtavakra Gita.