News (Page 7)

In my Zen training over the last couple of weeks, I have begun to notice a divide that exists between me (my ego), putting ‘me’ at the center of the result, against a more profound sense of self (my true nature) which sees the issue with radical honesty.

I have been struggling with zazen recently. While I am still sitting, my real meditation these days is to visit a stream near my house nearly every day.

Since my last blog post, where I stated, ‘I’m not a morning person’ I’ve been trying to let go of the labels I’ve gathered and glued firmly to myself over the years. It’s taken me time to realise how unhelpful they are and this new blog post was supposed to focus on this very topic.

These were paradoxes: healthy, useful discussions where both sides of an ideological divide had a valid point and the country was better off when compromise landed in the middle.

I want to remind you who you are. Part energy, part matter. Part divine, part conventional. Part universal, part differentiated. Part interbeing with all of existence, part condensed into a seemingly separate self.

Last Christmas, my family and I were deeply ensconced in life in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. We decided to visit family in the U.K. for six weeks at the end of January. And here we are 11 months later still in the U.K. looking out of our window on a bleak midwinter scene of rain and bare trees in the City of Coventry, a place that we never had any intention of visiting, let alone living.

If you had to sum up this year in one word, what would that word be? For me, based on what I keep bumping into regularly, that word would be ‘overwhelmed’. While the press often refer to the impact of these times as the worst in ‘peacetime’, these are not peaceful times.

Embodiment is trending. At a time of deep divisions and discontent, the dissociations of head from heart, of talk from walk, of action from a felt sense of its consequences, are wholly inadequate for dealing with the wicked issues we face. So it’s not surprising that an antidote is resonating in the Zeitgeist, what many herald as an emerging stage of human development in which the clever head re-integrates with the deep wisdom of the body. Embodied leadership is showing the way.

From a global pandemic, to rising racism, division, tempers and temperatures, it’s easy to get triggered in this time by a sense of urgency or helplessness, anxiety or depression. Yet there is a way to lead into this time, making the difference that is ours to make. That way, grounded in the 1500-year tradition of physical Zen training moves us beyond a struggling self, where we can be in a mess without being a mess.