Being together

William Morris, Vision of the Holy Grail, 1890

In Barcelona we studied Wolfram's 'Parsifal', the oldest book in the Western culture. Perhaps the first book ever to be written. Eduard, our kind, deep, speaker, showed us through the myth, and being a doctor brought it down to a cellular level. Fascinating. One such delight was him explaining how the innocent fool (Parsifal) enters into the Magic Castle of the Fisher King that arises out of the middle of the mist in his search for the Holy Grail. He explained how a cell protects itself from invasion by setting up a bouncer-like immune defense, hence the invading cell cannot jump over the moat of the castle, nor ram through the jammed-shut big wooden doors. However a cell does allow fusion with another cell when the cell appears to be exactly the same. Out comes the red carpet. Wow! 

Mind blowing! The power of the innocent: of being nothing more and nothing less, of being just exactly the same allows entry to that healing place, to sup of deep connections, of deep love, and really what else are we really looking for? We are nothing without our connections to others. We are nothing without being able to connect to something bigger than us.

We are allowed entry when become unthreatening, when we are simply the same.

-

If I were to think that I was to live in a foreign country, even a place like Nepal where I’ve already been, I would still feel nervous and worried. But I wouldn’t be surprised to feel knots in my stomach. I would expect to feel different in my western clothes, I would expect not to understand with my different language, I would expect my body to react in rather unpleasant ways to the incomparable food and hygiene levels. And I would consider this all part of travelling.

But not in England. ‘England,’ is the response I give to ‘Where are you from?’ England is the place where I took my first lung full of air. England is where I was brought up on baked beans and jacket potatoes with cheddar cheese. England is where no one takes the piss out of my accent.

At England's finest

But when from the age of 21 you’ve only clocked four years in the country, with the other fourteen years being in countries recovering from dysentery, or selling chickens in the street, learning how to communicate in different languages, or learning new value systems, England is suddenly as foreign a Timbuktu. 

I am still struggling to turn on the television. In my own mother’s kitchen I can’t work out where she puts her stuff, how to use the potato peeler or where the recycling should go, my piano has gone, and I have no idea what people are talking about when it comes to culture, TV, bake-offs, and other such stuff that without knowing has become a national secret code. If you don’t know who Gary Barlow is (not to be confused with Ken) you will be laughed at, stared at in amazement and asked ‘Where the blummin’ ‘ell ‘ave you bin?’ To which I have learnt to be quiet.

Quite frankly. I am out of it. I am wearing the same clothes, I am speaking the same language, the food warms my innerds with childhood memories, and yet, I just cannot get 'in'.

And so faced with tremendous nothingness month after month I found myself dribbling on the dirty floor of my psyche rolling around in moderate to severe depression. I was drowning in feelings of being pathetic, unworthy, despicable.

Plunge. Into the dark.

It was while I was slobbering into my isolation that my good friend Rafa shouted down the ravine ‘Julia! Julia! Get up off the floor! Get up, stand up!’

He told me that it was horrible to see a friend wither away.

He told me he knew he could do nothing.

He told me to stand up. On my own.

I told him I couldn’t. I had no friends. I had no resources. No car, stuck in a village. No nothing.

He said ‘Excuses! Get up!’

It was such a harsh message, with an undercurrent of deep love that - I heard - I heard it in my heart - and from behind the waterfall of snot and tears, I managed to shakily stand and take a few gingerly steps back up into the world.

I thought about how I would have reacted if he had told me what to do, if he had given me direct instructions, or if he had simply gone ahead and done it for me. I would have wondered ‘Is this right for me? Is he seeing me and my situation properly? Is he projecting his situation onto mine and trying to heal himself vicariously? Is he trying to manipulate me, consciously or unconsciously, for his own ends? Where is his motivation coming from? Can I trust him? Can I trust these actions that I am taking because of him?’ etc etc etc Is he being guileless?

The thing is, him just being there in Spain, saying ‘I’m here,’ was enough for me to feel him. Any more would have jeopardized the whole thing. 

And so, feeling his innocent support, I went to a psychologist for help, and she invited me to a Pesso Boyden workshop the next Saturday. It is a marvellous technique which, to my eyes, was like family constellations except more directed, deeper, more healing. I felt it was more contained. I shan’t go into more details, else I’ll be off through other fields and valleys, but part of the workshop was to stand in on the others’ ‘structures’ as their significant others.

I found myself being a woman’s mother. She was in desperate need of being accepted, of being unconditionally loved. And so I set to task. I sat behind her, along with ‘her father’ with our hands on her shoulders and I channelled love, feeling it, really going for it, pouring it into my hands to enter into her body. But she wouldn’t take it. It was like pouring my all into a black hole, nothing coming out. It was swallowed whole, without a chance to shine even a little bit. I kept trying, I keep really trying, until I started to feel frustration and the welling of anger. All she had to do was accept and she wasn’t. She was consuming and destroying. Resentment. It slowly dawned on me that me sitting behind her in her healing session with my hand on her shoulder sending frustration, anger and resentment was not exactly textbook. So I gave up. I just sat there. I thought it was better than anything negative. Her shoulders suddenly relaxed. Her muscles allowed entry, her psyche opened just a little to allow in a shaft of light. I didn’t do anything, because I’d got myself into this new posture, of just being. I just was. I didn’t try and force love onto her, I didn’t force her to accept my offering. I just sat there. I was just was. I am be me. I mean it is difficult to put into words, because it is so simple. I was just present without forcing me or anyone else into what I thought should happen. I just was there. 

And I learnt for the first time to be in this powerful place: healing power.

-

Being in the north of England, back to my roots, I have had the pleasure of reconnecting with Brass Bands. If you don’t love brass bands, then it’s a sure bet you’ll dislike them, scoff and jeer. But if you love them, you’re in the secret society of loving something that is heritage, that is part of our northern English blood, that has been with us since we were all in villages and down the pits, in the mills and building canals. This is flat cap and steak and kidney pie. This is authentic. Brass bands are like folk music compared to Opera. Opera is fine. It is beauty close to the sterility of perfection descended from heaven. Folk music is the gut of music that has come up from the ground, fertile in its natural knobbiness, along with the potatoes that kept us alive through the winter. Like Tim Blanning quotes in ‘The Romantic Revolution’ (p122) ‘It was the innermost emotions of the folk that created folk songs and so the folk sees them as its children and loves them with its whole heart’.

First row second to the left: that blob over a Tuba is my head.

So there I am, suddenly playing music again with people I had played with when I was a teenager in the National Champion (...pause for surprised admiration...) Stockport Schools’ Brass band. People keep asking me ‘Is it Julia or Julie?’ until I get confused myself. We’re practising for a contest. It is starting to get hairy. We are down to last minute detail and three rehearsals a week. We’re off to Blackpool ready to put ablaze the Winter Gardens this Sunday. 

I really want to give it my best, for the sake of Marple.

So I do.

But last night, after a rather disastrous practise concert on Saturday night in Crewe, we were all very sensitive, open to change, because we know we have to. We didn’t show hardly any difference between ff (double forte) and f (forte) nor mf (mezzo forte)...nor did we have a range of pianos (quiets). We are just blasting it out; all of the time. This is not colouring; this is that grey brown muck you get from muddling colours. So, I decide I am going to soften all of my dynamics (which to be fair I think the other members of the band do too...all of us a bit afraid to play out, to become exposed). I stop putting so much into it, I stop blowing so hard, I just ‘play along’ with the others. I stop trying so hard. I can barely hear myself for I’m merging in with the others’ sound. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what you need in a cornet section, and in the band in general: one sound.

I realised I’d been trying too hard. We all had. We now have the notes down pat. We know the piece. Now it is time to allow it to breathe, rather than the asthma attack we were giving it before. And suddenly the band, for my ears at least, had a step change. The music became subtle. Parts came out and flew above in wonderful somersaults chirping spring without being stepped on by the heavy giant feet of us blasting out our parts. Music began to happen. We played as one.

-

I don’t know if I’m getting my point across? I have had so many conversations with people, who deep down are afraid of being mediocre. I strive. I strive to stand out, to be something. I want to be noticed. I don’t want to just merge in. I want to have an active role, so that I have a chance to stand on the pedestal and receive the jubilee cup prize amid crowds of applause. Of course in my speech I don’t talk about how brilliant I am and have been, just how it was thanks to the effort of the team - and that makes me all the more brilliant. 

Ego bullshit dreams.

Is a better perspective that our power is in simply knowing who we are and being it, unashamedly, quietly, gently, kindly, boringly even, without forcing ourselves to be anything else? Is not our part in humanity to sing our song in delicate harmony with the others so that we merge into the symphony (‘syn’ together ‘phone’ voice)? 

In this communion of simple silent being is the role of the innocent, guileless fool, characterised by Parzival, where we are at our most potent?

....and will it work in England?

 

The Secrets of Santa Claus

On 21 Dec 2013 at 5.11pm we celebrate the winter solstice. It is our darkest night, the night when Father Christmas originally came down the dirty chimney. We could say the story represents an experience that comes down through the spinal cord, through our head, heart and body. It comes down from the world of ideas and lands, stumbling in the dark all ruffled and rumpled, into this present reality. 

 

If we have been good through the experience, we are given gifts, and if we have not: coal. Coal is the unworked philosopher's stone. My mates in Catalunya, Spain, have the added twist of the danger of receiving a plastic representation of, erm, merda.

The Caganer in Barcelona this year. They also have Cagatios (logs that children bash the shit out of, which is where their presents come from) but often in the ferias (Christmas fairs) you can just buy the plastic excrement for the children's stocking.

The experience of being ruffled up happens to all of us. Life has its ups and downs. The question is - Were we able to keep equanimity during the storms? While going through a torment in Vipassana I wrote:

Even in its strength

The lighthouse

Cannot control the waves.

The lighthouse doesn’t freak out. It stays there, quietly, calmly, persistently, accepting the waves, knowing that nothing is forever. 

While we have been living life, the question Santa wants to know is, ‘have we been good?’

Did we freak out when someone messed us about? Did we collapse in tears because we were premenstrual? Did we rise into road rage at the knob-head who cut in front of us?

Or,

Did we listen and try to understand? Did we…erm…fill in gap…instead of collapsing into hormonal imbalanced tears? (A sooty hazy point for me…advice would be appreciated) Were we driving calmly enough to see the crazy driver and gracefully give him the space he and we needed?

In our experiences if we did ‘good’ we get gifts. Not presents, but gifts. Instantly. They are created by Santa’s helpers, good-hearted spirits, dressed like the original Father Christmas in green, who from their workshops in the trees represent the help of Nature. There are a myriad of gifts we can receive, such as compassion and understanding of others, the ability to see things from increasingly different angles, strengthened patience, or even the gift of feeling good about staying calm and being able to do dude-style surfing on hormonal waves. The list of life enriching gifts goes on and on…

And if we didn’t manage, then we tend to feel a bit of a merda, sat moodily in the coal shed of life.

Through the dark times when we manage to keep it together, we are able to unwrap, to uncover, our gifts, dis-covering that we actually always had them in our nature. By having used the gifts of patience, for example, we realise we have patience. Lao-Tzu said:

Treat those who are good with goodness, and also treat those who are not good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained. Be honest to those who are honest, and be also honest to those who are not honest. Thus honesty is attained.

With these gifts recognised, uncovered by ourselves within, the very same gifts enable us to climb a little higher in the tree of life. 

Along with the fairy lights our sparks shine out fueled by moments of being good to ourselves and others, the satisfaction of dealing well in a difficult situation, being aware enough to stay open and loving even when all seems so dark around us, etc.

As we go around life, with each new experience, down the chimney and up the tree, we are given the opportunity to learn to use our gifts with ever more loving kindness. As we strengthen in these roots, we ascend the tree of Life. The sparks of consciousness connect more and more lighting up our path until it is so bright we are nothing but a star! 

The star at the top of the Christmas tree is our higher selves connecting to a consciousness that is greater than our individual selves - which is where Father Christmas, in all his generous nature, flew down from.

What will you allow into your mind?

When I lived in Argentina we would watch the news daily. It was in 2001, the height of the Cavallo financial crisis. The news got personal. It wasn’t that a politician had been found to be corrupt, a law change or lacy knickers found in the wrong place, it was much more personal. They didn’t say ‘Julia you will not be able to get your money out of the bank tomorrow there is a freeze’ or ‘Julia’s bus was held-up today with men with guns who went round person by person taking their wallets’ or ‘A lady in Julia’s village, Maipu, was killed today by children because she would not give them sweets.’ They didn’t use my name, but they could have. We were all watching, eyes glazed with fear, about what they would say about our worlds, about our lives.

That was how we began to walk with hunched backs, constantly looking over our shoulders. I didn’t like to stop at red lights in my little blue Fiat 500 when other cars weren’t around: it was just dangerous. My boss’s son had been shot like that, and it was only the fact he jammed on the gas knocking the barrel of the gun from his temples to his leg that he wasn't killed. Our very own road-side chicken stall, Angelitos Parripollos, was held up twice, while we, the proud owners were on holiday. The first time Pollo, my cunado, in shock, just handed over all our hard earned cash, the second time, feeling indignant, he didn’t and el suegro (the father) got shot in a lung and my brother-in-law in the leg. By sheer miracle the suegro’s workplace, a bodega that he had been working for for 40 years, had paid his social security that month (they hadn’t paid any wages for about 5 months) and he was able to be admitted into a hospital. If not?

This was life. It was scary. It was impossible not to be aware of what was going on, you could feel it. Watching the news only made it worse: I started to become paralyzed and in that shut down state couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my own house.

So I made a decision to stop watching the news, and if it happened it happened. But when it didn’t happen (which in my case was never): it didn’t happen. I decided I could NOT stop using the bus to get into Mendoza just out of fear. We had to continue to live, to work, to meet friends. I mean, if it’s going to happen then it’s going to happen, independently to if you have read the news or not. But while the horrible, terrifying things weren’t going on, why live in terror as if it were?

I had a similar experience in Nepal in 2004. There was a Maoist uprising, and often we couldn’t teach in the orphanage’s school. We were forced to ‘strike’. If they found you teaching they would burn down the school. We all heard, as the news spread from village to village, that there were riots outside the University. This went on for months. Meanwhile we had to continue to live, to eat, to play, to teach the children how to draw.

One day I had to go into Katmandu. I wanted to buy games for the children, I was starting up play time, something the orphans had never heard of. Trundling back to the bus, I took the direct route back by the University. And as per the grapevine, there were students out there burning tires and making black smoke, and police men at the end of the road trying to look important, but actually looking a bit bored, while students in the university threw toilet paper out of the window making waterfalls of white paper stream through the black smoke. They had also thrown nails down on the road so that cars would not be able to circulate. To me it all seemed rather pathetic to be honest, a sort of crazy bonfire night, though it was a street I really wouldn’t want to walk down.

I got home to the village and visited my friend who happened to have the television on. I saw footage of the riots in Katmandu, they had capture that fear of being too close to death and my mind said ‘Ohh I wouldn’t want to be there, that looks so dangerous!!’ until with a jolt I realised that I HAD been there, only an hour before, and that it was nothing like they were reporting. It wasn’t safe as houses, but it wasn’t the war zone they were capturing. I wondered what angle they had used. How they had managed to ramp it up so much?

So I realised that the media’s direct effect on me caused either unnecessary fear, or escalated my fears into immobility. It seems to me that the real danger of fear exists more than in the mind. I mean, last year many, many tourists (millions) didn’t come to Greece because the media showed it to be so dangerous. I walked through Sygmata Square in Athens and thought it was exciting. It was just like the week before when I had passed through La Plaza Catalunya, in Barcelona: tents, and camp stoves and hippies all smoking joints and lots and lots of people getting excited, thinking they were making history. Knowing they were making news. And then once in a while some uncover cop would come along, be violent and create a problem to stir everything up, so the media could put the wrong slant on it all. Again.

It started to get really ridiculous thinking about the ‘danger’ reported in the news while swimming in the beautiful clear azure seas, still and peaceful, and wandering back to my little sweet house in the lazy sun, past Micro Café to say hi to friends who were contentedly having a little drink as the news continued to say how dangerous Greece was, even away from that one square in Athens. The worst that could have happened is that you could trip over a bougainvillea bush.

Ohh the news! The news! Telling me how to look at the world around me! Why listen? I don't need messages that say I am impotent to change the world, even my own world. I don't need messages based on fear, impossible situations and no solutions warping my views of myself and the world into weakness and uselessness. I refuse.

Why allow ourselves to be disconnected from the peacefulness of natural reality, making us forget the quantity of love that flows through the world and of communities all over the planet making a difference. I will not allow the news to make me think that I am not powerful within myself.

But when my own mind does it to me, for some absurd reason, I believe every word.

Me and my mind. Not listening any longer!

PS A lot of people responded to this post in private messages as if I were going through a 'dark night' but the idea came to me while on a 10-day Vipassana...it is an idea of liberation! A way out of the monkey mind. I know I have one, and I'm pretty sure everyone else who hasn't worked extensively on their inner mind does too. Opera's such as Wagner's Parzival and Verdi's Magic Flute attest to the feminine character sleeping or under the harsh rule of a cruel tyrant (ego impurities of the mind), Sleeping Beauty awakens from her curse, Snow White gets out of the woods (the unconscious) with the help of her 7 little worker dwarfs, Psyche on her journey separates the grain from the chaff with the help of ants...

I feel as if facing the monkey mind as a monkey mind is an awakening, knowing that the mind sends these messages and being able to stand firm enough to be able to see them for what they are: propaganda not based on reality. It is liberating (to me at least) to think we can begin to recognise what is and what is not real.

Being Oneself in a Relationship

We met while I was having an English cuppa in front of my Greek white-washed flat on a tiny cobbled street too narrow almost for bicycles. Bourganvilla pink and purples brushed against the white walls that wedged my house besides a little orthodox chapel where I was sat under the orange tree. He was a tourist, and I was not into having relationships. End of story. I was out of the market. The last one had burnt me so deeply that I had decided that I could not be me AND be in a relationship: I needed space and time to develop myself, and stop being so utterly and completely lost.

Later by email (yes I admit we swapped contact details) he invited me for a drink which seemed safe enough because I thought he was gay. He also seemed to be one of those interesting people who you wouldn’t want to miss, especially when living in a small society where the social offer is not exactly continually dazzling. This guy seemed to have intricate ideas and an open mind, and mentioned being a dancer, but even so last minute I tried to get out of it, but my mobile wouldn’t send a text to his American cell phone.

He clinched it later though, after the drink when we wandered up to the church on the top of Paroikia. Overlooking the expansive Aegean horizon of the dark, moonlit sea, and I found myself in his arms, being twirled through the air, and all I could see was a palm tree coming in and out of my vision as I circled, flying almost weightlessly in the air. If a man can lift this sturdy lass, he’s worth looking into. 

The Church where we danced that night.

In the following days we went swimming in the sea with a full moon lighting our return along the cliffs, had a secret breakfast where all my friends spotted me, and walked hand in hand down the little Greek streets, laughing because once again he had thrown me over his back as if it were completely normal and nothing had happened at all. The big turn on was discovering he was actually as intelligent as he seemed.

And so those three heady days spent together turned into a risk: after a month of email addiction we wondered about a three month ticket for me to go stay with him. I looked at the photos of his picturesque house in the first range of the Rocky Mountains, a cycle ride from Boulder, Colorado, and did a ping pong game of yes-no for about two weeks.

It turned out to be a good bet: I learnt ‘merican words and ways, we fell in love more, got on well, argued well together. During the end of my stay his work asked him to go to a world-wide conference. It is held at a different location around the world, and this time was in Nottingham, an hour and a half from my family home, a week after I returned. Surely this was meant to be? We both saw it written in the stars in Arial Black font.

But no.

Like attracts like. He also seems to think he cannot be in a relationship and be himself.

Hmmm.

So, instead of going for the dramatic surges of hormonal addiction to inboxes, we decided to be strong and separate: to walk our own paths. Sensible perhaps. We both sighed with relief, it had all been starting to get quite intense. It was beginning to be real.

And so I sit, hours and hours in the Vipassana center as a long term server and ponder all this, when I should in fact be not pondering or thinking at all but just quietly, equanimously, observing sensations arising and passing away.

Out of the meditation sessions, as a dhamma worker we can talk (imagine the disasters in the kitchen if not) and so as a children’s course ended I chatted with a woman who told me ‘It’s all about loving yourself.’ She said ‘Go travel alone, live alone, find a friend in yourself.’

Hmmm. Have done. Didn’t make the grade. I mean how much travelling alone must one do?

She says ‘Ohh but did you do it from love of self, or from lack? Running towards or running away?’

Hmmmm.

Thoughts flash of travelling alone and yearning for contact, for an arm to stroke, to feel someone’s hands on my lower back walking down a street.

‘Maybe you need to learn to live alone?’

I think of the isolation in the other house I lived in on the Greek hillside, hours playing the trumpet, painting, meditating, and doing all sorts of stuff that I like, thinking how much better it would be with someone else. 

She suggests baths, with Chardonnay and candles.

Yes, that would be nice.

But still it doesn’t get down to the bottom of it for me. Everyone has their own root causes, and sitting so many hours with myself, in that hall, is still not bringing out the love. Everything but. I’m finding that I am addicted to yearning for a man. I find I yearn for him more when I feel insecure. So I’m yearning for security. I yearn for him when I am tired. So I’m yearning energy. I yearn for him to tell me that I am funny, and bright and that I am worth keeping alive.

It’s not really a positive point of view.

‘Uff,’ I say ‘why is it so difficult?’

We look into each other’s eyes, sensing we have gone through the same: beating up on ourselves for no apparent reason.

‘I would never to talk to a friend like I talked to myself,’ she admits.

‘I know,’ I collude. I’ve thought that many times before.

‘But now, I’m pleased to say, I hardly beat myself up at all. I am loving to myself, I am soft, and as I become softer, the outer world does too.’

I realise in that wide, deep, chasm of comparison, that I have barriers to that inner calm, to that inner peace, where the mind is at rest.

‘I think I’m addicted to yearning for men,’ I admit for the first time out loud, as much to myself as to her. I shrink back wondering how she will react.

‘Who isn’t?’

I feel the relief flood through my pores.

Over these meditation days I have realised that I’m addicted to the fantasy of relationships, to craving for a man, as if ‘the one’ were the key to my everlasting fairytale happiness, where no longer will I need to sit through the agony of facing myself and my shadow: a magic cure for all.

I mean actually when you think about it, it is so embarrassing infantile, that you would only really want to admit it to a stranger at the bus stop.

‘You can spend half a meditation session dreaming about a man,’ she says.

I look at her alarmed, only thirty minutes? She senses it and amends, ‘I guess we can spend half our lives wasting away with all that craving.’

And so, the wonderful woman with the calm, deep still eyes, continues. ‘When you can love yourself, you begin to really get to know yourself, who you are, what you are, and only then can you set healthy limits.’ She pauses as if laughing inside to herself ‘I thought that I couldn’t be myself, and, be in a committed relationship at the same time. I travelled the world alone, I wrote a book, I did research in the United States alone…’

I look at her, wondering if she is going to add anything new.

With a blast to my innerds she says, ‘That idea of not being able to be in a relationship and be yourself, I realised, was just more bashing up on myself, more self abuse.’

Wow, what a turnaround!…Maybe it’s not always such a brave thing to march on alone with the banner of ‘self searcher’. Could it be just be another subtle way in which we can abuse ourselves, telling ourselves that we can’t be in a nourishing relationship? Perhaps being nourished in a relationship is actually what we need to allow ourselves? 

‘Because, actually,’ she continues ‘if you love yourself you can, you really can, maintain that relationship with yourself, while setting healthy limits and creating space for your own growth while in a relationship with someone else too.’

I checked. This seemed too good to be true, ‘Are you in a relationship now?’ 

‘I’m going into the beginning of a relationship.’

Nice.

‘But of course setting boundaries might sometimes mean leaving a relationship with another if it is not as nourishing as being by yourself.’

I nod, suddenly eager to move onwards into the bubble bath, not alone but by myself.

Post Script

So of course I didn’t go into a bubble bath, there are no baths in a meditation center, instead I went into a ten-day silent course. In between one of the breaks I walked into the fields and stood there, it had gone dark and the stars were shining in that way where you wonder how so many fit in and yet still maintain the deep dark velvet space around them. 

I was alone. And I found myself wanting to get to the end the course so that I could tell someone what I had done so they could say ‘Well done! I’m so proud of you!’ when I realised there is no-one waiting for me at the finishing line. It was then that I realised that actually here, deep inside this meditative place, I could say it to myself.

‘I’m proud of you,’ I said to myself, and suddenly I realised that actually I really am.

It is not easy to do ten and a half hours of meditation each day, going into the depths, facing myself and I do it patiently and persistently, without complaining, waking up everyday at 4.15am even though I really don’t want to. I put in all my efforts, even when I’m exhausted. I keep chipping away into deeper concentration, observing, feeling sensations. It is not easy and yet I do it. 

I really am proud of myself. Really. 

And suddenly I don’t need anyone to tell it to me.