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meditation

Inhaling and exhaling…

I love walking alongside rivers and estuaries and seafronts and hearing water lapping, and waves washing. The best place for ideas, and writing, and thinking, dreaming, living and breathing. And this is why…

“Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. I know that I am listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years, and it takes me out of a world of relentlessly ticking clocks. Clocks for some reason or other always seem to be marching, and, as with armies, marching is never to anything but doom. But in the motion of waves there is no marching rhythm. It harmonizes with our very breathing. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, of marking out how much still remains. It is the breathing of eternity, like the God Brahma of Indian mythology inhaling and exhaling, manifesting and dissolving the worlds, forever. As a mere conception this might sound appallingly monotonous, until you come to listen to the breaking and washing of waves.”

Alan Watts

I recommend breathing…

I meditate. Not as much as I feel that I should. Some of my friends mock me for ‘breathing’ and tell me that I’ve changed (the latter is a good thing. I am, they tell me, much calmer and less sarcastic and outspoken these days. Calmer being, I think in my friends’ use, a synonym for boring. I’ll take that).  Dan Harmon, the writer of Community and a hero of mine, declares that he takes “four deep four second breaths four times a day and it makes me better than you so eat it.” I wouldn’t go as far as declaring that my attempts at meditation make me better than anyone, but it has certainly made me feel better and, more importantly, aware of the following…

“We could say that meditation doesn’t have a reason or doesn’t have a purpose. In this respect it’s unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.”

Alan Watts