contemplative practice | Contemplative Inquiry

BUDDHA FAILED

Here is the late Tantric teacher Osho’s take on Gautama Siddhartha’s awakening.

“Buddha failed absolutely. After six years he was completely frustrated, and when I say completely, then I mean completely. Not even a single fragment of hope remained; he became absolutely hopeless. In that hopelessness he dropped all effort. He had already dropped the world, he had already left his kingdom; all that belongs to this visible world he had left, renounced.

“Now after six years of strenuous effort he also left all that belongs to the other world. He was in a complete vacuum – empty. That night his sleep was of a different quality because there was no ego; a different quality of silence arose because there was no effort; a different quality of being happened to him that night because there was no dreaming.

…

“That night, when there was nothing to be done – this world was already useless, now the other world was also useless – all motivation to move ceased. There was nowhere to go and there was no one to go anywhere. That night sleep became samadhi, it became satori; it became the ultimate thing that can happen to a man. Buddha flowered that night and in the morning he was enlightened. He opened his eyes, looked at the last star disappearing in the sky, and everything was there. It had always been there, but he had wanted it so much that he couldn’t see it. It had always been there, but he had been moving so much in the future with desire that he could not look at the here and now.

“That night there was no desire, no goal, nowhere to go, and no one to go anywhere – all effort ceased. Suddenly he became aware of himself, suddenly he became aware of reality as it is.”

Osho When the shoe fits: commentaries on the stories of the Taoist mystic Chuang Tzu London: Watkins Publishing, 2004

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September 12, 2016

DRUID CONTEMPLATIVE DAYS

On 1 October Elaine Knight and I will be holding our tenth Druid contemplative retreat day since we began in July 2012. Over the years we have also offered shorter sessions and a weekend retreat (in April 2015). Yet by and large we find that day retreats are the best format for our offer to the community.

Shorter monthly sessions work fine for our local ongoing group, in a context of experience and continuity. But when new people are coming in and meeting each other, we want the spaciousness of a day. A day is enough to build the kind of experience we are aiming at. We are not offering complex teaching that needs extended time to unfold, and we don’t need the dynamics of residential community for our focused and limited purpose.

It looks as though we will have 10-12 people on 1 October and we have reached the point at which we know the day will pay for itself. This is within the ideal range for our kind of day – two or three more or less is also fine. Elaine and I will be co-facilitating this event with Nimue and Tom Brown.

I look back and see ‘contemplative Druidry’ as a project. Retrospectively, I find project a better word than ‘inquiry’, though an inquiry element has been present. I began the project by testing the word ‘contemplative’ itself. Was it going to be resonant or even meaningful in Druidry? I wrote articles in the OBOD membership publication Touchstone asking for people to contact me with their views and, subsequently, describing our early ventures. I created the Contemplative Druidry Facebook Group in August 2012. This is still going strong with nearly 1700 members (as at 12 September 2016), though I have not been involved in moderating it for over three years. Over time it became clear that the term does mean something. Although it caused some confusion and questioning at first, it has been taken up. As we developed our practical work, it became easier to explain and discuss.

With the help of a considerable number of other people I was able to publish the book Contemplative Druidry in October 2014. It is still selling and still witnesses the life experience of real people exploring Druidry (frequently among other traditions) and explaining why a contemplative thread matters to them. As time has gone on one of the outstanding questions has been whether there is a particular group of people who can be marked out as ‘contemplative Druids’. I think at this distance the answer is a qualified ‘no’, qualified, because some are clearly contemplative in emphasis. But Druidry is such an extensive field, or interlocking set of fields, that only a few people cover everything. In the end I decided for myself that ‘Contemplative Druid’, as a description of particular people, was a splitting and otherising kind of term (potentially in both directions) and so best avoided. This is why we now talk of ‘Druid contemplative days’ rather than ‘Contemplative Druid days’.

My sense of project is coming to an end. My personal contemplative inquiry, which has always had a degree of separation from the project, is continuing with a different emphasis. But we have a group, and we have the days. Our capacity to provide days is proportionate to the demand for them: no problem there. So I expect this work to continue. For me, it will be my one active role in Druidry. It doesn’t contradict anything else I am doing or likely to be doing. So I look forward to this day, and the continuing life of the group.

Further information on the days can be found at http://contemplativedruidevents.tumblr.com/

James Nichol (2014) Contemplative Druidry people, practice and potential Amazon/Kindle (Foreword by Philip Carr-Gomm

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Contemplative-Druidry-People-Practice-Potential-ebook/dp/B00OBJAOES/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1

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July 1, 2016

METHODS IN CONTEMPLATIVE INQUIRY: PART 3

This post is about meditation, and looks at three approaches to meditation supportive of contemplative inquiry. The first is that of the Headless Way, the second is Sophian meditation, and the third is a form of breath awareness meditation.

The Headless Way

I have been working with the Headless Way – a path devised by the late Douglas Harding (1) – for 3 months, having started at the end of March. I include a ‘headless’ exercise in my morning practice on completion of my chakra work and in my understanding the experience is that of the 7^th chakra, an empty awareness holding all the others. It begins with pointing first outwards and then inwards at our own heads, and then coming up with a literal description of what we actually see. On doing this for the first time, I wrote: “Looking out – curtains, folds, blueness; Looking at body – arm, flesh, patterning; Looking in – nothing but space and the ‘external’ impressions that fill it. An odd sense of relief, building to lightness and joy”. Later I talked of “space instead of head, never moving, always now” and how “world and sky rested on shoulders”. This experience, “seeing through the eye of Spirit”, as I called it quite early in the piece, tended not to last long in linear time in the early days, but “I experienced an extended afterglow in which a warmth and radiance of being continued”.

I find that, as Douglas Harding said, “the initial seeing gives the ability to renew it. Since the Absence of things here is as plainly visible and as coolly factual as their presence there, the seeing of this Absence is available any time, at will”. Not dependent on ideas or feelings, it is a contemplative path without the trappings of mysticism, available “at least as much” in the market place as in the meditation hall. Now I am familiar with it, I probably wouldn’t say “seeing through the eye of Spirit”, and some of the glow has gone. But regular practice has given me a reliable method of establishing a habit of conscious 1^st personhood as “No-thingness here”. The work now is to maintain this perspective whilst giving full honour to my embodied every day self – the life of the other six chakras.

Breath meditation

I still have a role for breath based meditation, and I like the version I alluded to in a January 2016 (2) post reviewing Russel Williams’ Not I, Not Other Than I (3). Here are his instructions, followed by my comments:

“Feel down here, a little bit above the navel you’ll find the right place. Centre yourself there, in feeling. Observe your breathing, in the sense of the expansion and contraction of the outer part of the body, as if it were a balloon …” From here we are guided to notice the calming and peaceful effects of this “gentle movement, this comfortable gentle movement … absence of agitation, peacefulness … a kind of heartfelt warmth of feeling … it feels homely, as though you belong there … And as though it were a light”. We then move outwards from the “balloon” to include the whole physical body and then go beyond it. “It reaches out in all directions … and begins to feel at home with all its surroundings, whether it be animate or inanimate … of the same nature” …. And so on into silence for a few minutes. At the end of the meditation the practitioner is asked to draw back into the “very centre”, making sure it is “still peaceful and warm” before returning to normal consciousness.

“What I learned from this was the flavour of ‘sense-feeling’, a specifically located warmth, a sense of quiet movement, qualities of gentleness and peace. Nurturing is another favourite Williams word. These qualities fill the body-mind and move beyond it, filling emptiness, engendering loving-kindness. In a group meditation, Williams reports that they can create a deep rapport and subtle meeting place between participants. The aim is to develop “such gentle perception that you could compare it to a finger, soft and warm, touching a snow flake, but so delicate that the flake doesn’t melt”. From there, we can begin to see into the nature of things, becoming aware of a different reality, expanding into it until we become “boundless”. This is achieved not by any great effort, but by simply letting go.”

Whereas Headless Way seeing is best done standing up, this meditation is for sitting or reclining. However, in the reclining position, especially on a bed, I am liable to go to sleep. The quality of sleep is deep and refreshing, and I like it. But the posture is undoubtedly problematic for the more earnest and goal-oriented meditator. For me, the Headless approach is linked more strongly to inquiry, so the relaxation offered here is absolutely fine.

Sophian Meditation

I gave an example of Sophia meditation in my Re-dedication post in May (4). I wrote: “I open my heart to the wisdom of Sophia and gaze at my icon”, then going into reflective mode about recent contemplative work in the Druid community. On completing this period of reflection, I went deeper, saying: “I close my eyes and slip into Sophia’s Innerworld nemeton, which takes the form of a walled garden”.

I do this mediation sitting, and despite closing my eyes I do not find myself going to sleep. The basic setting doesn’t vary much. It is a familiar and well-worked Innerworld space. “At the centre is a fountain surrounded by four rose beds separated by run-offs. Two of the beds hold white roses, and two hold red. There are seats around the fountain, big enough for two people, on all four sides. The rest of the garden is more of an orchard with many kinds of fruit tree, including some trained up the garden walls. These walls are brick, and have an eighteenth century feel. The orchard isn’t over-manicured. It might indeed be described as slightly unkempt, though not with any sense of neglect.”

Specific characteristics vary a lot, and much of the communication available to me here is through the variances in setting, or how Sophia presents herself, rather than through actual dialogue. When I visit this garden, the Sophia of the icon may sit opposite or beside me. But she may also take different forms – a dove, a rose, a tree, the fountain itself. She may be another bird or creature that turns up in the space. She may be sunlight in a drop of water. I may also experience her as all of it, so that goddess and nemeton are one. She is always a friend and guide. In my re-dedication piece, I went on the describe the specific circumstances of the day:

“This time she is in her icon form, though the dove is in a tree and the chalice by her side as she sits opposite me, in the late May dawn, east facing west. I go into my headless state and know that the same is true of her. But the context (the Innerworld, in this garden, with Sophia) changes the state, making it more intimate, relational and local. I like it. In my heart, I have more care about the particularities, indeed vagaries, of the writing than the pristine emptiness of the paper that holds them, though both perspectives matter and they do belong together. If form is nothing but emptiness, and emptiness nothing but form, then what we always have is paper being written on, and it is the story writing itself that mostly draws a storying monkey like me.

“As this thought, within my living dream of the garden, passes through, Sophia comes to sit beside me. We are simply companionable, watching the fountain, as the clear fresh water bubbles up. It is from an inexhaustible spring. In this archetypal garden setting, Sophia renews an eternal pledge – that wisdom’s commitment is to extend and transmute knowledge, and not to repress it. And in this moment the garden, the fountain and Sophia begin to fade …”

Next Post

The final post in this series will be about questions of interpretation in contemplative inquiry.

(1) Http://www.headless.org

(2) https://contemplativeinquiry.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/book-review-not-i-not-other-than-i/

(3) Russel Williams Not I, not other than I: the life and spiritual teachings of Russel Williams Winchester, UK & Washington, USA: O Books, 2015 (Edited by Steve Taylor)

(4) https://contemplativeinquiry.wordpress.com/2016/05/26/re-dedication/

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April 19, 2016

CONTEMPLATIVE DRUID PRACTICE: SIMPLE AND PROFOUND?

People of like intent working together. That was an early principle of our Druid contemplative retreat days, when we started in July 2012. We didn’t have to be like-minded, in the sense of having a common doctrine, or even of entering a common spiritual trance. That’s one reason for choosing plain, open and simple practices.

We have carried on in that spirit ever since, and it means that people who have otherwise diverse practices and views can comfortably share our contemplative space. My sense over the years has been that, essentially, this way of working has a restorative and regenerative role for people who live with the pressures of busy and/or challenging lives. That would include most of us, Druids or not.

Then there is the thought of being ‘simple and profound’. The ‘simple’ is easy to describe. We are very sparse in our use of ritual or mythic narrative. Rather, we enter into more conscious relationship with the space we are in and with each other. We are attentive to where we stand in the wheel of the year, what the actual conditions are like, what we notice around us and the effects on us. On retreat days we make sure of including time outdoors. We spend time side by side in solo meditative silence, turning within. We also spend time in a more outwardly attuned collective silence (Awen space), from within which we may speak or sing out. Sometimes we have specific activities like toning, chanting, meditative exercises, or contemplative drawing.

What about the ‘profound’? In Moon Book’s recently published Pagan Planet (1) I wrote a short piece called Living Presence in a Field of Living Presence: Practicing Contemplative Druidry. For me, being ‘living presence within a field of living presence’, and living this presence more consciously, is the key to any deepening that we may find in our simplicity. It enables both the transformative potential of ‘knowing’ ourselves a little more, and does so within a context of interconnectedness.

I find that when I cut to the chase, and get to this experiential level, I need have no worries about working the Headless Way or how it fits with Druidry. My solo practices and meaning-making have indeed undergone a shift, yet Druid contemplative sessions and retreat days remain a highly appropriate and nourishing vehicle for practice and community.

(1) Nimue Brown (ed.) Pagan Planet: Being, Believing & Belonging in the 21^st. Century Winchester, UK & Washington, USA: Moon Books, 2016

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March 18, 2016

CONTEMPLATIVE INQUIRY IN ACTION

For me, active spirituality is based on inquiry rather than faith. Formal inquiry moves in cycles, and in my experience each cycle has a number of phases:

Intuitive musing, gradually distilling into a sense of direction
Crystalizing intent, and refining it with the work of preparation
Actualizing the intent
Relaxing after the intent is achieved
Reflection/review on the process and harvesting its fruit
Wondering whether the inquiry needs another cycle, which may move me on to more intuitive musing …

I’ve just had a period of down time from intensive practice. For a few weeks I let it go, my attention elsewhere. I’m just beginning to pick the work up again, at a reduced level of intensity. My sense of things after the break is not quite the same as my sense of things before, even though there is a great deal of continuity. Now as I return to the work, I would describe my Druid contemplative inquiry as being in the reflection phase of a long cycle.

Late in 2011 – specifically at Samhain – I was sufficiently prepared and intentional to launch an inquiry into contemplative practice within a Druid setting. This launch was fully ritualized and dedicated to the Goddess in her wisdom aspect. It was both a personal and collective inquiry from the beginning, and in this post I’m thinking mostly about the collective work. From the beginning of 2012 I was reaching out to and involving other people, with the first retreat day in July of that year.

Along the way we have co-created specific forms of group work. By the Spring of 2014 I had enough sense of the work and its direction to devise the questions for the interviews in Contemplative Druidry: People Practice and Potential and in this period I began the interviews themselves. The book was published in the following October. Two years later we have an available and tested means of doing Druid contemplative practice in group settings. Speaking for myself, this has made contemplative Druidry easier to talk about as a community practice, because I have a point or reference which involves things that people do and ways in which we benefit. This helps to keep the conversation grounded.

I now feel confident to let the process evolve by itself. I expect change and development and I expect to have a role in them. I want to reflect on how the process went and draw some conclusions. I will continue to integrate the work into my life. But I don’t think I need another inquiry cycle.

I’m in a parallel process in my personal contemplative practice – also at the reflection/review stage, but I’m not as far on with that and not yet clear about further cycles. More of that later. If there is another cycle I’m not sure that it will be either entirely contemplative or entirely Druid, though it will certainly incorporate elements of both and the learning from them.

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January 25, 2016

CONTEMPLATIVE DRUIDRY IN 3 SENTENCES

Elaine and I were recently asked by a non-Druid local group to define contemplative Druidry in 3 sentences. This is what we came up with.

“Contemplative practice in Druidry supports what has been called ‘the Nature mysticism of modern Druidry’. Our understandings of what this means are provisional and inquiring – those of us who follow the Druid way are encouraged to craft our own practices in accordance with our inner guidance, our needs and wishes. Practices in the Stroud-based group include group meditation, personal sharing, outside walking meditation, chanting and contemplative arts.”

This mix of practices also forms the basis of our retreat days for the wider Druid and fellow-travelling community. This year we are running two such days – one in London on Sunday 7 February and the other in Stroud on Saturday 1 October together with Nimue and Tom Brown. See also http://contemplativedruidevents.tumblr.com

We owe the phrase ‘the Nature mysticism of modern Druidry’ to Philip Carr-Gomm, who leads the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD), who used it in his foreword to Contemplative Druidry: People Practice and Potential. He also pointed out that the Druid way as a whole is one where we take responsibility for crafting our own practices. We see this a something we need to emphasise, since this approach is still unusual in spiritual movements as a whole.

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November 23, 2015

STOCKTAKING

In 2014 The Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD) celebrated its 50th anniversary. It’s now just over 22 years since I first joined. Where am I now?

I remember being reassured by the way in which OBOD was able to hold a point of tension between two seemingly competing narratives. The first was the sense of living relationship with the land and the inheritance of ancestral stories. The second was an open and generous universalism. Without the first, the second could be vague and vapid. Without the second, the first could become culturally inward-turning and defensive. I’ve always been grateful for this balance.

As part of the 50th anniversary year, Sharon Zak and Maria Ede-Weaving put together The Golden Seed: Celebrating 50 Years of OBOD as “an anthology of prose, poetry, images and crafts” (including a DVD) created by OBOD members and friends. It is still referenced at http://www.druidry.org though currently unavailable. In my own entry I said I was more comfortable with a language of “practising OBOD Druidry” than “being an OBOD Druid”. That’s how I still see it and I would now want to add that this practice itself sits within a (for me) larger framework that I would name as the Way of Sophia. This has been true for quite a while, and I will write about it more in the future. Here I just want to say where my Druidry continues to fit.

There are two huge lessons that I draw from Druidry. The first is about how to do solo practice. I can’t now imagine a core solo practice that doesn’t take place in a sacred circle, woven of ritual and liturgy. Allowing a slow evolution of movement and liturgy, I gain insight into my purpose and intent in a way that offers both clarity and embodiment. Within that circle, I include body and energy work and also some form of sitting meditation: the precise forms vary. There’s also an aspect of healing and blessing. Thanks to the OBOD distance learning course, this approach to practice has become second nature. Someone could have given me a list of instructions to this effect on the back of an envelope and I might have had a go with different aspects from time to time before coming across something else on the back of another envelope. But I had the chance to build an evolving practice over an extended period, in a way that was both self-directing (I have an allergy to gurus) and within a tradition that made support and guidance available (I also don’t operate brilliantly if unwitnessed and alone). This combination is quite rare in spiritual education, and it’s a great privilege to have a continuing relationship with this work on the mentoring side. The course covers a lot of other ground as well. But this was the piece that was transformational for me.

The second lesson concerns two intertwining challenges. Both are connected to the contemplative inquiry I’ve been involved in for just over four years. One is the challenge of responding to the Order’s invitation to members to take initiatives and offer varying forms of leadership, whilst still (if we so choose) being held within the collective and feeling part of it. The other is the contemplative journey itself. This has involved the further evolution of solo practice, but more importantly to the co-creation of an innovative house-style in group work and in particular of Day Retreats for small groups. I and my colleagues seem to have a good handle on this now, both within our own local group and in the wider community of Druids and fellow travellers.

These lessons are my guide as to where to put my energy within Druidry, offering contexts of connection, service and nourishment.

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October 26, 2015

SAMHAIN GIFT

A Samhain gift from Sophia. Here, the pentagram image stands for a cycle of meditations, a pathway to wisdom. We move from peace (bottom left, the earth position) to joy (right hand, the water position) to love (left hand, the air position) to healing (bottom right, the fire position) to wisdom (top, the spirit position) and back to peace again.

It seems that for me inner peace, as well as being a condition of any real peace, is also the beginning of wisdom. Inner peace is a blessing and it is also a skill. We can learn how to access and develop it, though for many of us it doesn’t come easy.

The learning and practice are likely to involve encounters with distraction, agitation and turmoil. I find that there are two ways of addressing this – one is to have ways of diminishing and dispersing them; the other is to find a still point of peace within the distraction, agitation and turmoil themselves. Peace has its place within aroused states as well as calm ones. Essentially, I experience peace as a fundamental at-homeness, an affirmative being and belonging in the world.

Peace is the bedrock. But it isn’t everything. Rather, it opens possibilities. The first is joy, a kind of joy that comes from within peace. This joy may be still. It may be flowing. It may be calm. It may also be ecstatic. Peace and joy together create a very powerful internal state and in my view form the basis for the outward turn to love and aware engagement. This in turn enables the energy of healing – in relation to self, other and world.

The step to wisdom is next, though it assumes a parallel work of knowledge-building and understanding outside the meditative setting. Wisdom depends on these, yet is qualitatively different. In my experience it’s the qualities nurtured by intentional contemplative practice that make the difference.

In this view I acknowledge the influence of the Mahayana Buddhist idea of prajna, where wisdom is a union of spiritual knowledge (jnana) and compassion. The core text of Mahayana Buddhism is the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra (1), with prajnaparamita represented as a deep meditative state and also personified as Prajnaparamita mother of the Buddhas, just as further to the west Sophia has been represented as the mother of angels. In the text of the Heart Sutra the Buddha Gautama Siddhartha provides instruction to his disciple Avolokitesvara, who went on to develop a powerful female alter ego as the great Chinese bodhisattva Guan Yin – another Sophian figure.

The Sophian pentagram first came to me as a compelling image; then as a sequence of words. From there I quickly identified specific practices (already individually familiar) to work with the named qualities and states. It feels as if I’ve been given a direction for the next phase of my personal inquiry and practice, and it’s good to have that direction as a Samhain gift from Sophia.

The Heart Sutra: the Womb of the Buddhas Translation and Commentary by Red Pine. Berkeley, CA, USA: Counterpoint, 2004

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October 23, 2015

CONTEMPLATIVE DRUIDRY IN PAGAN DAWN

Gratitude and celebrations! The new edition of Pagan Dawn has given me the opportunity to describe contemplative Druid practice, as we have been developing it in recent years, to a wider Pagan and like-minded public.

In the meantime Contemplative Druid Events has arranged three open events for 2016:

7 February Dark of the Moon workshop in central London in Treadwell’s workshop space at 33 Store Street, London, WC1E 7BS. Facilitated by James Nichol and Elaine Knight. We will greet the dark of the moon using contemplative and visionary methods drawn from the evolving tradition of modern contemplative Druidry. Our programme will include contemplative exercises, subtle energy work, animist communion, silent sitting and Awen space group meditation. Anyone with an interest is welcome to come.

15-17 April Our annual Birchwood Retreat at Anybody’s Barn, Birchwood Hall, Storridge, Nr. Malvern, Worcestershire WR13 5EZ. Facilitated by James Nichol, Karen Webb, Elaine Knight and J.J.Howell. Arrivals from 4.30 p.m. for 6.30 p.m. supper on Friday; departures by 4.30 p.m. on Sunday. Accommodation and full board included. Anyone with an interest is welcome to come.

1 October Contemplative Day in Stroud, from 10.30 a.m. – 4.30 p.m. at the St. Luke’s Medical Centre, 53 Cainscross Road, Stroud GL5 4EX. Facilitation by James Nichol, Elaine Knight, Nimue Brown and Tom Brown. Anyone with an interest is welcome to come. At the time of writing there are places on all of these events, though the London one is now filling up. For information on costs please see: http://contemplativedruidevents.tumblr.com or write to grovelight@hotmail.co.uk

For Pagan Dawn, if you’re in the UK, check this link:

https://paganfed.org/shop/pagan-dawn?product_id=96

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October 13, 2015

ANAM CARA

This post is about the anam cara, or spiritual friend in Gaelic tradition, and about the use of language. Recently I wrote about allowing more space and using fewer words. This wasn’t a renunciate view of language, which I value highly. My hope was that “more space” would allow “something new to emerge”, and that my words, though fewer, would be better chosen.

I am starting to see some fruits from this strategy. I’ve also recently said that I experienced Sophia “as a psychopomp or inner guru”. Now I would say, “anam cara”. This term is known from the early days of Christian monasticism in Ireland and is in current use within the Scottish-based Celie De – see http://www.ceilede.co.uk/

It is a mentoring relationship, not a peer one, but it includes the sense of a real personal connection, not just a role. People speculate about whether it is an inheritance from indigenous Druidry. Subjectively, my relation with Sophia feels like this: much more than psychopomp or inner guru. In my understanding ‘anam cara’ is gentler, subtler and less formal.

The Sophia I experience is not a rhetorical device (personification) or a glove puppet arbitrarily selected by me. She is also not – in my sense of things – a mind independent celestial being. Rather she is the felt presence, the voice, and at times the image of a deeper nature – and my inner link with the Oran Mor (the song of what is). From a personality perspective, this deeper nature is ‘not me’ and not owned and controlled by ‘me’, so I have to work at relationship.

From the perspective of deeper nature, the separation doesn’t exist. At times Sophia can point beyond herself and then I may enter the subjectivity of deeper nature and experience the world differently. The little ‘I’ and the anam cara are as one, beyond separation and immersed in the song. But most of the time that’s not how it is in my subjective life world, and a link to that fuller reality is provided by Sophia and her nudgings and promptings.

I don’t make any fundamental distinction between nature and spirit. All, for me, is contained in the word nature (or terms like the Oran Mor). Nothing is lost. Cosmos, relationship and practice remain the same. But the use of a nature language is truer to my experience.

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Contemplative Inquiry

Tag: contemplative practice

October 7, 2016

BUDDHA FAILED

September 12, 2016

DRUID CONTEMPLATIVE DAYS

July 1, 2016

METHODS IN CONTEMPLATIVE INQUIRY: PART 3

April 19, 2016

CONTEMPLATIVE DRUID PRACTICE: SIMPLE AND PROFOUND?

March 18, 2016

CONTEMPLATIVE INQUIRY IN ACTION

January 25, 2016

CONTEMPLATIVE DRUIDRY IN 3 SENTENCES

November 23, 2015

STOCKTAKING

October 26, 2015

SAMHAIN GIFT

October 23, 2015

CONTEMPLATIVE DRUIDRY IN PAGAN DAWN

October 13, 2015

ANAM CARA