Tag: enlightenment

I rather love Sundays. It’s a bit strange, that, since I live and spend most of my time alone, so there’s not much difference between Sundays and other days. But there is a difference, on two counts. The first is that this is the day of the week that I take my cancer drugs – Ixazomib, Lanalidomide and Dexamethasone. I have a small breakfast, fast for two hours, take the drugs and then fast for another hour or so. Then I spend much of the rest of the day rather out of my head. But at least it’s legal.

The second is the Sunday meditation. By evening, the drug effects have worn off a bit, helped by a herb I take called Resveratrol (Japanese Knotweed, no less), which helps balance me out, and with absorption of the drugs.

I’ve been doing the meditation since the 1990s, almost without fail, around 1,500 times now. Yes, if committedly you do a meditation once a week, it adds up.

The numbers don’t matter but, during that time, some of those meditations will in some way be extra special, even life-shifting. Looking back over my life, though I’ve done a few things with it, my feeling is that these meditations have been one of the most significant things I have done, ever.

No one and nothing have been able to stop me, because it can be done at a bus stop, in the corner of a cafe or even when in distinctly unsupportive company. You just have to go quiet and lock on to the beam. I’ve even delivered a few public talks during the meditation, letting my friends upstairs drop ideas into me for conveying to the audience. I even did it once in Israeli detention at Checkpoint 500 outside Bethlehem, but it wasn’t serious and they let me out thanks to good behaviour. The tofu I was carrying, which I’d bought in Tel Aviv, looked to them like Semtex, but the officer in charge rather liked me, letting me go. I didn’t have the profile, vibe or age of a terrorist, he reckoned.

But, most weeks, it’s a day of return. Return to a certain perspective that comes with the meditation, even before it starts. It’s a bit like going home. Regardless of what has happened in the previous week, and regardless of my state of mind and heart, which at times are not at peace, I can lock back into the energy-space, the continuity, the flow of the meditation.

Yet it’s different every time too – it’s a parallel thread of sanity, of re-anchoring and of bathing in the blessing-field of the inner, deep-space overlighters who preside over the occasion. They do things to me, or sometimes they set tasks, or sometimes I’m just floating in their energy-world.

Sometimes I section up the meditation. It starts with a self-healing routine with my ‘inner doctors’, who scan me, flood me with light and sometimes perform operations. For this to work I have to clear my psyche, empty myself out, let them in and allow them to draw me up to their level.

Then we progress to ‘any other business’ – and this varies a lot from week to week. Often it involves seeing things going on at the time in a different light, or blessing and thanking those who have troubled me, or changing my position in an energy-constellation of relationships and situations, to unlock them, and to own up, at least to myself, about the ways I have contributed to creating or maintaining the situation. Even if it involves Donald Trump – poor man.

Then comes the work. If I don’t already know where to go, I ask my inner friends to send me to a world situation where I might be able to bring some release, healing and forwardness, or do some spiritual mop-up, or, a bit like a surveillance drone, connect them into the details of a situation so that they can do what they need to do with it. Recently this has concerned Iran, though I’ve done a lot with the two Palestines too.

Then it comes to an end and, amazingly, the blessing-field shuts off. This can be quite distinct, and always exactly at 7.30 GMT. If I’m sleepy I sometimes doze off at that time. Sometimes I go into a different kind of meditation, and sometimes I get up.

Then I spend the rest of the evening in a reflective state and, if I have thought ahead, by then a meal will have simmered its way to readiness in my slow-cooker. Or perhaps Claire or Selena, two members of Friends of Palden, bless them, have left some food in the fridge.

I’m so fortunate to have a small group of helpers who look after me, and I’m so grateful to them for that. It means so much to me, and I am so happy that they feel it is worth it. I’m also at present super-grateful to my former partner, who left four years ago, for the love and care she gave during my first two years of my cancer journey. I became too much for her. Sometimes we truly appreciate things and people when we no longer have them – and this emptiness can also be a gift if we make it so.

If you don’t know about the meditation, try here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html – and, if you wish, do join in. It’s your choice and your move. You might be meditating alone, physically, wherever you are, but you are in good company. Just do whatever meditation you normally do, except with us – this is about spiritual diversity.

Meditation times for different countries are below.

And now it is time for breakfast and pills! And for another day, feeding the birds, going for a staggery walk and delighting in the silence of my own company. Yesterday I felt unhappy being alone but today it is different: loneliness is a feeling while aloneness is a simple fact, and that feeling can be changed.

Because everything is a gift. As many of my Arabic friends would say, everything comes from and returns to Allah. We bathe in the wide-open field of the Vastness. And ever shall it thus be so.

Love from me. Palden.

———————

Current meditation times, on Sundays:
GMT: UK, Iceland, Ireland & Portugal: 7-7.30pm
W Europe: 8-8.30pm
E Europe, Turkiye, Israel, Palestine, Egypt: 9-9.30pm
Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, UAE: 10-10.30pm
Pakistan: midnight-00.30 Monday
India: 00.30-01.00 Monday
Oz: AEST 5-5.30am Monday
NZ: 8-8.30am Monday
Greenland: 5-5.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile 3-3.30pm
EST, Cuba 2-2.30pm
CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 1-1.30pm
PST, West Coast North America 11am-11.30am