mental health – Notes from the Far Beyond

Looking Within

This time of year it’s easy to feel battered by life. Things just get to be too much. This is part of the syndrome of modern times – we get overloaded and stressed, landing up in a routine of juggling too many balls, and we lose our way. We end up wondering what it’s all about and why we’re living our lives the way we do. This is an important truth point.

When I got cancer six years ago I had to look at what I had done in my life to bring it about, or to make myself vulnerable to it. We can blame such things on this or that but, in the end, it’s us. I realised that I had been both harmed and helped by moments like this – times when I was strung out on a busy and engaged life, pushing myself, trying to keep up with everything that was required of me, trying to do my best.

I was harmed because at times like this we actually generate the seeds of future illness. These are times of vulnerability, overstretchedness, worry and, if we are honest, times when we swim around in our guilt and fear, in unconscious stuff that we never have time to look at or to process through.

So we lay it down as a pattern, a pattern of fear which becomes a bit harder to look at another time. This is where the root causes of later illnesses or disabilities arise – in those stuffed-away, shadowy segments of our psyche where we don’t want to look. This is where we have power change our futures.

I was also helped by times like this. They give moments of self-examination and soul searching, an opportunity to pay attention, at the very time when we need to do so – even in the middle of busily stressful, dissonant and portentous junctures.

One of the greatest mass self-destruction errors of today is the setting aside of essential soul matters in order to tread the mill, to pursue our important agendas, in which we carry the weight of the world, fight our loved ones and get worked up over small things (like supermarket queues).

We lose our way. We lose our sense of the real reason why we’re doing all this business of being alive on a planet. I mean, what on Earth am I doing with my life?

It is very important, amidst these times of So Many Important Things, to give ourselves proper quality time, being quiet, giving ourselves timetable-free space, relaxing, yielding, taking it easy, changing the subject inside ourselves, and letting new information, energy, healing or blessing come into us.

This is a matter of allowing. It’s not about making it happen. Unless you really want to, you don’t have to pay large amounts of money to go on retreats or to exciting places in the mountains of Turkiye: it’s a matter of giving time and space now, today, even if just for an hour.

When I was examining myself and the causes of the cancer that I was suddenly given in 2019, I came to see the roots of my cancer in moments like this. It’s to do with those times when we have stuff coming up from deeper down, changes going on, truth emerging – and, we tell ourselves, we’re too busy, and we can’t give it the attention it is due right now. Later.

We often set aside these moments, these openings of doors. Thus we lay down patterns which can lead to future regret. Or at least to future times when conscience and consciousness are squeezed and wrung out of us, by force of circumstance. Times when our souls decide to present us with hard, inescapable truths.

It’s not about being perfect. The soul is forgiving, understanding, and it sits in an eternal place. We are here to learn. As humans we are a mixture of light and darkness. We are not here to be angels. We are here to make good in a difficult and challenging situation, and to do our best with the riddle of life and the deal we are given, to struggle our way through an obstacle course and a learning journey. This is what we came for.

This is planet Earth’s special gift: you get an amazing physical life in which you meet remarkable people and situations, and in return you undertake to learn some profound lessons – lessons about balancing the physical with the spiritual, daily-life routine and inner calling, and our own and others’ needs and preferences.

We should not feel bad and guilty about our failings, our hidden bits, and the things we come to regret. These are fuel for the fire of learning. That’s what we came for.

But it certainly does us a lot of good if we pay attention to releasing whatever needs releasing as closely as possible to the time that it happens, while it is in focus. It’s good to build a habit of moving forward, seeking out truth, applying all of the different kinds of growth-tricks we come to learn as we pursue our path through life.

If we build this habit it means that when the shit really does hit the fan, we have tools and experience to resort to, because we have built a growth habit, a truth habit.

It’s not that truth is always available at the moment when we seek it. Sometimes it takes time. Someone once said, a decision is truly made only at the time when you can chuckle about it. On the other hand, in every moment there is sufficient truth available for us to do enough of the right thing in the situation we find ourselves in.

This involves intuition – listening to the signs and signals within us. It involves listening to that inner voice which at times just says, ‘Be aware, be aware in this moment’. This is what you could call conscience.

Only sometimes does it give an answer about what to do, but it certainly gives a prompt to say ‘Be aware, this is a moment of choice’. If we pay attention to these moments, these moments of proto-truth, it expands our free will, our freedom of expression, our freedom to negotiate situations in the best way we can.

Sometimes we get it all wrong. And this is life. Because there can be deeper threads, deeper meanings going on underneath, and it is not uncommon that we find ourselves out of our depth, being stretched. Life gives us these moments of choice. This is what free will is. And sometimes we get it wrong.

That’s not the end of the matter. Because revelation and times of correction do come. Be patient. Sometimes we can make it up with the people who were involved, or we can correct or improve the situation, or we can own up in some way, and sometimes we can’t. But within ourselves, it is possible to change the story.

In every scrangle, we were half of the problem, and we can change our half, even in retrospect. This shifts shadows. Balance starts returning. Forget good and bad, right and wrong: what matters is movement, forwardness and progress. Sometimes this can involve taking the difficult path – a path of confrontation, pain, tears or apology. But this lands up becoming the easiest path.

Sometimes we cannot shift the shadow or resolve the situation. It might be too late, or the other party might refuse to forgive, or resolution might not be possible. But we can still look at our own side of the equation and get that bit right.

There is a simple rule by which to judge situations: treat others as you would like them to treat you.

If there are instances in the past that you regret, where you didn’t do your best, you can own up and rework them. It’s a de-guilting, forgiving process. And perhaps the judgements of rightness and wrongness made at the time were themselves incorrect.

In whatever proportions, you were both at fault and you were both right too. Remarkably, if you move on your side, sooner or later there will be movement on the other side. But don’t sit around waiting for it.

There can be resolution for the other person, or the other people who were involved, even if you don’t know whether it’s happening, or even after their death or yours. But in the fullness of time, if we release our side of the equation, then it loosens up the whole tangled cycle of co-bondage that lies behind and beneath the whole situation.

Some situations just cannot be understood or explained. But things happened that way. The world, as we have made it, is an incomprehensible place. So-called ‘mental illness’ is a simple consequence of living an a screwed-up, contradictory, insensitive world.

This is particularly important for those of us in late life. It’s about forgiving other people for what they did or they omitted to do, or that they did in ways which could have been different. It’s about forgiving world and societal situations because some, such as an earthquake, might have hurt a lot, but these are part of the formula, the equation, the deal we took on by being born, when we decided to have a life on Earth.

There’s also the matter of forgiving ourselves. Because in forgiving ourselves it loosens up the whole cobweb, the whole network of shared error, since we are not as separate as individuals as we frequently believe. We are all so intertwined. We breathe each other’s air.

There are various dimensions to this. There are things we definitely got wrong, and there are things other people judged were wrong which perhaps were not so, when seen from further away.

Then there are cultural issues where social judgments are implicitly made and accepted which, in the fullness of time, turn out to be to be very different. For me, for example, 900 years ago I believed in holy war, yet in this life I do not believe in war at all.

Then there are matters where we were wronged, yet we took on the guilt, the wrongness, because we were surrounded by unavoidable situations or people who misjudged us. Quite complex gestalts and constellations of human feeling can cause us to carry a psychological burden when in fact we might not have needed to carry it.

Some people spend their whole lives carrying far more guilt than indeed they should do, but in another way they mop up the free-flowing projections of other people and of society, absorbing it like sponges – sometimes with an ability to transform it, as nurses, carers, humanitarians or even inadvertent social healers, and sometimes they become victims of society and its ills and madnesses – the special needs cases.

In fact, the way things are going, the whole population of the world, currently around 8.2 billion, is becoming a special needs case. Help!

So if you’re feeling rather beat up at the moment, and if you’ve had enough, and if you’re feeling physically or emotionally vulnerable, it’s well worth staking out some time for yourself. Just tell everyone else to go away. Switch off your phone. It is to others’ advantage to support you in becoming a better person.

Whatever their dependencies and needs, these will be better fulfilled if you are in a good state. But if you are struggling inside with ghosts and demons, your generosity and good-natured side doesn’t shine genuinely and wholeheartedly.

If you’re lying in bed feeling unwell or wobbly right now, you might try listening to one of my podcasts about the inner doctors. Working on things like this can be really helpful, but often it’s only at these moments of vulnerability where we really perceive the need to pay attention to this kind of thing.

Also, it’s winter solstice – at least, here in the northern hemisphere – and a time for contemplation and reflection. Many people make this into a time of stress, spending vast amounts of money and overconsuming even if they don’t want to – all out of a sense of obligation to fulfil needs which were relevant in former, poorer times, when a feast was good and necessary, but which have lost so much relevance today. If gifts and treats are expected and taken for granted, they are not a gift, and the money might have been better spent supporting a family in Gaza.

There’s a big case of cognitive dissonance around all this. It is symbolised on Christmas Day when the day starts in a very human and open hearted kind of way, but then most people in countries like Britain start assaulting themselves with alcohol and overeating, also going through social situations which perhaps they might not want to go through, though they might feel obliged to do so. Don’t upset your grandmother, darling.

This sense of obligation to be happy, and to do all the right things, is, deep down, guilt-driven. Yet in order to have peace and goodwill on Earth, and every day of the year, and for evermore, which is surely what we all genuinely want, we need to free up all this guilt.

As you might by now tell, I don’t do Christmas, so unfortunately you will not be receiving a Christmas card from me. It’s not Scrooge mentality – it’s just a divergent Aspie’s preference. Before Christmas I am Scrooge, and after Christmas quite a few people, burping, tell me I’m lucky to have bypassed all that.

Here is a greeting to those who concur with me, and who will be spending Christmas mostly on their own – for perhaps you are the ones who can do some forgiving, pumping up the peace and the goodwill to all people, with an extra dollop of collective release and public mercy, without burying it in fats, and carbs and alcohols.

Here is a greeting to those who love Christmas too. It can be such a wonderful time of family and neighbourly gathering, and do it well. It’s special. Unplug the TV and get everyone to pile their phones in a box for the time you’re together. And get the kids doing the washing up – or, alternatively, making a valuable contribution of their choice. After all, we live in anti-authoritarian days, so options must be available, though I have not heard of a human right that entitles us to avoid earning our ticket.

Savour the Christmas plenty. I mean that. Because we’re coming into times when there might not be so much plenty, and it will be necessary to enjoy that too, and the gifts of grace that come with it. For when the economy goes up, society goes down, yet when the economy goes down, society goes up.

I think that was an economics and life lesson that the Prophet Jesus, peace be upon him, was trying to teach. It is likely that peace and goodwill in our world will rise as the global economy adjusts to the facts of its situation, and as humanity goes through an inner change that causes it to stop gulping up our world and shitting on it.

Not only that, but we will enjoy the new situation. There will be elements of relief to it. And defence expenditure, malware and security cameras will be things of the past, like holy war.

The world is in a process of acceleration and thawing, and it’s complex, and the bits are all bumping up against one another, and it looks as if things are getting worse with each passing year. No, they are getting better, though it is a painful and intricate process. Things are just starting up.

And the way they look now is not how it is going to be in the fullness of time. All things shall pass. All will be well, and in ways we cannot currently imagine. Hold that thought. All will be well.

Love, Palden

#followers #everyone #forgiveness #worldcrisis #mentalhealth #socialhealing #healingtheworld

Pain

This and the pics below were taken in Bethlehem, Palestine, in Dec 2012

I was talking to a friend about our different illnesses and she said, “You must be suffering more than I”. This made me think, because suffering cannot be quantified and I can’t really say ‘I am suffering more than you’. Or at least, if I do, I’m making judgements about that person and about me that don’t really hold up. With pain, it’s really difficult being objective – it all hangs around our capacity to accept, tolerate and handle it.

Pain is partially to do with what is happening and partially to do with how we’re perceiving and experiencing it. I knew this before cancer came my way, but I’ve found since then that it is more true than I thought. I don’t instantly reach for the painkillers – avoidance of pain charges its price too. I use them only when I’m worn down, needing a break, to stop myself going into a self-fulfilling pain loop.

It’s not easy. But we do make things more difficult than they need to be. We create more friction inside ourselves than we need to have. We take difficulty and pain as negative experiences, something bad, something wrong – often according to beliefs and predispositions that aren’t very good for us.

Yet pain isn’t wrong – there’s something strangely right about it, if we can but change our perspective and suspend judgement enough to see how this might be so. Too often we compare our pain with how we feel things ought to be, how they used to be or how they could be, and this has a way of increasing the pain. Because it turns us away from facing it.

It comes down to attitude. Attitude might or might not change our circumstances or their causes, but certainly it can change how we experience and handle it all.

I’ve learned a lot from people in conflict zones, especially Palestinians, who have developed such attitude over the generations, in both the personal and the social spheres. They’ve got tragically used to dealing with hardship and they’ve developed ways and means of surviving in situations where levels of hardship and suffering are high – such as sharing what they have and looking after each other. They aren’t angels and they make mistakes, but they’re better than we at protecting and helping each other, and making the best out of a bad set of circumstances.

Many people in the comfortable countries can get really upset over issues that are relatively small, such as a power blackout, a shortage, a traffic jam, or someone not doing what they said they would do. Tolerance levels are low, tight and sharp-edged. We have an unhelpful sense of entitlement to a problem-free life. So when the shit hits the fan we catastrophise it, mishandling it and often creating more problems than were needed.

In all of life’s situations there is a degree of choice, either to make a big deal over something or to square with it, accept it and do the best we can. The choice lies around the friction we put up. It’s an honesty process, and with pain we’re forced to face stuff we don’t like facing.

Spiritually, a key issue is this: we come to Earth to learn, get experience, go through it, learn from it and hone the soul. Because at the end of life, all you take with you is what you have become as a result of having lived a life. Pain is an intense kind of experience that has a way of grinding at us, drilling holes in us, attempting a takeover of our psyche and giving us a truth-and-reality experience.

It’s the price we pay for the pleasure of being in a body and the experiential access that it gives us to the wonders of the world. Without a body we cannot stuff chocolate, have orgasms, go on holiday or bliss out in a field of bluebells. Pleasure and pain, whether emotional or physical, are two ends of the same experiential spectrum, and you don’t get one without the other.

I had a remarkable experience six years ago when first stricken with cancer – a blood cancer called Multiple Myeloma, which erodes the bones and creates all sorts of trouble and pain. Since then I’ve had treatment, though there is no remission from Myeloma, and am now on a maintenance regime of medication, supplements and working on myself. I’m surprised to be alive, actually, though clearly there are reasons to be here.

The cancer came on quickly over a few months and I deteriorated rapidly. At times I was in extreme, 150% pain, immobilised, helpless, rendered into a wreck of a man, at death’s door. One day the pain was so intense that I couldn’t even raise my head from the pillow to drink – moving a millimetre made my bones grind and grate. But I had to drink anyway and tried moving.

The pain was so overwhelming that something in me popped out of my body and I saw myself from above – as a soul having an experience on Earth, lying there, all crippled and useless. There was something strangely comical about this. Something in me could see the poignant humour in it – here I was, suffering, more than I had ever experienced, and it was bizarre. I started chuckling. It really hurt to laugh. My then partner, looking on, thought I was losing my marbles.

The funny thing was that my experience of pain suddenly changed. It seemed to become more distant. I became more at peace with it. I was able to face it and accept it, from more of a distance – it was simply a fact, a situation. Something profound had shifted in the space of several minutes.

Over the next few weeks it decreased further and within a couple of months my pain levels were around 30%. Also, my boundaries had shifted. Previously, I could handle 20% pain without it getting to me too much, but afterwards I could handle 40-50% – my pain threshold had moved and it has stayed there since.

Over the last six years I’ve hovered around 10%, with a permanent, steady and stiff ache. I hardly notice it, having become used to it. Most of the time I accept it – except perhaps in the late afternoon when Sir Isaac Newton seems to switch up the Law of Gravity. But there are times when I do notice the pain and it gets to me, deep down – especially in winter. Usually these are times when my spirits are low and I’m feeling worn out with life.

So there’s something here about being spirit-propped. The pain, disability and precarity of a cancer patient have somehow thinned the membrane between me and spirit – a membrane that I used to try so hard to cross, while now it comes more naturally. There’s something to this about the perspective of experiencing life as a soul in a body, visiting Earth.

Pain hits us all, in all sorts of ways and degrees, and at various times. It can go deep, and we each have our crosses to bear.

For example, throughout my adult life I’ve experienced ‘political pain’ – the pain of being misunderstood and misjudged in public, and paying a high price for it (as a dissident and an Aspie-Autistic). It has impacted me immensely. It’s the pain of being wronged in the social and political sphere – sometimes by evolving facts and sometimes by the wrongdoings and micro-harms of others, or by the madnesses of crowds. Even so, this pain forced me to come to terms with the reality of it, to understand what was going on underneath and to forgive the people involved, and to understand and forgive myself too – and in late life, forgiveness has been a gift to the soul and a lightening of a burden.

The world’s pain levels are escalating in the 2020s, partially because so many souls are alive today having a human experience, and partially because life is getting tougher for everyone, everywhere. Outrageously tough situations such as we have seen recently in Gaza are just the tip of a very big iceberg.

And here’s the rub: no one is exempt. Hence, a generous and charitable attitude toward others in need is wise since the tables can turn. We might one day be glad to receive others’ help.

It’s our choice as to whether or not the future is going to bring hard times. We can make a big deal about things ‘going wrong’, or we can accept things and get on with it. In the end, many problems are not as big as we think they are. What might to one person be a disastrous crisis, to another person is just another boring night of bombing.

We create sufferings simply by complaining, being angry, feeling hurt, self-victimisation, or by doing things which are not the wisest. So the level of actual hardship and difficulty we face is a different matter to the way we handle it, and in the latter lies our choice.

Even so, for some on our planet, life is really hard and, in the short term, they don’t have many options – if, that is, they survive. This is not ‘their karma’: this is the world’s collective karma spilling over onto them.

One of the things I’ve noticed in my peacemaking work is that many of the peoples most beset by longterm war – Bosnia, Ireland, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Lebanon, Sudan, Palestine – can be the nicest people around, and it does not seem fair that such ‘karma’ should fall on them. The people most affected by climate change are mostly not the ones who created it, and the world’s poor are losers in a system steered by others. But even they are faced with occasions when choice becomes available.

If we follow a deeper path through life, over time it changes our emotional responses, perspective and priorities. We don’t need to consume as much, we don’t need to ricochet through life, we don’t need to deny ourselves tender moments with loved ones, and we don’t need to create as much waste and damage as we do.

Because something changes inside. It’s a slowly-distilling sense of basic trust, a simple knowing that, somehow, things are going to work out. Especially if we allow it. The issue isn’t about being perfect – it’s about learning from life’s lessons and making good outcomes out of difficult situations.

So this matter of hardship and suffering depends so much on where we’re looking from. While I have a blood cancer, I’m partially disabled and life is difficult, it doesn’t mean I’m sitting here suffering all the time. Though I must admit there are times when I do.

Sometimes, in down times my spirits seem lost in a fog of fatigue, but even then it’s a matter of being patient and letting it be. I can struggle against it, feeling as if I ought to be doing this or I wish I could do that, when in fact it’s okay to take it as it comes, to flop down in a dull state and let it be. I tend then to revive more easily next day. It’s just that I’ve have been given yet another cameo experience of being on planet Earth.

With love, Palden

Sunday Meditation

Those of us who like to do this meditation will be there in inner space at the usual time – times below. You’re welcome to join us – yes, you! Just do your meditation, contemplation, mindfulness, prayer, t’ai ch’i or whatever is your path, in your way, together with us.

As the Christian God once said, somewhere in the Bible, when several are gathered together, tuning into divinity, love and peace, there shall Divinity be. It’s true. The power of it skyrockets.

If needed, full details are here.

Times for the meditation will change with the clocks soon. Why? Because we’re staying with natural time – it’s humans’ clocks that change. We go with the birds, animals and the rising and setting of heavenly bodies. Natural time.

In UK and Europe the clocks change on Sunday 26th October and in North America it’s on Sunday 2nd November. Subtract one hour from the existing time, wherever you are – so, for example, in UK, it goes from 8pm to 7pm (20.00-19.00). Yet it’s the same time!

If thus far you’ve been working with Gazans in your meditations, please stay with them. Things are progressing, but it isn’t getting easier and, in some respects a postwar period can be more difficult than war itself. A few weeks ago I did a podcast with a guided humanitarian meditatation, which can also be applied in other places and contexts, and if that interests you, you can find it here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Dl3rJ46VJ7l2PLHIP5dsW?si=dyC2wwmKSHKPEEGVtGVIUw

Some weeks ago, on an eclipsoid newmoon, I wrote that we had just gone through a turning of the page in the wider world. We see this unfolding now. It simply makes everything look different – it’s a deep and fundamental change of optic.

Ultimately, this is how the world, or humanity at least, changes – and that affects the natural world and the wider universe greatly. Since optic is a psycho-spiritual matter, subtly affecting the perceptions, feelings and behaviour of eight billion souls, this is where meditation has quite a big influence.

Love from me, Palden

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Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm
W Europe 9-9.30pm
E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm
PST North America 12noon-12.30pm
These times will change by one hour in a few weeks. I’ll remind you.

Gaza

A Spiritual Humanitarian Mission

This is a change of course. I’d like to take you on a spiritual humanitarian mission to Gaza, in this weekend’s meditation on a rather strong newmoon. It’s here, as a podcast, and it takes around half an hour:

https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Something prompts me to share this with you. It’s something I’ve been working with for years, and with others (such as https://flyingsquad.org.uk ). It’s spiritual humanitarian aid and inner work to help progress things in our world.

I’ve worked quite a lot in Palestine itself, and that’s why repeatedly I suggest connecting with real people there, whether online, in meditation or by actually visiting. They’re just like you and me. Here’s an audiobook about life in Palestine when I was there twelve and more years ago, in better times than now – it explains a lot: https://www.palden.co.uk/bethlehemblog.html

So many feel deeply frustrated that they can’t do anything much to help people in and around Gaza and the West Bank.

This is one way to work with this feeling, to make something of it. It’s good to make the best out of a bad situation. This is one thing Palestinians teach the world: how to hang in there.

If you haven’t done this kind of thing before, then follow this guided meditation as a starting place. I encourage you to be imaginative, to follow your own way and path, to develop this over time, and to be fully human with the people you meet on journeys such as these. It’s an energy-exchange.

You can do it on your own, or you’re welcome to join the Sunday Meditation each or any Sunday – it’s free, with no complication.

It’s simply a circle of good souls in various countries who meditate together each week. I have a feeling it would be good for the group to work with Gaza for a few weeks. https://palden.co.uk/meditations.html

This is special. With love. Palden

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Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm
W Europe 9-9.30pm
E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm
PST North America 12noon-12.30pm

Sunday Meditation

One reason I’m not writing as much nowadays about the Sunday meditation, or doing written blogs, is that my physical capacity to write is slowly diminishing. It’s all about fingers on the keyboard, and brains. This is the way of things. Yet there is cause for gratitude.

A few days ago it was six years since my life suddenly changed, one afternoon in 2019 while doing gardening. Four of the bottom vertebrae of my back collapsed and, since then, I’ve been partially disabled and also much aged. At first it seemed I had a bad back problem – the pain was total – but after three months I was diagnosed with a blood cancer, Multiple Myeloma, and it looked and felt as if I had a year or two to live.

I’m still here.

“Mr Jenkins, I don’t know what you’re doing but, whatever you’re doing, do carry on.” So said the haematologist in charge of my case, not long ago. The pharmaceuticals and the holistics I’ve been on since then have definitely saved me, but there are two extra things that I believe have made the crucial difference, beyond the medications, supplements and therapies.

The key one concerns being ‘spirit-propped‘ – that’s what it feels like. Being held up by spirit. And doing things to make it so, to prioritise spirit. Of which the Sunday meditation is one. There are times when my spirits flag, I droop terribly, and my body is half-dead, but I bounce back after surrendering, handing myself over to soul and spirit. In a recent podcast I told about the ‘inner doctors‘ I work with – they have helped tremendously. And spirit and attitude keep me going, even through the worst times.

But there’s another one too, which is related: having a mission. I’m a relentlessly mission-driven person and, once I had adjusted to living with cancer, the prospect of having a short life ahead activated something in me: a deep wish to bring my life’s work to some sort of conclusion and to hand it on for others to do something with. After all, all of a sudden I had a lot of available time, and I’ve been on my own a lot too. I was given the space to do it.

So I’ve been doing some remote humanitarian work, and writing and podcasting, and completing my geomancy research, and building an archive of former work on my website. Currently I’m working on an audiobook version of Shining Land, about earth-energy, geomancy and the ancient sites of West Penwith, where I live. That’ll be ready soon.

I have no idea what happens after that, and my strength and abilities are declining, and winter is coming on. Spirit has clearly told me to do only things I am asked to do, and not to push myself. Okay, yes.

But there’s one thing I’ll continue to the very end, which has helped greatly thus far – the Sunday meditation. I hope it has been good for those of you who have joined in over time. I know that my friends upstairs – the Nine – are happy with people they’ve met, and in some cases re-met, in the meditation. And if anyone chooses to continue with it after I’ve gone, the channel will still be open, and there will be times when you’ll sense me there with you.

Because it helps. It helps raise our planet, inch by inch. It helps with the resolution and healing of many things – even during times when it feels like everything in the world is going backwards. Your thoughts and prayers help the oppressed, and they help transform and turn around the great destruction and the great delusion.

If you’re wondering what this Sunday meditation is, check out this page and, if you’d like to join in, you’re welcome:

https://palden.co.uk/meditations.html

It’s dead simple. Just sit with us for half an hour, wherever and whoever you are. There’s no prescribed method or mantra, no sign-up and you don’t need to be online: just do meditation in your own way, however you do it, being in the zone with us. The times are below, for different countries. Come with us to the wordless world, the world beyond and within all things. It drips with sparkly diamonds of light.

Love from me, Palden

Meditations: https://palden.co.uk/meditations.html
The Inner Doctors: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7ukL7efuNJMJciDIWAHyPh…
Shining Land: https://palden.co.uk/shiningland/
Podcasts: https://palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

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Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm
West Europe 9-9.30pm
East Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm
PST North America 12noon-12.30pm

Sunday Meditation

Yes, it’s Sunday, and the meditation continues whether or not I announce it here. You’re welcome to join me and us in this open meditation. There’s no formula, mantra or prescribed method: do it your way, as you always do or have done.

It’s a joining together of souls, to share inner space togther by entering the zone and bathing in a universal energy-stream. No need to be online – switch off your technology to be more, not less, in contact. There’s no sign-up and there are no strings.

Times in different countries are below.

For further details, go here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

Sometimes I can’t or don’t announce the meditation, but I’m there every week anyway.

I’m feeling rather tired of the daily round being alive, mostly alone and untouched, and of an aching body and the rather uphill climb of being lodged inside it – with a blood cancer, radiation-related, that affects my bones and various parts of this creaky body.

So, if you freely will, keep on with the meditation whether or not I announce it. For there are other people doing it with us, at the same time, in a number of countries – not just us in this group. Hidden away in the world’s quiet corners, we form a network of light, holding the world in place. Holding hands with people of all cultures, backgrounds, faiths and times. Perhaps it’s a secret conspiracy.

We’re sliding into a time of accelerated change, a growing avalanche of events. It’s good to hold the tiller and keep it steady while the world goes into an increasingly swirly, crunchy period of intensity before breakthrough comes. Which it will.

There are, in the end, no winners or losers – we’re all in this together, all humans, sharing a planet that seems big, yet it is so small.

It’s no longer a matter of taking them to our leader – there is none, despite the beliefs of many. It’s a matter of where humanity really is at, as a whole.

One thing that life has taught me is this: those times when everything seems stuck, unlikely to change and seeming to get worse and worse… these are times of prelude to change. So stay with the process.

Such times are part of the cycle of life. They come to oblige humanity to clarify what it truly, ultimately wants and is choosing to create. Then come times when the wave breaks. So getting used to riding our psychospiritual surfboards is a good thing to do. Or perhaps the only thing to do.

It falls on some of us to help bring about that change. Yet it also falls on some of us to look further, to help lay the tracks for what unfolds afterwards and as a consequence. It’s good to look further than the reflective boundaries of our own reality-bubbles.

Bless us all, and here’s a hug to you from me.

With love, Palden.

Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm GMT
W Europe 9-9.30pm
E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm
PST North America 12noon-12.30pm

Saturn and Neptune

So here am I, a lifelong author and communicator, and I’ve been sitting here in recent weeks with nothing much to say. That’s unusual. It isn’t ‘writer’s block’: it’s a funny feeling of little to say. In my birth chart, Neptune and Saturn are opposing Mercury right now, so I guess this blog is expressing the essence of what that double transit is bringing.

I’m one of those authors who, if I have little that is meaningful to say, I don’t just rattle off material just to fill space, stay regular, fulfil expectations or contractual requirements. I go quiet instead. The best of my writing has always come when there’s a need. I wake up with it, and out it comes.

In life this has given rather uncanny gift which has been both a blessing and a bane: a strange capacity to articulate ideas and perspectives that other people were about to get, but they hadn’t got there yet. As if speaking to people from the future, pointing to how it’s going to be. Or might be. Or could be.

I haven’t always got this right, though there have been times I’ve got things very right. Sometimes I’ve perceived a possible reality that just didn’t happen that way, or I underestimated the influence of obstructors, or got my facts wrong, or suffered wishful thinking or over-optimism, or simply mis-estimated things.

Yet at times I’ve hit the nail right on the head, and it has sparked outcomes or affected people and situations far more than anticipated – sometimes going into the magical-miracle zone. Cosmic catalysis.

It’s a question of whether the benefits from things I got right have outweighed the misfires and problematicals. It feels as if this question is on the weighing scales at present. And, perhaps to prove the point, recently I’ve had little to say. It’s a pause for rumination. Or perhaps a reality-flip is going on. Or a reassessment.

My ongoing cancer saga continues. A new symptom has appeared in recent months: I’m losing the use of my legs. That’s what it feels like, though diagnosis is yet to come, following an imminent MRI scan of my pelvis and a diagnosis in the coming week. My legs are exhausted after a hundred yards, as if I’d just hiked forty miles. Even when just standing still, they turn to rubber, as if they’re about to give way.

It varies on whether it’s an Up day or a Down day. Down days have increased, when I have little energy, drive or inspiration. So something is going on.

It reminds me of six years ago when no distinct symptoms of cancer had yet appeared, but something wasn’t right. It wasn’t possible to put a finger on anything until my back suddenly gave way in August 2019. This was the first concrete symptom of a rapidly developing blood cancer, Multiple Myeloma. It’s ‘multiple’ because it has a range of disparate effects that vary greatly from person to person. This makes it difficult to diagnose.

So it took twelve long weeks to progress from a back-breakage to a cancer diagnosis, though this process was helped by a series of three inspired acts of intuition by, in succession, a cranial osteopath, a GP and a hospital specialist. Bless them all.

I can’t put my finger on what’s happening now, but something is happening. Astrologically, it concerns Mercury, and I’m a Mercurial person (a Virgo with a Gemini Moon). This feels neurological. There’s that ‘nothing to say’ syndrome too. And there’s more.

It concerns ‘growing down’ – losing our powers. This demands a lot of acceptance – getting used to the fact that something is ending. Really ending. In the past I’ve been a cross-country runner and mountaineer, and I find loss of leg-power to be confronting.

Also, as an author, many people are retreating from their phones and social media habits and, thus, many of my readers are simply disappearing. The default answer is to spread into new online media and engage in networking and marketisation strategies. I’m getting loads of e-mails from online promoters who want to marketise my podcasts.

I’d love to reach more of the kinds of people who might benefit from my blogs and podcasts, but I’m not interested in all that promo stuff. My abilities are waning and I can’t manage the work that’s involved. I’m not seeking to set up a business or build my career. This lifelong content creator is sharing his end-of-life process, that’s all.

By nature I am, or was, an integrity-marketer, studiously avoiding falsities, glamours, competitiveness and deceptions in my approach. I used to be a whizzo at this, but not now – my time was 20-40 years ago. Nowadays, online media are changing so much – I can’t keep up, and get my head around all the details. Meanwhile, digital costs and charges are rising, and this obliges monetisation. I can’t do this any more, I don’t have what it takes to crank up a business and I don’t want to leave too many complexities for my son to sort out when I pop my clogs.

So where this goes is anyone’s guess. Anything that increases my workload or demands feats of memory and micro-management will simply not work. Anything I do needs to serve my health and wellbeing without weighing me down, and I’m already going at the maximum pace I can handle. So there’s a dilemma here.

Fresh sets of eyes peer out on the great wide world. In a few weeks they will fly thousands of miles.

Anyway, there’s something to learn from all this. It’s a matter of looking at what’s underneath. It’s about acceptance of What Is. It’s a reduction of options. This happens to those of us who experience a gradual, stepwise end-of-life decline instead of a sudden, drastic one – things narrow and shut down, bit by bit. It’s simply a matter of doing our best with what is, and what we’re capable of doing – there’s little or no option. It can be difficult and rather final, though there’s a joy and fulfilment in it too, if we choose to see the gift in it.

Earlier in my cancer saga I used to measure my condition in terms of perceived age. My physical age is currently 74, and normally I hover around 80-85 in perceived age, but in the last few days I’ve felt like 95 – energyless, wan, off-balance, needing someone to hold my hand, and wondering whether the latest rewrite of my will makes sense.

Yet I’m also transported into the eternal present, propped up in bed, hearing the singing of birds in a crisp, microsecond, sonorous, meaning-rich way, as if they’re teaching me something. Which they are.

They’re teaching me a very special something. A something that words cannot truly encompass because words reduce it. It’s a silence between each frame of life’s movie. A moment of seeing, a shifting of optic, a moment of existential tranquillity. It’s very quiet. It’s momentary yet vast. A glimpse of the Void. A taste of the Silence. A Neptunian slippage of consciousness into a temporary eternity.

So perhaps having little to say has its virtues. After all, I’ve managed to say something about it, so something must be happening right! It just goes to show, there is indeed a gift in everything.

Love from me. Palden

Words and pics here are AI-free!

www.palden.co.uk
https://penwithbeyond.blog

Freedom of Attitude

I’m continually reminded of the extent to which the present is a gift. Everything comes from Spirit, from the Void, from what we call God, and everything returns to Spirit, to the Void and to God. And everything exists within them.

It doesn’t matter how we see the nature and meaning of life, the universe and everything – it’s still the same. We are the eyes, ears and hands of existence-consciousness-beingness. It’s dead easy to forget, to get lost in our stuff, but it remains true.

Some people are in the midst of nightmares right now. Some days ago I did a joint online presentation to a support group in Britain with Ibrahim Issa, director of the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, in the West Bank of Palestine. Western governments, aid agencies and donors have withdrawn a lot of support, so we’re having to do some remedying of that, especially since life in the West Bank is getting harder and harder.

I was amazed at his composure. Or perhaps he was just too tired. He and everyone around him had been kept awake through the night by missiles, planes and sirens. And fear.

Even so, they keep on at the school, driving by the seats of their pants – attending to the needs of the children, their families and the local community. On a shoestring.

The latest measure they’ve taken – since Israeli roadblocks all over town make movement difficult – is to take trauma-support services to the people, in a Volkswagen van. It’s a sort of trauma-ambulance, for people losing their rag because of the tensions, dangers and offensive experiences they’re living through.

In my contribution I mentioned the Arabic term, sumud – hanging in there, never giving up. The secret is to stay in the present, to make the best use of the gifts it yields. When the past is being obliterated and the future holds little to hope for, there remains the present – the only time we actually have agency.

My own body is gradually deteriorating – a new health issue is slowly immobilising me – yet I’m continually amazed at the gifts that life presents. One is this: lessons I’m learning from people younger than me. In this case, it’s Ibrahim, teaching-reminding me about the present moment. Doing what you can with whatever is available right now and making the best of it. Because the past is gone and the future is but an idea.

People bang on a lot about freedom of speech, though really we need to learn more about exercising our freedom of attitude.

In the immediately-impending future, on Sunday (times below, for different countries), there comes the Sunday Meditation, and you’re welcome to be present with it. It’s free, no sign-up, no strings, do it your way, and wherever you are.

Perhaps give some attention to feeling what it’s like to stand in the shoes of someone whose life could be snuffed out tonight, for no understandable reason or purpose. Hold their hand. There’s no shortage of available souls in need of good-hearted soul-company, in plenty of places. This is what we can do.

With love from me. Palden.

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More about the meditation: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
About Hope Flowers school: www.hopeflowers.org – click ‘support’ to find out how to make donations from different countries.
Here’s an interesting talk by Ibrahim, during a recent visit to UK (36 mins long): https://open.spotify.com/episode/0gW1m1QSbrknFftmjzkA2f…

The Plughole

It’s the Sunday meditation again, and I have revived sufficiently from an illness that floored me last week to be able to elbow you about it! That is, you’re welcome to join us in the zone – times for different countries are below. It’s an open meditation space lasting half an hour. To quote Van Morrison: no guru, no teacher, no method – just you and me in the garden… Follow your own path, together with us following ours. We shall be blessed.

If needed, details are here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

The illness was a fluey thing. My energy was low, and I’d been pushing hard and under pressure in my remote humanitarian work. So when I got cold and wet during a trip to Falmouth, my soul pulled the plug and I went down through it. Next day I was semi-conscious, stiff and hurting, with sluggish brains, wobbly balance, burning feet (peripheral neuropathy) and I was right out of it, gone, hardly here.

A pertinent sign at Gurnard’s Head, in West Penwith

My predominant emotion was grief, over things that have happened, and particularly over moral dilemmas and painful moments in my humanitarian work over the years. I’ve seen people face hardship, suffer and die who, in my estimation, should not have died, and at times I’ve been unable to help – often quite simply I did not have the funds needed for medical treatment for an amputation or to save a life.

This is a deep dilemma being faced by many humanitarians now, as governments blithely withdraw funding and the public shrugs its shoulders. For me, in late life, it has left traces of regret, even though I know that the net value of my work was positive overall, and there’s a lot I’m glad about.

But the illness enabled me to go deep, deep down to a place where the hidden roots of life’s experiences and events ferment and bubble. This is one of the big virtues of illness that many people try their best to avoid – the consciousness changes it can bring about. Sometimes our soul needs to cut us down and render us helpless, to help us work through something – burn through something. Whether or not we actually do this is a life-choice and an exercise of profound free will.

It is an act of free will to choose to go through a turning in the deepest seat of consciousness. You have to go over the edge and take the plunge. Getting into the habit of doing this throughout our lives sets us up for one of life’s greatest and most moving of experiences – dying.

As you approach death, life tends to take you down in stages – a series of crunch moments or crises where your worldly powers and agency are reduced, your world shrinks, and you bodily functions deteriorate. This incremental withdrawal yields the possibility of a new seeing, a new understanding, if we so choose it. Though it involves perceiving truths that can at first be uncomfortable. Yet facing and accepting these revealings becomes a relief too, an understanding, a forgiveness. For this life had simply been a short visit on an ongoing pathway. It begins and it ends.

Back in the 1990s I was privileged to help and spend quality time with Sir George Trevelyan, who was in effect the grandfather of the New Age movement in Britain. Very much a man of the Twentieth Century, born in 1906 and dying in 1996, he was an aristocratic philanthropist, thinker and educator, planting the seeds of the new age and the green movement in the 1940s-70s. He was a four-planet Scorpio. At the very end, he died by decision, announcing that he should not be disturbed or given any food or drinks. He was gone in 4-5 days.

Here’s a video of him talking in 1988, in his eighties. Thank you, Sir George, for being you, for what you did with and for so many people, and for pointing the way in my life too.

Meanwhile, if you care to join today’s meditation… see you there!

Love, Palden

Geopolitical Healing

The seventh Aha Class, in Penzance, Cornwall
Weds 12th March, 6.30pm, at The Hive

A settler incursion and tricky situation in the historic souk in Hebron, Palestine

Inner journeying, meditation, remote healing and peace-building. Doing our bit toward tackling the world’s problems – instead of wringing hands and feeling helpless.

In recent times many of us have been moved to join meditations, prayers and link-ups when major crises break out. Waves of mass empathy and concern over such crises can have a wide and deep psycho-spiritual influence – it goes deeper than mere ‘public opinion’.

Praying for peace or showering light over a benighted area are good, though often they are of a generalised nature. They can affect the collective psyche and sometimes help swing things.

But it’s possible to get closer in. It’s possible to penetrate actual situations and play a more targeted part in them – literally rescuing people or souls, or participating in situations, meetings and crux-points at the frontline of human experience.

That’s what this evening is about. This might be a valuable inner tool to add to your repertory. This is not ‘lightworking’ but spiritual humanitarian work – bringing in truckloads of spirit, rescue and healing.

This is not simple. It carries responsibilities, and it’s not a matter of imposing our wishes – benign or biased – on world situations. The key issue is to help humanity learn, to become more aware in making the choices it makes, for the longterm resolution of what are often deep-seated problems.

In the first half of this evening, I’ll outline considerations and issues involved in such work, how we choose issues and crises and work with them, and the blessings, delusions and dangers involved and what it’s all for.

In the second half we’ll go on an inner journey to work with a particular area of focus that is currently afoot in the world. (And, first time round, we won’t be working with polarised Trump-related issues!)

You might or might not wish to go into this kind of work but, even if you don’t, world situations do come up at times, touching our hearts, to which we respond, and inner journeying (conscious dreaming) is one way we can play a part in world affairs as situations arise. Once you get the gist of it, it can be applied in areas that interest you – socio-cultural, ecological, geopolitical or simply encouraging forward-moving change.

If you’ve done this kind of thing before, this class might help you clarify a few things and take it a step further. If it’s new territory, it’s a good place to start.

Since most of you will not be able to come, audio recordings will be posted online within days after the class (no charge) – just follow the link below. Recordings of all of the Aha Classes can be found here. If geopolitical healing interests you, you might find this site useful: The Flying Squad.

https://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-geo.html

With love, Palden

Site: http://www.palden.co.uk
Podcasts: http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Books: https://www.palden.co.uk/books-by-palden.html