300 Words a Day - #6 - Collecting Experiences

I’m not an experience-collector.

Experiencing new things doesn’t make life richer, for my attention is not in the experience, but on the experiencer, therefore the constant flow of experiencing fills my cup rather beautifully, without the need to venture off onto a road less travelled. 

Surely anything that is here one moment and gone the next doesn't qualify as a safe investment of our wellbeing.

Yet I find that’s how the majority of us live.

No singled out experience can top being in unconditional love. 

No desire... no fear.

All experience is made out of the same stuff.

See it, and you’ll never feel the urge to “experience something new” ever again.

Don’t see it, and book that cruise in that faraway destination, that you’ve always wanted to see.

When a dog catches its tail, the wagging stops.

Until it starts again.

We don’t need to go anywhere or do anything to feel alive.

It’s all in the being. 

A friend who was diagnosed with cancer told me, “Today, I saw the trees.”

They were always there.

Brandon Lee, in his last interview, before being shot and killed, whilst filming The Crow, quoted a book called The Sheltering Sky. 

It goes:

“Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.” 

It’s all here.

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Allowing Children to Enjoy the Silence

After writing my last post, I contacted a friend who teachers in the south of England.

We met back in 2001, when we both did a diploma in Dance Music Production at the School of Sound Recording in Manchester.

We were both deeply into our music - it's funny how things have changed.

As the years have gone by, we both laid the music to rest and focused our attention on other fields of interest. Mine was writing. His was teaching.

He has said in the past how much he loves his job. I admire him for this. There're not many people who can say the same. One of the things I always remember him saying was that he introduced meditation into his classroom.

Last night, after writing my previous post, I sent him a message asking him if he still asks his class to meditate.

His answer was music to my ears.

"Yes, I introduced meditation in my class first and then rolled it out to the whole school, so every class meditates at my school now to varying degrees.

"In terms of the effect it has had in my class, I would say it has created a calmer atmosphere in my class. And when a classroom is calm, the teacher is calm and when the teacher is calm, the kids are calm, etc, etc it's a virtuous circle.

"My class came up with our motto which is "A calm mind is a happy mind and a happy mind is a smart mind".

"In the middle of lessons I have introduced mindful moments. I ring the singing bowl when the kids are busy working and they immediately put down their pencils, stop working, place feet flat on the floor, straight spines and just focus on their breathing. A minute later, I ring the bowl again and they carry on. It's gives them some head-space.

"Just today, when doing some tricky maths using brackets in equations, I rang the singing bowl. The class stopped. A minute later I rang it again and they carried on. One of the kids came up to me at the end and said "I was really glad of that mindful moment because I was getting stressed with a hard question. But after the mindful moment, I found the answer". And sometimes meditation works like that. " :) (his smiley face)

Need we say more?

www.gavinwhyte.co.uk

Mindful Children

A few weeks ago I visited Glasgow to watch the showing of the Studio Ghibli film, The Wind Rises.

The weather wasn’t too good, so I decided to grab a seat in the theatre’s cafe and read my book.

I didn't intend on sitting there for two hours, but that’s what happened. I was quite content watching people come and go, in and out of the movie theatre. Some were anticipating the film they were about to see, and others were sharing experiences of the film they had just seen. All the while, I sipped my coffee, read my book and occasionally looked at my watch to make sure I didn't miss the 16:40 showing.

Two elderly women sat down at the table next to me. With them were two boys of about nine years old. Who the women were in relation to the boys, I don’t know.

The boys started to colour in a colouring book whilst the women spoke about wine and the latest results on The Voice.

I drifted off into the world that my book provided me with. All of sudden, they started to talk about (it probably wasn’t all of a sudden at all, but for me this topic of discussion came from nowhere) . . . . meditation and mindfulness.

My eyes were focused on the page in front of me but weren't absorbing anything whatsoever. My ears, on the other hand, were on high alert.

One of the women said, ‘I just can’t do it. My mind won’t calm down. I have too many thoughts – it’s hectic. I just don’t know how he does it.’

Then this is where it got interesting. One of the boys said, ‘I’ll tell you how I do it.’

The ‘he’ the woman was referring to was one of the kids!

The boy continued, ‘When a thought comes, I just let it go. Like a cloud. I watch them and don’t grab onto them. Then they just disappear.’ He then went back to his colouring.

Amazing!

It turns out that these boys were being taught mindfulness and meditation at school.

That’s fantastic.

Every school should include mindfulness and meditation as part of the national curriculum.

As the Dalai Lama said, ‘If every eight year old in the world is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation.’

It sounds far-fetched, but imagine if it’s true!

I know some schools have already introduced such methods in their daily routines. Like sitting in silence, eyes closed, for a few minutes before class starts. Or doing a few minutes at the end of the day.

I’ve just read this interesting article from last year. It was published in The Guardian and was written by Andrew Jones who is the head of religious studies and sociology at a Goffs School in Hertfordshire.

http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2013/jun/10/meditation-mindfulness-schools-stress-calming-classrooms

Oh look, more clouds.