As many of you know, because it is mostly all I talk about, I live with my two golden labradors, Rosie and Iona. We are very close. They sleep on my bed at night. They sit with me - on and off - when I meditate, or watch telly. The hover at the kitchen door, whenever I am cooking. And, as anyone with a labrador will know, if the bathroom door is ever closed, they are not happy about it….enough said. 

Needless to say, I love them very much. 

On Monday, Rosie was spayed. It is quite a serious surgery, although routine, in which the ovaries and some of the uterus are removed under a general anesthetic. My vets (Vets for Pets Bridlington) are wonderful, and looked after Nutmeg and Holly in their last days and have looked after Rosie and Iona, since they were adorable eight week old puppies.

I have a very gentle morning alarm called ‘droplets’ which starts off very quietly and is meant to ease one into gradually wakefulness. My problem is that Rosie and Iona are conditioned to hear this noise and bounce up and down on the bed at the delight of a new day…..not such a gentle awakening!

However, recently I have been checking my sleep by wearing my apple watch in bed. This wakes me by gentle tapping on my wrist, which the dogs can’t register and so I am able to press snooze without them knowing. 

Another aspect of presence in cultivating resilience is that presence is a portal to our aware being, which is fundamentally ok and so inherently resilient. By cultivating presence and sensitising ourselves and abiding as aware being we can contact this inherent resilience. Aware being is like the space of the sky and challenging experiences are like the weather moving through the space of the sky.

If we over-focus on the weather, the challenging experience, we will be swept away by it. Instead, we can recognise that the space of the sky is never damaged or impacted in any way by the weather. In the same way aware being is never damaged or impacted in any way by challenging experiences. This is our fundamental okness, our inherent resilience, it is always present, but we generally overlook it in the busyness of life.

It has been difficult to leave my community of practice at the Mindfulness Association, which I was at the heart of for 16 years. My final day was last Friday 19th June.

Then on 20th June, Tracy and I held our first Holiday Retreat Day at Bridlington Links and it felt like coming home. It was a coming together of friends and it felt like the joyful emergence of a new community of practice.

Take a look at your hands, wiggle your fingers and notice how that feels. Now close your eyes, continue to wiggle your fingers and notice sensations in the fingers from the inside. Spend some time doing this with the eyes open and then with the eyes closed. Be curious about any differences you notice in your experience with the eyes open and closed. 

Now notice what words the mind is using to describe the experience of wiggling the fingers. Explore directly the patterns of sensations which the mind describes with that word. For example, if the mind described the experience of wiggling the fingers as ‘fluttering’ explore directly the patterns of sensation that the mind labels as fluttering. 

In life we often struggle because we think that we are the content of our experience. In other words, we think we are our thoughts, emotions and perceptions. However, our true nature is that which knows the thoughts, emotions and perceptions, which we call our aware being.

The beachcomber approach is all about connecting with the aware being, which is generally overlooked because we are lost in the thoughts, emotions and perceptions. We do this at the start of our practice, as described above.

Last night I was leading a mindfulness session on Zoom and we did the bus driver exercise. This is an exercise from Acceptance and Commitment (ACT) therapy that has been adapted into a creative reflection practice using writing and drawing. One of the great things about teaching mindfulness is that I get to do this exercise repeatedly over the years.

I guide this practice out of my black book of class plans which I have had for many years and at times I use this book to draw my bus in. I did the exercise as I guided it and drew my obstacles and enablers onto my bus. At the end of the exercise I was struck by how different my current bus was from the one I had drawn several years ago.

Presence is the first habit of happy people which we will be exploring in the Beachcomber Meditation monthly subscription - A Year of Meditation. 

So why is presence, in other words being here and now, so important for happiness?

This week I have been attending an online retreat led by non-dual teacher Rupert Spira. It just finished this morning (Saturday). The good news is that I have another week of retreat online with Rupert starting on Sunday evening.

Rupert describes the non-dual understanding very simply as the recognition that the nature of my being is peace and love and that I share my being with everyone and everything. Sometimes he teaches this very simply. Sometimes he teaches this in a complex philosophical way. Both of which appeal to my mind and which for me compliment each other beautifully.

So that will be our journey each month. For the first six months our themes will be the six habits of happy people. These habits are presence, gratitude, kindness, resilience, good relationship skills and living with purpose and meaning. 

For the next six months we will explore these themes by noticing what is happening in our minds in relation to these themes, noticing how we feel about what is happening, recognising that all this is mental activity and opening to and becoming that which knows the mental activity. 

This morning, the horizon offered a new wonder: a silent gathering of rock stacks. I found myself lingering, caught in the quiet spell of these earthen sculptures, capturing their fleeting artistry. Rosie and Iona, however, did not share my appreciation; they met these strangers with a chorus of skeptical barks, deeply suspicious of these new things on the beach.

When I mentor meditation students one of the biggest obstacles to their meditation practice is not having enough time. When setting up Beachcomber meditation one my main aims was to support busy people to fit a meaningful meditation practice into their lives.