I didn’t write a reflection in the blog yesterday (although I did the day before).  I said when I came down here for this ten day retreat at the Krishnamurti Study Centre, that I was aware of three intentions … three hopes.  One was to “move the slider across” from the usual heavy emphasis on “Doing” in my life at home to a much greater emphasis on “Being” here in the Centre & walking in the surrounding countryside.  A second wish was to explore “Awareness” more … both by seeing how it is to spend days where I am more aware, and to read/discuss/think/experiment with awareness over the time here.  Both of these hopes have worked out well … precious days, deep, soft.

I have already written a series of posts about this stay down at the Krishnamurti Study Centre in Hampshire - see for example the first one "Setting the scene" or the most recent (before this one) "Being, flow & 'pure driving'".  Yesterday I took an ‘idle & blessed’ day.  This is something I’ve done back at home in Edinburgh a few times … see, for example, the posts “A day spent 'idle &a

Yesterday I wrote a post on "Our sense of self".

I wrote a post yesterday on "Quietening down ... and do we need time to change".  Now it's the fourth morning … I have some sense of my inner world rearranging itself, like shifting icebergs.  That description overplays what feels to be going on … but changes there certainly are, in what I’m paying attention to and in how I’m feeling.

I've already written a couple of blog posts during my "retreat" at this Study Centre - "Setting the scene" and "Settling & questioning".

I wrote a post yesterday about arriving here at the Krishnamurti Study Centre.  Now it's early on the second morning – how was the first full day?  It was fine.  I wrote, thought, read, went on a two-hour walk (boots repeatedly clogging with the Hampshire clay), practised yoga, meditated, and talked a bit (at mealtimes).  I can feel myself settling, my mind ‘changing’, still a bit ‘uncertain’ of this big shift in my environment & activities.  It seems like I’m thinking more clearly and about bigger issues.

So here I am bright & early on the first full day of a ten-day personal retreat at the Krishnamurti Study Centre in Hampshire.  Why?  Well I was conscious of three intertwining reasons when I booked this time away several months ago.  One is about doing & being, another about awareness, and the third is about getting a perspective on my life.  And who knows, maybe I will be surprised by other reasons that emerge during my stay here.

In her wonderful poem "The summer day", Mary Oliver wrote:

(This post & the previous one in the series are downloadable combined into a Word doc or a PDF file)

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes."   Proust

"Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."    Rumi

"Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men."   Confucius

     (This post & the next in the series are downloadable combined into a Word doc or a PDF file)

"But the future is the future, the past is the past; now we should work on something new."    Shunryu Suzuki

In 1970 I started to learn meditation with the Cambridge Buddhist Society.  It was the year that Shunryu Suzuki's great book "Zen mind, beginner's mind" was published.  I was deeply intrigued.  So much of his writing was challenging: