Last night, I went to the Retreat Centre. I hadn’t been since November, when I did the ‘Stress-free living’ course. The sun was about to set, the trees in bloom were at their best, the birds were tweeting happily. I could easily have sat down on one of the benches and read instead of going inside and listening to Matthew talk about ‘energy management’. But I was also very happy to be back and to ‘concentrate on my inner being’ again.
As always with these talks and courses, the first half is excellent and you get a lot out of it, and then it’s just downhill after that because they start talking about God, the divine, whatever (they say) you want to call it, and it just becomes tedious and irrelevant. To me at least.
There was what looked like a businessman to my right, and as soon as he entered the room, accompanied by his wife, I thought ‘I bet she’s dragged him here, I bet he’s got no desire whatsoever to be here’. It turned out to be true. He was so bored! And when we did the relaxation-cum-meditation exercise, he just kept looking around him, at the ceiling, at his wife. And yes, I guess I wasn’t doing my bit all the time either, since I managed to notice that! But he just kept distracting me. Oh no – forgive me: I allowed myself to be distracted by him. Big difference.
In this, I think meditation courses and talks are great: you learn things in a different way, you see them in a different light. We tend to lay the blame with other people, with external events. Yet, we all have a choice – to be governed by these external happenings, or to lead our lives from our internal world out (as opposed to from the external world in).
That’s what I was reminded of last night. So it was definitely worth going. In any case, if I had tried to go home straight from work, I would have been stuck on the A34 around Oxford because there was an accident. Another sign that it was high time I went back to the centre!
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About me
- Lotus Flower
- Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
- I am a 32-year-old French woman who has been living in the UK for 13 years. Some people will tell you that I must have been English in a previous life, as I’ve nearly completely lost my French accent. About my cultural make-up, others will claim that I’m just not French at all, shocked as they are when I tell them I don’t smoke, I don’t like onion, I can’t stand garlic and I don’t care much for wine (especially this last bit – this is so un-French). However, I am French in many other, subtler ways. I’ll let you discover these as you read my posts here. This is the blog of a writer first and foremost. I am an editor by profession, but at heart, I am a writer. I’ve always loved keeping my diary, and this blogging phenomenon is an excellent opportunity to indulge in what is for me the easiest form of writing, while giving me a good excuse to stop working, even if only briefly, on my pile of half-started, half-finished novels, short stories and travel articles.
2 comments:
Hi Lotus Flower, thanks for your message on my blog.
Yes, we were totally surprised about me getting preggers so quickly - I was convinced it'd take years or worse it wouldn't happen!
I think that getting more intuitive with my body has actually helped me. I thought I was pregnant way before I'd done the test, because my boobs were sore and I felt different. Weirdly I didn't want to eat pate - it made me nauseaus even tho I like pate. Funny how clever your body is!
Have you looked at a site called mymonthlycycles.com, I think it helped me work out when I was ovulating?
Hi Liquorice Torpedoes
Thanks for the website - no, I hadn't come across it. I have pretty regular cycles and mega obvious symptoms from Day 12 onwards, so I don't think I'll need the site (not for that purpose anyway!), but thanks. I stopped the pill in November and basically have had pregnancy symptoms every month since then! ... and then of course getting my period... So it makes it very hard to guess whether I'm pregnant or not! So now I just get on with my life (try to!) and 'wait and see' every 27 days or so...!
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