Making Space for the Rain
Musings on the rain and lots of heart expanding yoga classes to book this week.
"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make
a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven”.
Milton
When the rains came last week I was delighted. I spent the whole week responding to other peoples complaints with the refrain that ‘It was so good for the garden’, which showed every bit of my age and reminded everyone of their mothers. But the thing is, right then, I meant it. The smell of the dry earth being pelted not just with intangible drizzle but great monsoonal downpours had me enraptured. I flung open all the windows of the house, leant out and drank in the smell of petrichor and watched as the raindrops drew shapes down the window panes, little by little and then all of a sudden, as they do. On more than one night I fell asleep to the sound of the rain on the roof with a delight that always reminds me of childhood, in that same non-specific but insistent way that cut grass does. And whenever there was a break in the clouds and the sun returned, I would stop whatever I was doing - any excuse will do- and would go out to the garden to delight in the aftermath; the rain settled in perfect droplets on the leaves of the alchemilla, the buttercup strewn grass that was now glistening and the flowers - hot pink roses and dirty purple poppies and cream coloured foxgloves with their speckled violet throats - that looked so relieved that I was sure I could feel it too, like a form of kinship.
Fast forward to this week, to now, to today, when I got soaked even just getting a water bottle from the car, got stuck on the way to Oxford in the inevitable traffic that rain always causes and find myself battling that strange and particular tiredness that only a barometer can explain and I am less enamoured. Irritated even. And hungry for the summer, real summer to return. I haven’t yet made it into the garden but even from the window the trees look bedraggled, the roses are cowering and the clouds are sitting low in the sky and lending their drabness to everything. Even the dog doesn’t lift his head from his basket as I walk past. He has- it seems- no interest either, in getting outside.
The Buddhists might use the experience - my pendulum swinging reaction to the same thing- as the perfect example of the mind’s own vagrancies, itself as changeable and untamed as any weather. They might say too, that it shows the extent to which nothing is neither objectively good or bad, but just - to borrow and bastardise Hamlet- our thinking that makes it so. Awareness like this, however fleeting, can be at least useful. It is so easy to cast around for external cause to explain our feelings and only sometimes is it true. And anyway rarely is anything as intransigent as it seems. And it can be helpful, in a small but still meaningful way, to recognise that the shallow roots of these feelings are both their antidote and opportunity.
One of the first times I ever learned meditation in any formal capacity was at the Jamyang Buddhist centre in Elephant & Castle in London. The course ran for six weeks and coincided with some building work next door, so our beginners meditation sessions were accompanied by the sound of drilling and hammering. It proved hard, and in most cases impossible at first not to be distracted by the relentless and jarring sounds that interrupted the otherwise silence, piercing both our thinking and our early attempts not to.
On the third week, and aware that there had been some complaints from some of the students, our teacher spoke out.
‘These conditions are ideal for meditation’ he said, with his trademark wide grin and shining eyes. I imagine more than one of us looked back confused.
‘Small troubles, like this drilling and this hammering, are our best teachers.’ he added, before going on to explain that the entire point of meditation was not absolute silence, or a mind free from thinking, but the opportunity not just to see with a certain clarity how changeable the mind was or how quick we are to leap to response but also to practice the essential art of sitting with small discomforts - like noise, or sore legs, or fleeting thoughts or, indeed, a period of seemingly endless rain - to practice, like a fire drill, for much bigger things.
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YOGA THIS WEEK - WAYS TO GET ON THE MAT
This week’s class is a heart opening practice inspired by the recent rain, and by the opportunity it might afford to make enough space for all feelings. Soulful and soothing this week the emphasis will be on opening the upper body, releasing and relaxing shoulders and the arms , and making space in the whole of the heart space with the hope that you will be left feeling both newly spacious and energetically uplifted.
I am also teaching an extra class this week at Chloe’s studio so for locals there will be an opportunity to practice in person on Friday morning, as well as the usual Tuesday Zoom and evenings sessions.
BOOK NOW………………..
‘MAKING SPACE FOR EVERYTHING; A Heart Opening Yoga Practice’
Tuesday 9th June 9-10am ZOOM LIVE and/or Recorded.
Tuesday 9th June 6-7pm IN PERSON @ Chloe’s Studio, Gagingwell
and/or
Friday 12th June 9.30-10.30am In PERSON @ Chloe’s Studio, Gagingwell