Miscellany

Monday 9:05 p.m.
                             I weighed in this morning at eleven stone ten pounds, so I've dropped a couple of pounds since I stopped consuming dairy products a month or so ago. In fact, my main food intake over my five week holiday was tatties, onions, and cabbage, all more or less free. With some fried eggs. And lots of olive oil. Unusually for me, I haven't been making much bread since ... well, no butter. And I haven't been making soup. But I made soup and bread yesterday. Still, no butter. <BR>
                             Today was the first day back at the jobbie and, typically,  I got a bad night's sleep last night. There are no kids till Wednesday. I meditated a lot today. I meditated in the hut this evening. This was very good, but reminded me of how knocked off I'd been since speaking to the lama. Unless I was about to really fung myself up, that was not a good meeting. I'm still far too careful in what I'm doing. I'm careful when I'm vase breathing at all, and I haven't got back into that really. I haven't been holding my breath for over a minute, or anything like it. <BR>
                            There are various points in the Medicine Buddha Sadhana (mine is definitely well customised!) where you dissolve everything into emptiness. This kind of river meditation where you are just sitting near the thoughtless zone,  and letting whatever thoughts you havego, is a bigger part of my practise than before the meeting with the lama. I think that's what he wants me to do. Do that, Hotboy, and forget the fireworks for now. Sometimes when I'm doing this kind of meditation, I have a wee vase breath, and there is heat in there, and I try to tell myself that this is the kind of heat that he said wouldn't do me any harm. <BR>
                              I suspect that it was when I wrote to Teresa that I was getting heat alright, but not the kind of heat that was concentrated in the navel chakra symbol since, I assumed, I couldn't visualise that properly, that the alarm bells started ringing. I suspect that. I don't know that. <BR>
                              You are supposed to consider your root guru to be on a par with Shakymuni, I think, when you are trying to do the vajrayana, even although the lama does not claim to fully realised at all. In fact, he says on one of the CDs in the auld maw's house that he doesn't know what it means. This dichotomy is what screwed me up over the holidays. Let's hope there's just the accumulation and the purification as we move into the autumn and winter.