What a journey from Manchester to Cork via car, train, boat, coach and foot. Now if your not serious about having to be somewhere, to do a job then forget this line of travel. But me, I am serious and it’s just another away day in the life of………..

Out group was 11 people, 2 of them male including myself. I explained the idea behind yogAsana to the group and we worked for 2 hours through the more passive aspects of the practice that lead to a beautiful stillness as a preliminary to a short meditation on the breath.

If someone is not used to staying in postures with relaxation for any length of time, then it can seem a little daunting. But this is very good training for learning to sit still in a formal meditation session. Things happen. We feel sensations, hear sounds and intruding thoughts arise and we wish all this would cease, and we wish none of these things were happening, and it would be so nice to just sit in stillness and peace if even just for a little while. Well our ears are open, our sense of touch is still there and our mind is still present so why should these functions automatically cease just because we have decided to sit for a meditation session. If we can turn this around and remain focused on our chosen object of concentration, then there is really nothing to get annoyed or upset about. It’s because we think that we must have these conditions present and when we notice that things are not quite like we would like, we feel agitated and restless during out meditation period. So how do we deal with these distractions during our practice? Well, I can ask you, “How do you deal with those same distractions when holding a posture in stillness for say 3 -5 minutes in a yogAsana class?” And my answer is to handle the distractions in a very similar way. They are not the object of your practice but only become so when we give then that power to take over our concentration. Just ignore the distractions and keep your mind on the stillness. It’s this continual coming back to the stillness that eventually trains the mind to stay at ease even tin the heat of heavy distractions.

It’s a matter of doing it again and again and again. Does that seem repetitive and where have we come across this same idea before? We need to habituate the mind to the task at hand, and this can only come about with repeated application. That’s the punch line.

So what about Yoga Guru in Cork, Ireland? This weekend is an opportunity to habituate the body and mind in a particular direction for a sustained period of time. If you can find the time, then it’s this kind of input that can propel us from our everyday level of understanding to that of insight, to that of another way at looking at our relative reality and drawing us ever closer to an awareness of how things really are as opposed to the way things appear to be. Never ever stop………………….