Dear Yogis..

ZOOM SUNDAY MORNING 10AM:  The Gita Study.(All welcome – see the home page of the web site for details)

Friday again in this new world we live in.  Although there is possibilities of travel, because of flash lock downs and restrictions, what may LOOK  possible isn’t really – unless you have a spare few thousand to pay for quarantine.  Thank goodness there is so much to do, to get ready for the next wave… or just to live a life closer to the earth.  I miss zooming with you (never thought I would say that), but every day brings something new.

 

SATURDAY STUDIO CLASS (22nd May)

This will be in two parts.
Part 1. SALE OF WORK: 1pm to 2pm –  Sleep Herb sachets, bags of beads, Framed paintings on tea bags.
Part 2.  ART/CRAFT CLASS ($25): 2pm to 4pm.  Knitting/crochet/darning….  bring wool, needles, things you want to work on.  If you don’t have needles or wool you have plenty of time to haunt the op shops – they have plenty at this time of the year.  We could start knitting-nancys, plaited rugs, crochet rugs.  We can play.

 

ARE YOU THINKING OF DEATH

I am not getting morbid.  Over the last few months there have been a few deaths.  Some unexpected, some “a welcome relief”, and I wonder if you have thought about it for yourself.  When we finish the Gita we are going to spend time with The King James Bible and the Bardo Thodol considering death – or how to live.  Surely you don’t want to get to the end of your life and discover that you have never lived?

I recently watched the funeral of Prince Philip.  Here was a man who had been planning his death for some time. He had started tinkering with his JEEP HEARSE since 2016, and commissioned Psalm 104 to be put to music for four voices.  People knew what he wanted, and he got it.  Do they know what you want? Have you discussed it enough with your family so that when the time comes they will neither be sad, nor afraid, but excited to put your plans into action.  Joyful to mark your passing – it is just turning a page.  You really will not be “gone”.  

One of my clients died yesterday and she has organised friends and family to decorate her casket with photos, words, poems, anything they would like to add as a ‘goodbye message’.  What have you got planned?  A home made cardboard coffin, painted, decorated… Is this too “out there” for you? I recently was at a funeral where the casket was bamboo.  A step in the right direction, but uninspiring.  I have always offered to add ashes to an oil painting.. subject of your choice – but could just as easily decorate your coffin.  I have been employed to do both of these for pets, and for my own gorgeous pet who passed,  keeping the skull and decorating this (beautiful not creepy at all).

“The successive existences in a series of rebirths are not like the pearls in a pearl necklace, held together by string, the “soul”, which passes through all the pearls; rather they are like dice piled one on top of the other.  Each die is separate, but it supports the one above it, which is functionally connected.  Between the dice there is no identity, but conditionality.”  (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying).

It is like a flame  in a lamp.  Is the flame different in the beginning of the night and the end?  No,  because it is the one lamp that burns the whole night. Rebirth is the much the same.  One phenomenon arises and another stop simultaneously.  So the first act of consciousness is neither the same as the last act of consciousness, nor is it different.

 

I WILL SEE YOU ON THE MAT (I really will).

NAMASTE.  JAHNE