Zen and the Art of Peacekeeping

Living the questions

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

            Rainer Maria Rilke ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ (1934)

I've read this quote so many times. In the past I've read it and aspired to love the questions, even while my heart and mind seemed determined to yearn after the answers. We live in a society that believes in solutions and that sees the questions not as a place to reside but as a barrier to get through as quickly as possible. Recently I rushed headlong towards a resolution to uncertainty. I leapt to embrace a solution despite the fact that it didn't fit.

I woke up the morning after this moment of decisiveness and felt out of sorts and out of place. I was not ready to live this answer. Instead I decided to keep company with the questions for a little longer. It was a wonderful relief.

At first I wondered whether this was the relief of avoidance. I wondered whether I had simply turned away from the hard questions and chosen to live in blissful, willful ignorance. I wondered how I would know the difference.

But as I sat in meditation one morning I realised that I already knew the difference between avoiding the question and keeping its company. As long as the questions were with me, as long as I was willing to sit with them and observe the feelings, thoughts and sensations that came up for me in their company, I was living the questions. 

Three weeks later I don't know if I am any closer to an answer. But in the meantime living with the questions has turned out to be a refreshing change. Now that I don't feel the terrible pressure of making a choice, I can relax and really pay attention.

Spring Cleanse: What are you ready to let go of?

Well, it hasn't looked or felt much like spring around here this past week. Earthquakes and tsunami in the Pacific have left hundreds of people dead, thousands homeless and many more devastated. Here in New Zealand a late cold snap has left farmers without any electricity as they struggle to rescue new spring lambs from the late snow. When disaster strikes I find myself questioning my decision to leave Oxfam, to leave the world of direct humanitarian assistance behind while I write this book. It has been a big change for me and it is taking some time to get used to not having a job that gives me a clear and concrete sense of what I am doing to help.

Then I take a breath. Let it out. Take another. Let it out. I remember that working in war zones or in the wake of natural disasters is only one way to change the world. Writing a book is one way to change the world. Teaching yoga is one way to change the world. Uncovering my own voice, telling my own story, telling my own truth is one way to change the world. I also remember that I don't have to change the world. I don't even have to change me. So, I shed another layer. I let go of another set of the beliefs that have served me well in the past. I'm ready to release them and rest in the space they leave behind.

This week, following the full moon, the moon is waning and it is a good time for letting go. As part of this cleanse I'm not only letting go, at least for the month, of foods and drinks that don't really nourish my body. I'm also taking a little time to notice what thoughts and beliefs I'm still carrying that don't really nourish my soul.

So as you sit in silence for a few moments every day and as you take the time to prepare and consume nourishing food for your body, notice what else you might be ready to let go of this month.

For the rest of this week let yourself settle gently into the changes you have made to your eating and drinking practices. Notice if you are feeling differently. You may experience some symptoms of detoxification this week, especially if you were consuming caffeine, sugar and/or alcohol regularly before the cleanse. Some people experience headaches, in the past I've experienced some confusion/dizziness and also some weepiness. It all passes. Just notice it as it arises and see if you can be present and aware without attaching yourself to the sensation. Use your breath and the awareness of sensations in your body to ground yourself and simply notice what is going on, without judgement.

As you notice the sensations in your body, begin to think about how you want to move your body. This first week of the cleanse, depending what level of cleanse you are doing, you might feel some sensations of fatigue or even nausea. This might be a sign to ease back on any really vigorous exercise regime and focus on gentler, restorative practices like walking or gentle yoga. If you are feeling energetic then by all means, move it! If you don't usually exercise then this week is a good time to start. Gentle, regular exercise will help manage any side-affects of the cleanse and will help increase the benefits of the cleanse as the weeks go on. 

Here are some great resources:

Kristen's Raw

If you are aiming for either total or partial raw food for the cleanse then check out this great site, which I found when Kristen herself left a lovely comment here yesterday. She has fabulous recipes and general information and advice about the raw food lifestyle.

101 Cookbooks

A great site if you are planning to mix some healthy vegetarian/vegan cooked options into your cleanse. Today's featured recipe is 'Green Soup with Ginger', yum!

Yoga Today

A great site where you can get free daily yoga practices on video, including this one which is the best place to start if you haven't practiced yoga before and can't make it along to a class.

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.

— Rumi

Last week I wrote a list of 10 things you probably shouldn't say to a friend who doesn't have children. It was quite an experience. People responded, to say the least.

One of the ways in which people responded was by talking to me about it. As a result of one of those conversations I realised that one of the items on the list is probably the most important of all. It's also the item that bothers me least, these days.

What used to bother me the most was the suggestion that the love between a parent and child was much deeper, wider and more profound than any other love. The inference was that if I was unable (or unwilling for any reason) to have children then I would never experience true, deep love.

This no longer bothers me. It can still be pretty hurtful to others, though, so I still suggest you might want to think twice before launching into your rant about how only having a baby has taught you what true love is.

It no longer bothers me because now, finally, I understand that the fullest, deepest love already resides within me. If I don't experience this love for all beings all the time it is simply (ha!) because of the barriers and obstacles that I've erected around my heart, because of the way I contract and withdraw my heart in fear or shame or blame or guilt.

I'd suggest that babies have a special gift for getting us to lower those barriers. It may be their inherent vulnerability or it may be because they haven't yet put up any barriers around their own hearts, which is the same thing. But one way or another babies invite us to let down our barriers. This is particularly but not, in my experience, exclusively true of our own babies, whether by birth or otherwise.

So we let down our barriers. We engage with these marvelous little beings in moments free of fear, blame, guilt or expectation. As our hearts open we experience our own true nature, which is love, joy, equanimity and compassion. We then attribute this experience to the other being. We assume it is this wonderful baby that causes this love to arise in us (I've done the same with lovers). When, in fact, it was all within us all along.

So now when people tell me that since they have had their baby they have come to know what love really is, instead of feeling cheated I feel joy. I feel joy that another being has opened their heart. I know now that there are other paths towards an open heart. I've come to understand that although a baby may be one of the best short-cuts around, ultimately we can all learn to open our hearts irrespective of the company we are keeping. It's not easy but it is simple.

It starts with sitting still and making friends with your own mind and heart.

It's another way to change the world.

There are a few phrases that have become so well-used that their meaning seems some days to have been worn thin. But some of them are used so much because they touch on simple yet powerful truths and it is worth pulling them up into the light and really thinking about what they have to say to me.

The first is "be the change you want to see in the world", from Gandhi. This one is perhaps the most well-used of all. A google search for the entire phrase threw up 276 million results. We see it used in marketing slogans, on bumper stickers and - over and over again - on blogs. It has become so ubiquitous that it is easy to stop really hearing what Gandhi was saying and, perhaps more importantly, what the words themselves say to each of us right now.

I know that these words are the words that come to me when I am fuming in frustration at a friend who is once again running late for lunch, dinner or a movie. They are the words that come to me when somebody cuts me off in traffic or pushes past me to get the last seat on the train. They are the words that come to me when I'm feeling threatened or insecure about a situation or person in my life.

In those moments I am reminded that I always have a choice, and that if I say that I want to see more love, more joy and more compassion in the world then I have the opportunity in each of those moments to choose to bring more love, more joy and more compassion.

What I've learned through meditation and yoga practice is that I don't have to overcome my inherently jealous, angry, insecure nature by putting on some external mantle of loving kindness. If I practice regularly the scales of attachment start to fall away from my eyes and I can see the world more clearly, I also find myself resting down into my true nature - which is loving and joyful and compassionate - unencumbered by the distractions and confusions of fear.

It's not a kind of utopia, though. Fears still arise, my insecurities still get triggered, I still worry that my boyfriend will wake up one day and realise what a total geek I am and run away with one of the cool party girls. But little by little the practice seems to be giving me quicker access to the truth that lies beneath these passing fears, and I can find my way back to compassion faster and with less suffering.

That's what it means to me to "be the change that I want to see in the world". That's conscious activism.

Twee Merrigan (yoga teacher) watches Edo Kahn and Jo Mall (musicians, devotees and music therapists) play and sing with children living in an orphanage in Bali

Conscious activism is an idea that I've been playing with for a couple of years now, and here in Wellington I've had the joy of finding some friends and traveling companions who are also interested in practicing their own form of conscious activism.

The most signigicant discovery for me this past year has been the incredible gift of sangha, good company. On Thursday mornings I've sat in meditation with a handful of friends and strangers who have become dear friends. What we all shared was not only a commitment to supporting each other in our meditative practice but also a commitment to uncovering a mindful path of 'activism'.

Each of us had plenty of experience with social change, having been activists in various forms ourselves, and each of us was committed to grounding our actions in a solid base of simply being.

Over the course of this year I have learned so much from these friends and from the simple but profound practice of sitting in meditation with the people with whom you want to plan to take action to ease the suffering of all beings. I've found that there can be a transparency that develops between people who sit together. When you see someone once a week and what you do together is sit in silence there is a quality that develops to your relationship which defies the logic of our 'talk' culture. There is also a shared commitment to this process of sitting, even when we all dissolve into giggles for ten minutes, that gives us a shared - though silent - language.

So we sit. We each do the un-work that is sitting, letting go one by one of the thoughts and feelings that rise to the surface. Settling into the vast sky of the big mind. Sometimes struggling to let go, sometimes wondering how the others can possibly look so calm. Sometimes chanting together, sometimes in silence.

And then, at other times and in other places, we come together to plan actions for social change. We agree that it is important that our actions reflect our commitment to ease suffering, that we don't employ means that create more suffering. We recognise that generating and perpetuating a sense of 'us' and 'them' leads to the creation of more conflict. We choose instead to try to act with compassion, love, hope and joy in all our activism.

I imagine sometimes what my old colleagues might make of all this. Brave, committed but often angry people. I suspect some would find us naive.  But I know what I have come to understand, that if I want there to be more peace in the world - more joy, more hope, more compassion - then I have to begin with me. This is what conscious activism means to me.

What does conscious activism mean to you?

Sunrise meditation on Mt Batur in Bali. Photo by Leah Simon

Qu: What do writing, yoga, meditation and human rights all have in common?

Answer: They all involve paying attention.

(Other answers may also be correct, in fact they almost certainly are)

William James said:

“

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.[2]

”

Offerings in Bali

On Friday morning I met a dear old friend for a cup of tea before work. We got talking about Buddhism and quantum physics and the fascinating overlap between the two.

A couple of years ago my brainy ex-boyfriend gave me a copy of Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" to read. It is a relatively simple introduction to quantum physics and to string theory. I use the word 'relatively' advisedly in this context.

He was gently trying to educate me. My ex and I never quite saw eye to eye on the matter of my spiritual beliefs. He was an athiest with a great hunger for scientific knowledge. I was an agnostic with a great hunger for spiritual practice.

The irony is that our very different paths (physics and philosophy for him, yoga and meditation for me) may very well have brought us to a similar place in the end.

I never quite got my head around quantum physics. But I was fascinated by the experiments that showed that sometimes particles act like waves and sometimes light waves act like particles. What intrigued me most of all was that the act of observation appeared to influence whether particles acted like waves or particles.

I loved the simplicity of Niels Bohr's interpretation of this experiment. When it looks like a wave, it is a wave. When it looks like a particle, it is a particle. He essentially said that nothing is real unless it is observed.

Did you get that? Nothing is real unless it is observed. The entire universe is actually a series of probabilities.

String theory appealed to me even more. The fundamental, elemental matter of the universe is in fact a dancing, vibrating loop that appears to be either particle-like or wave-like depending on where you are looking from, amongst other variables.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon with twenty other people, sitting in meditation and receiving teachings on how to live our meditation.

At the end of the day all the teachings came down to this - we are not as separate from each other nor as fixed as our egos would like to believe. We are all connected. Are we connected by the four universal forces identified by quantum physics or by prana, the shared universal energy identified in yogic teachings? Maybe they are the same thing.

We are not fixed. We are constantly in the process of creating ourselves and our realities moment by moment. By the act of observation we take those dancing, vibrating strings and make of them "me" and "you". What would it be like if, when we looked at the world and at each other, we let the picture we have of what we think we are looking at drop away for a moment and opened up to the mystery and the beauty of not knowing what we are looking at.

With this in mind, I'm off to observe the effect that the act of cleaning has on the dancing strings that make up what I call my home.

Sitting on top of Mt Bakur in Bali, watching the sunrise. Ready to leap.

When I was going through the process of deciding to leave my job with Oxfam (now that I've resigned I can finally name my wonderful employer) there were three main barriers that I found I had to work through.

The first barrier was perhaps the most obvious, I wondered whether I would have enough money, whether my savings would last long enough to finish the book and where I would find money once the book was done. In the end this was the simplest to get past. I have savings, I will live on them while I write. Once they run out I'll find work to make more money. Easy. I could make it a lot more complicated by imaging scenarios in which I don't find ways to make money again but since I've been in the work-force for twenty years and have always been able to make enough money to pay my bills I decided to keep it simple and trust that I would be able to do it again in 6 months time, if necessary.

The second barrier was a sense of obligation to my employer. Oxfam is a wonderful organisation that does great work all over the world to help find lasting solutions to poverty and injustice. I was drawn to Oxfam because they look beyond the obvious and direct contributor to poverty and are prepared to tackle the big injustices that create and perpetuate global imbalance in resources and opportunity. With Oxfam I've been able to do advocacy work on unfair trade policies, ineffective aid and the growing impacts of climate change on developing countries. I am able to do work that I'm passionate about and to work with like-minded and like-hearted people. I've grown close to my colleagues and have a strong personal commitment to the work we all do. It was hard to leave all that without a sense of guilt.

But I've been learning about guilt these past few years and I now know it doesn't serve me or anyone else so I'm getting better at recognising and releasing it. I'm not indispensable to Oxfam and although I always do my very best, I'm not even necessarily the person best able to do my job. It is time for me to pursue other paths and to open this job up to someone else.

The final barrier was a little less obvious, but was perhaps the most powerful. Over almost two decades I've built a strong sense of personal identity around my work as an advocate for human rights, justice and dignity for all. At its crudest, this manifests as a desire to know that I am a good person, and a hope that my good work/s might be evidence that this is so. When I explored these thoughts and feelings, I uncovered an underlying belief that I have to earn my place in the world, that I have to some how pay the world back for the extraordinary privilege I have enjoyed as a child of the middle class in New Zealand.

In recent years my exploration of the practices and teachings of the Buddha have been nudging me towards the possibility that my identity might be less certain, less knowable and - ultimately - less important than I had previously assumed. Yesterday in meditation class our teacher encouraged us to explore what it was like to release ourselves for a moment from the grasp of the intellect - that marvelous thought-proliferating machine - and to settle into the 'don't know' mind. What if I don't know if I am good or bad? Can that also be okay?

Can it be okay to no longer have a job title that is almost guaranteed to get admiring responses from everyone to whom I am introduced? Can it be okay to dedicate my days to something that gives me incredible satisfaction but that may never do any good for anyone else? Can it be okay to really believe that what the world needs most is people who have settled into their own simple wisdom and who are following their hearts? Can it be okay that I don't know? When I settle quietly into the space that sits behind, above, beneath and all around that marvelous thought-making machine that is my thinking mind I find that there is plenty of room for all of this, and more, to be okay.

By Marianne Elliott

In November 2007 I arrived back from a short holiday in the United States to my work as a UN human rights officer in Afghanistan. Days later, the deadliest suicide attack to take place in Afghanistan happened in Baghlan, killing at least 40 adults and three children and maiming more than 60 adults and 60 children. For two days after the bombing I sunk into a despairing sadness for Afghanistan...

Continue reading at the Shambhala Sunpace blog where I've been invited to start submitting guest posts. I'm thrilled because Shambhala Sun is one of my favorite magazines and their blog is on my daily must-read list.

Om, one of the beautiful daily mandalas of fresh flowers at our yoga retreat in Bali.

It took one week of yoga retreat for me to finally experience for a sustained period what I have have long 'believed' but had only experienced in short bursts or glimpses. I discovered that when you practice regularly, consistently and appropriately the distractions of thoughts and feelings really do begin to fall away and you settle down into the simple but profound experience of the universal peace and love that is your essential nature.

It was such a wonderful experience that I knew immediately what I needed to do. So yesterday I resigned from my day job. From here on in (well, once I work out my notice and pull everything together into fabulous hand-over notes so that the great causes I've been working on can be seamlessly continued) I'll be dedicating my time to writing, practicing, studying and teaching yoga and to building a social profit company the aim of which will be to bring opportunities to experience that peace to people working in places of conflict. Yoga and meditation courses in Kabul? I think so.

Stay tuned for more! For now I'm putting my head down to write while I can since the office awaits with a mammoth to do list tomorrow.

Namaste!

Change the World: Make friends with your Heart

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.

— Rumi

Last week I wrote a list of 10 things you probably shouldn't say to a friend who doesn't have children. It was quite an experience. People responded, to say the least.

One of the ways in which people responded was by talking to me about it. As a result of one of those conversations I realised that one of the items on the list is probably the most important of all. It's also the item that bothers me least, these days.

What used to bother me the most was the suggestion that the love between a parent and child was much deeper, wider and more profound than any other love. The inference was that if I was unable (or unwilling for any reason) to have children then I would never experience true, deep love.

This no longer bothers me. It can still be pretty hurtful to others, though, so I still suggest you might want to think twice before launching into your rant about how only having a baby has taught you what true love is.

It no longer bothers me because now, finally, I understand that the fullest, deepest love already resides within me. If I don't experience this love for all beings all the time it is simply (ha!) because of the barriers and obstacles that I've erected around my heart, because of the way I contract and withdraw my heart in fear or shame or blame or guilt.

I'd suggest that babies have a special gift for getting us to lower those barriers. It may be their inherent vulnerability or it may be because they haven't yet put up any barriers around their own hearts, which is the same thing. But one way or another babies invite us to let down our barriers. This is particularly but not, in my experience, exclusively true of our own babies, whether by birth or otherwise.

So we let down our barriers. We engage with these marvelous little beings in moments free of fear, blame, guilt or expectation. As our hearts open we experience our own true nature, which is love, joy, equanimity and compassion. We then attribute this experience to the other being. We assume it is this wonderful baby that causes this love to arise in us (I've done the same with lovers). When, in fact, it was all within us all along.

So now when people tell me that since they have had their baby they have come to know what love really is, instead of feeling cheated I feel joy. I feel joy that another being has opened their heart. I know now that there are other paths towards an open heart. I've come to understand that although a baby may be one of the best short-cuts around, ultimately we can all learn to open our hearts irrespective of the company we are keeping. It's not easy but it is simple.

It starts with sitting still and making friends with your own mind and heart.

It's another way to change the world.

Cliches

There are a few phrases that have become so well-used that their meaning seems some days to have been worn thin. But some of them are used so much because they touch on simple yet powerful truths and it is worth pulling them up into the light and really thinking about what they have to say to me.

The first is "be the change you want to see in the world", from Gandhi. This one is perhaps the most well-used of all. A google search for the entire phrase threw up 276 million results. We see it used in marketing slogans, on bumper stickers and - over and over again - on blogs. It has become so ubiquitous that it is easy to stop really hearing what Gandhi was saying and, perhaps more importantly, what the words themselves say to each of us right now.

I know that these words are the words that come to me when I am fuming in frustration at a friend who is once again running late for lunch, dinner or a movie. They are the words that come to me when somebody cuts me off in traffic or pushes past me to get the last seat on the train. They are the words that come to me when I'm feeling threatened or insecure about a situation or person in my life.

In those moments I am reminded that I always have a choice, and that if I say that I want to see more love, more joy and more compassion in the world then I have the opportunity in each of those moments to choose to bring more love, more joy and more compassion.

What I've learned through meditation and yoga practice is that I don't have to overcome my inherently jealous, angry, insecure nature by putting on some external mantle of loving kindness. If I practice regularly the scales of attachment start to fall away from my eyes and I can see the world more clearly, I also find myself resting down into my true nature - which is loving and joyful and compassionate - unencumbered by the distractions and confusions of fear.

It's not a kind of utopia, though. Fears still arise, my insecurities still get triggered, I still worry that my boyfriend will wake up one day and realise what a total geek I am and run away with one of the cool party girls. But little by little the practice seems to be giving me quicker access to the truth that lies beneath these passing fears, and I can find my way back to compassion faster and with less suffering.

That's what it means to me to "be the change that I want to see in the world". That's conscious activism.

Conscious activism

Twee Merrigan (yoga teacher) watches Edo Kahn and Jo Mall (musicians, devotees and music therapists) play and sing with children living in an orphanage in Bali

Conscious activism is an idea that I've been playing with for a couple of years now, and here in Wellington I've had the joy of finding some friends and traveling companions who are also interested in practicing their own form of conscious activism.

The most signigicant discovery for me this past year has been the incredible gift of sangha, good company. On Thursday mornings I've sat in meditation with a handful of friends and strangers who have become dear friends. What we all shared was not only a commitment to supporting each other in our meditative practice but also a commitment to uncovering a mindful path of 'activism'.

Each of us had plenty of experience with social change, having been activists in various forms ourselves, and each of us was committed to grounding our actions in a solid base of simply being.

Over the course of this year I have learned so much from these friends and from the simple but profound practice of sitting in meditation with the people with whom you want to plan to take action to ease the suffering of all beings. I've found that there can be a transparency that develops between people who sit together. When you see someone once a week and what you do together is sit in silence there is a quality that develops to your relationship which defies the logic of our 'talk' culture. There is also a shared commitment to this process of sitting, even when we all dissolve into giggles for ten minutes, that gives us a shared - though silent - language.

So we sit. We each do the un-work that is sitting, letting go one by one of the thoughts and feelings that rise to the surface. Settling into the vast sky of the big mind. Sometimes struggling to let go, sometimes wondering how the others can possibly look so calm. Sometimes chanting together, sometimes in silence.

And then, at other times and in other places, we come together to plan actions for social change. We agree that it is important that our actions reflect our commitment to ease suffering, that we don't employ means that create more suffering. We recognise that generating and perpetuating a sense of 'us' and 'them' leads to the creation of more conflict. We choose instead to try to act with compassion, love, hope and joy in all our activism.

I imagine sometimes what my old colleagues might make of all this. Brave, committed but often angry people. I suspect some would find us naive.  But I know what I have come to understand, that if I want there to be more peace in the world - more joy, more hope, more compassion - then I have to begin with me. This is what conscious activism means to me.

What does conscious activism mean to you?

Pop quiz

Sunrise meditation on Mt Batur in Bali. Photo by Leah Simon

Qu: What do writing, yoga, meditation and human rights all have in common?

Answer: They all involve paying attention.

(Other answers may also be correct, in fact they almost certainly are)

William James said:

“

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.[2]

”

Stringing me along

Offerings in Bali

On Friday morning I met a dear old friend for a cup of tea before work. We got talking about Buddhism and quantum physics and the fascinating overlap between the two.

A couple of years ago my brainy ex-boyfriend gave me a copy of Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" to read. It is a relatively simple introduction to quantum physics and to string theory. I use the word 'relatively' advisedly in this context.

He was gently trying to educate me. My ex and I never quite saw eye to eye on the matter of my spiritual beliefs. He was an athiest with a great hunger for scientific knowledge. I was an agnostic with a great hunger for spiritual practice.

The irony is that our very different paths (physics and philosophy for him, yoga and meditation for me) may very well have brought us to a similar place in the end.

I never quite got my head around quantum physics. But I was fascinated by the experiments that showed that sometimes particles act like waves and sometimes light waves act like particles. What intrigued me most of all was that the act of observation appeared to influence whether particles acted like waves or particles.

I loved the simplicity of Niels Bohr's interpretation of this experiment. When it looks like a wave, it is a wave. When it looks like a particle, it is a particle. He essentially said that nothing is real unless it is observed.

Did you get that? Nothing is real unless it is observed. The entire universe is actually a series of probabilities.

String theory appealed to me even more. The fundamental, elemental matter of the universe is in fact a dancing, vibrating loop that appears to be either particle-like or wave-like depending on where you are looking from, amongst other variables.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon with twenty other people, sitting in meditation and receiving teachings on how to live our meditation.

At the end of the day all the teachings came down to this - we are not as separate from each other nor as fixed as our egos would like to believe. We are all connected. Are we connected by the four universal forces identified by quantum physics or by prana, the shared universal energy identified in yogic teachings? Maybe they are the same thing.

We are not fixed. We are constantly in the process of creating ourselves and our realities moment by moment. By the act of observation we take those dancing, vibrating strings and make of them "me" and "you". What would it be like if, when we looked at the world and at each other, we let the picture we have of what we think we are looking at drop away for a moment and opened up to the mystery and the beauty of not knowing what we are looking at.

With this in mind, I'm off to observe the effect that the act of cleaning has on the dancing strings that make up what I call my home.

'Don't know'

Sitting on top of Mt Bakur in Bali, watching the sunrise. Ready to leap.

When I was going through the process of deciding to leave my job with Oxfam (now that I've resigned I can finally name my wonderful employer) there were three main barriers that I found I had to work through.

The first barrier was perhaps the most obvious, I wondered whether I would have enough money, whether my savings would last long enough to finish the book and where I would find money once the book was done. In the end this was the simplest to get past. I have savings, I will live on them while I write. Once they run out I'll find work to make more money. Easy. I could make it a lot more complicated by imaging scenarios in which I don't find ways to make money again but since I've been in the work-force for twenty years and have always been able to make enough money to pay my bills I decided to keep it simple and trust that I would be able to do it again in 6 months time, if necessary.

The second barrier was a sense of obligation to my employer. Oxfam is a wonderful organisation that does great work all over the world to help find lasting solutions to poverty and injustice. I was drawn to Oxfam because they look beyond the obvious and direct contributor to poverty and are prepared to tackle the big injustices that create and perpetuate global imbalance in resources and opportunity. With Oxfam I've been able to do advocacy work on unfair trade policies, ineffective aid and the growing impacts of climate change on developing countries. I am able to do work that I'm passionate about and to work with like-minded and like-hearted people. I've grown close to my colleagues and have a strong personal commitment to the work we all do. It was hard to leave all that without a sense of guilt.

But I've been learning about guilt these past few years and I now know it doesn't serve me or anyone else so I'm getting better at recognising and releasing it. I'm not indispensable to Oxfam and although I always do my very best, I'm not even necessarily the person best able to do my job. It is time for me to pursue other paths and to open this job up to someone else.

The final barrier was a little less obvious, but was perhaps the most powerful. Over almost two decades I've built a strong sense of personal identity around my work as an advocate for human rights, justice and dignity for all. At its crudest, this manifests as a desire to know that I am a good person, and a hope that my good work/s might be evidence that this is so. When I explored these thoughts and feelings, I uncovered an underlying belief that I have to earn my place in the world, that I have to some how pay the world back for the extraordinary privilege I have enjoyed as a child of the middle class in New Zealand.

In recent years my exploration of the practices and teachings of the Buddha have been nudging me towards the possibility that my identity might be less certain, less knowable and - ultimately - less important than I had previously assumed. Yesterday in meditation class our teacher encouraged us to explore what it was like to release ourselves for a moment from the grasp of the intellect - that marvelous thought-proliferating machine - and to settle into the 'don't know' mind. What if I don't know if I am good or bad? Can that also be okay?

Can it be okay to no longer have a job title that is almost guaranteed to get admiring responses from everyone to whom I am introduced? Can it be okay to dedicate my days to something that gives me incredible satisfaction but that may never do any good for anyone else? Can it be okay to really believe that what the world needs most is people who have settled into their own simple wisdom and who are following their hearts? Can it be okay that I don't know? When I settle quietly into the space that sits behind, above, beneath and all around that marvelous thought-making machine that is my thinking mind I find that there is plenty of room for all of this, and more, to be okay.

In Times of War, Feed the Right Wolf

By Marianne Elliott

In November 2007 I arrived back from a short holiday in the United States to my work as a UN human rights officer in Afghanistan. Days later, the deadliest suicide attack to take place in Afghanistan happened in Baghlan, killing at least 40 adults and three children and maiming more than 60 adults and 60 children. For two days after the bombing I sunk into a despairing sadness for Afghanistan...

Continue reading at the Shambhala Sunpace blog where I've been invited to start submitting guest posts. I'm thrilled because Shambhala Sun is one of my favorite magazines and their blog is on my daily must-read list.

Stepping out

Om, one of the beautiful daily mandalas of fresh flowers at our yoga retreat in Bali.

It took one week of yoga retreat for me to finally experience for a sustained period what I have have long 'believed' but had only experienced in short bursts or glimpses. I discovered that when you practice regularly, consistently and appropriately the distractions of thoughts and feelings really do begin to fall away and you settle down into the simple but profound experience of the universal peace and love that is your essential nature.

It was such a wonderful experience that I knew immediately what I needed to do. So yesterday I resigned from my day job. From here on in (well, once I work out my notice and pull everything together into fabulous hand-over notes so that the great causes I've been working on can be seamlessly continued) I'll be dedicating my time to writing, practicing, studying and teaching yoga and to building a social profit company the aim of which will be to bring opportunities to experience that peace to people working in places of conflict. Yoga and meditation courses in Kabul? I think so.

Stay tuned for more! For now I'm putting my head down to write while I can since the office awaits with a mammoth to do list tomorrow.

Namaste!