Tree of Life by Mary Fleeson

Today, all being well, I will be on Holy Island… Lindisfarne… for the last day of the Silent Eye’s autumn workshop. It is a place I love and have been lucky enough to visit many times now… but it can never be enough.

That is one of the joys of these workshops… that we not only get to visit wonderful places ourselves…and spend time researching them too… but that we get to share them with others, exploring the sites and their histories, their legends, myths and folklore… and making them a part of a theme that runs through the weekend. These themes explore spiritual concepts, often in unusual ways, and because we do not stand as teachers in front of our students, but share the journey, listening, looking and learning ourselves, we learn as much as we share.

Beyond the land-based workshops that take…

“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

Jalaluddin Rumi was a 12th century Sufi mystic, whose approach to the ‘real’ was remarkably modern. This should not surprise us. Anything spiritually true will have that immediate and familiar ring about it – the sense of a homecoming, something ‘just there’ beneath the surface of our consciousness.

The Sufis knew that there is no need to use an overly ornate symbolic system to describe the psychologically-real in the human being; most of those that do were created, in times of religious persecution, to enable teaching in secret. Today, there is the danger that they become the tools of egoic gurus who use them to veil the truth, rather than light a path to it. This is not always true, but is a danger…

I was struggling with the height of the walls – 10 metres. I am distinctly medium in height; my two sons tower over me, at six foot, three inches each. But ten metres is a long way into anybody’s domestic sky; and yet that’s how tall the central stone tower of the Broch of Gurness was.

The small cheeseboard (above) bought in Kirkwall, the capital, has served us well as geography prop. Locate the island of Rousay and, from its south coast, drop down to the shark-shaped headland on the West Mainland below. That’s where we are, at the Broch of Gurness, with Rousay opposite, so close you feel you could swim to it – but those waters are treacherous…

I hope someone else is asking, ‘What’s a Broch?’ It’s a well-known word north of the border, but I had to ask the Historic Scotland guide at the tiny visitor…

They who set out to discover the twin meanings of the word ‘self’ must walk a certain path. The route to the deeper, real self lies only in the journey through the everyday self. Without this study – and its consequent effects – there can be no personal transformation.

We have to learn to look at ourselves with intensity if we are to begin to glimpse the false edges of what we take ourselves to be. There are many forces at work to guide and help us. This is not a journey that is taken alone. To paraphrase the ancient Kabbalists: The universe is awake to an awakening Adam. Our birthright is the state of full and inclusive consciousness, free from the accumulation of the personal past. What prevents this state of living is the power of that past…

The ordinary, everyday self is characterised by one word: reaction…