Welcome to “Mark Blogs”

Welcome to the first edition of a new monthly (-ish) blog: “Mark Blogs”. 

I’m very grateful to have this opportunity to share some of the things that I am currently working with in my mindfulness practice. Hopefully, this can be a source of inspiration and encouragement to you as, like me, you try to bring more mindfulness into your daily life.

I have long felt that if I can experience the benefits of mindfulness, then anyone can. I don’t feel that I have any natural predisposition to being mindful; in fact, quite the opposite. When I was 17

years old, a close friend gave me a statue of The Thinker as a gift, recognising my

tendency to think a lot. I was very pleased because I associated thinking with being clever and identified strongly with my thinking mind. I remember going on a vipassana retreat when I was 25 years old and being frightened by the idea that if I were to stop thinking, who would I be, particularly would I lose the sense of humour that I was very proud of. I was afraid that I would lose myself, my identity and become a kind of automaton, an unthinking biological machine. How little I knew that it would be quite the opposite.

The aspiration to write this blog has been with me for about the last eight years, starting a couple of years after moving to live in Plum Village. A number of factors delayed its debut, including a substantial amount of self-doubt. Who am I to share my story? What have I really got to share? Who would want to read it? etc. It’s interesting that it’s been more the transformation of my idea of the self in self-doubt that has played a significant role in the conditions of putting something out there.

I am writing this from Upper Hamlet. As many of you already know, my wife Honor and I have been fortunate to have had the conditions of living in Plum Village for a number of years, and last October I had the opportunity to return. 

Each month, I will try to share what I have been working on, what’s coming up in my practice and how I am trying to hold it in a way that allows for a deeper understanding to develop.

After some years in the practice I see that while my thinking can be helpful, I often have the tendency to think too much. At the moment, Honor and I are deciding where we shall live for the next period of time, whether we should settle in Ireland or move to Plum Village and the surrounding areas. In the space where a decision is yet to be known, I see that my thinking mind is searching for a solution; it doesn't like not knowing, the uncertainty, and wants to reach into the unknown and pull the decision out, much like a magician reaching into his hat for the rabbit. 

One of the senior monastics in Plum Village, Thây Pháp Dung once shared a potato-based analogy. Given my Irish inheritance I may be strongly drawn to potato-based references. So, if while we’re cooking potatoes, we’re constantly lifting the lid to see if they are cooked, then they’ll never cook. It’s a little like the saying that a watched pot never boils. In the tea house in Plum Village, we have a digital kettle where you can set the required temperature, excellent for herbal and green teas, and having made direct testing, I can confirm that a watched pot or in this case kettle does in fact boil. But we get the idea. When we’re cooking something, we do need to do something. We need to put the potatoes in a pot, we need to add water, we may want to add some salt, but once this is done, we need to leave them to cook. If we don’t give them the time they need to cook then we will have something indigestible for dinner.

With decisions, once we have put in some of the necessary ingredients, relevant information, ideas, maybe even dare I say it a list of advantages and disadvantages. In this case, I renamed them pleasant and unpleasant conditions because we can never be quite sure if something is really an advantage or a disadvantage. We can learn a lot from the experiences we might have perceived as disadvantageous, and those advantageous conditions that we seek can sometimes stifle our growth.

Anyway, as for the decisions that Honor and I have to make, hopefully all the required items are in the pot and now we have to be patient and allow the time required for the cooking process. From time to time, the desire to lift the lid and poke around inside the pot will arise, but the practice is to recognise this desire, to be compassionate with myself, to see clearly whether I’m adding an important ingredient or just rummaging about and if I can, to put the lid back down. Unfortunately, unlike cooking potatoes, there isn’t a set time that decisions take to cook, each one is unique and mindfulness is required to discern when they are ready.

Another analogy that helps me in these situations is that of the farmer and the Earth. As farmers we can only take care of planting the seeds and providing them with what they need to grow, but we can’t do the work of the growing itself, that is left to the Earth and the Earth knows very well how to do this work. 

Some things take time to grow, this blog itself, is something that needed eight years from the planting of the initial seed to the manifestation of the blog, yet here it is and hopefully, given the right conditions, it will continue to grow and develop.

So dear friends, as I sat down to write this, I was presented with the intimidating prospect of a blank white page. After all this time there is still the question, what am I going to say? The worry, the fear, the anxiety is there but what is also there is a deep aspiration to share and the hope that this sharing will be beneficial to myself and others.

I hope that you have enjoyed this sharing and that you can be part of this journey with me. If you are not there then I am not here either. If there is anyone that you feel might also find this of interest and benefit, please share the link.

If you would like to share things that you find helpful in bringing the practise to decision-making, please add these in the comments below.

If I could ask you to be patient and compassionate as I find my voice, that would be very helpful and at the same time if the blog is not nourishing for any reason I am delighted to hear feedback and please feel free to unsubscribe at any time.

Sign Up to receive this blog