Every Christmas hols, I set the assignment for all my theatre students: lie down in semi-supine in the balanced resting state everyday during the hols and write a short report on this.
Ido it myself. The first lesson back we share our experience by reading aloud our reports and in a 12-step manner, without judgement or comment.
Because I am in Alonnisos, a Greek Island, I often lie down outside, even if the weather isn’t warm, as I take my dog for a walk. Today it started off with a blue sky and thin clouds as I battled with my habitual mind wandering. I tend to see a lot of the sky and flying things – today a crow, a seagull, a fly or two – and always those strange wriggly minute blips in my vision, like minute tadpoles, flicks of light that have gone before I can follow the trail, and the water patterns from the eye itself, such stuff as one might see under a microscope. and I wonder at how I am looking up into the forever of sky and stars and the universe, well supported by the earth itself. An awareness of being stuck to the surface of the planet as it spins through space.
There is some inhibition involved if it starts to gently patter with rain which it has a couple of times recently! The sounds are much greater: the vision of the wide sky accompanied by the buzz of an insect, my dog licking his paw, the hydrofoil coming in to the port, an aeroplane, the wind in the trees. Today the blue sky turned silver, a beautiful Turneresque skyscape of swirls of light and encroaching dark clouds. And I remembered Paul’s words ‘Now we see through a glass, darkly’ and thought how when my mind churns or is in the forefront, it is like a veil that means I don’t see the moment laid bare for what it is, but always from the habitual perspective of my mind, the structure of my personal experience and thought patterns. Sometimes, maybe I experience ‘Penny’ disappearing and get to a deeper experience of ‘now’, through the veil of my thinking. Perhaps when I lie down and look up at the sky I have glimpses, ‘face to face’.