If you’re looking for a book that will not just introduce you to meditation, but provide you with clear and careful instructions that will take you all the way from beginner to full on yogi, this is the book for you. It’s big - over 500 pages - but don’t let that put you off: that’s just because it’s covering a huge amount of ground. Now, before we go any further, something needs to be said: the author of this tome, John Yates, aka Culadasa died recently.

So sang Peter Starstedt, back in 1969 Although I’m too young to remember the song at release, it was none the less a frequent enough occurrence on the radio of my youth. The song, in a style described by its Wikipedia article as “faux European waltz tune… with brief bursts of French-style accordion”, is still bringing in significant royalties for Mr Starstedt, decades after its release. The lyrics mention all sorts of things - Marlene Dietrich, Picasso, the Sorbonne, and Napoleon brandy among them.

One of my favourite things about meditation is how I get to talk about happiness with people without it being childish. Happiness is, it seems to me, simply a good thing. Why wouldn’t people want to be happy more of the time? Well most of us might, perhaps, but somehow we don’t think we can talk about it. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, that when we talk about “being happy”, other people seem to regard us with a look that says we’re not a serious grown-up, but have instead reverted to a child-like state and are incapable of seeing all the bad stuff.

The cycle of getting distracted and then returning to what we should have been attending to is ever-present in our lives. Part of meditation is training to shorten this loop.

I love optical illusions. This particular one shows our brain trying to make sense of perspective - the two horizontal boxes are the same width, but the top one looks wider than the bottom one because of what look like the “railway lines” behind them. There are lots of theories about what’s going on in our brains when we see things like this. But what we know for sure, is that our brain is telling us something about the world that isn’t true.

Buddhists talk about Doubt as one of the “five hindrances”. It’s important to distinguish between two different ways we use the English word doubt. The first is helpful: it’s about inquiry, investigation, and examination. We shouldn’t automatically believe or disbelieve things we hear, we should be curious - that kind of doubt is helpful. That’s what the robin in today’s photo is doing: he is just thinking “is there anything I can eat here?

Some days you just feel sad. Things might be going ok at work, the family are in truth at least somewhat lovely (all things considered), maybe it’s even stopped raining for twenty minutes and the sun has come out, but for whatever reason, you’re not feeling it at all. Maybe you were feeling ok yesterday, maybe yesterday wasn’t so good either, but today definitely isn’t up to the mark. And you know what?

One of the wonders of Life is the constant unexpectedness of it all. A long time ago, when I was driving along a road I knew very well, and had driven for years, I came around a corner and was confronted by the sight of a very large pig, just standing in the middle of the road. I just about managed to avoid the embarrassment of a pig-related insurance claim, pulled over, and soon found that it had escaped from a nearby farm.

What do you think of yourself in the world? How do you compare yourself to those around you? Do you remember all the bad things you’ve done in your life, all the mean things you said? Could you write a list of them? Is it a long list, or a very long one? There are two answers to this: the first is that no, you can’t remember doing any bad things, and you’re a brilliant person.

These are the difficult times. When we can make a difference, to ourselves and others, by what we do in the moment.