Personal Writing and Memoir

Another Youtube on how we can use memoir….

All Saviors Disappoint

This week’s cover for the ‘New Yorker’ shows four cartoon frames. A small figure walks towards us. As it gets closer we see that it’s Obama, walking on water. The final frame shows a surprised Obama as one leg disappears beneath the surface.
Very witty. Some people really felt that, like Jesus, [...]

Memoir as Soul Work

I’m going to be putting a series of videos up in the coming days, giving hints as to how you can turn your memoir (or in fact any kind of personal writing) into something that will grow you as a conscious being. You may not like the words ‘Soul Work’ because they seem religious. [...]

Memoir - It’s still about Soul Work

I’ve just uploaded another video to Youtube
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With luck the link should work, otherwise try this address:

Memoir writing is not just about proving oneself more right than anyone else (Sarah Palin might be an example of that way of thinking). It’s about digging deeper so that we can grow in understanding, compassion, and [...]

Memoir -and the Buddha

Some of you may know the famous Buddhist saying; “I am in the Buddha and the Buddha is in me”. In other words, without me, the things taught by Buddhism, such as peace and love, cannot come fully into existence. Buddha energy needs me to help express it, and it needs you, too. And [...]

Money and Haiti

The BBC news this evening told me that $200 million had been pledged to Haiti by various foreign governments as aid and relief. The news anchor seemed impressed.
This effort is commendable. Yet it still adds up to about the same amount as three F21 fighter jets.
People, it may, once again, be up to us [...]

Nothing is but thinking makes it so.

Hamlet may have been reaching for some certainty when he said this line, but it still can guide us. Everything we think in response to an event is a construction that we are placing on that event or feeling. And it might be wrong.
If I feel I will die if I don’t buy a new [...]

Love

There are many things worth remembering, and one of these is that love can only come into a place of stillness within us. It cannot make itself felt in turmoil, because confusion is all we can feel at such times.
If you want love in your life you may have to practice stillness.

Anyone for cricket? A Metaphor.

Every so often I read the British cricket reports, since it is the national game of my erstwhile homeland. This season’s matches against South Africa have shown an England side that has had some success, but is at the moment chiefly praised for its tendency to hang on, white knuckled, and force a draw [...]

A Lost Joseph Conrad story…. wrestling with the past.

Today I thought I’d post a few comments on a rather abstruse subject - Joseph Conrad’s story ‘The Sisters’. I choose it because it’s fairly clear that Conrad was using his story to explore some rather murky personal territory.
So murky was it that, in the end, he abandoned the tale. It [...]