In 1985 I left the rock and roll band that had formed the stimulating, but mind numbing cocoon in which I had lived for the last ten years. I no longer knew what I wanted anymore and risked wasting the rest of my life pursuing more of the same, simply for lack of vision. So, from pursuing fame and money became a new challenge - that being, how do I bring myself back to life? This formed the beginning of the amazing journey I am still on. When I was a kid, I'd always been drawn to the idea of meditation, because my father had a lot of books on Asian religions – especially Zen, which I found particularly fascinating. Over and above its stories of eccentric monks and their strange adventures, I was attracted to Zen’s defiant need for the truth of reality as direct experience, rather than the set of beliefs and laws I had been conditioned with by my culture. So I could see how meditation might work, but had no idea of what to do about it. So over the decade after I left the band, I tried as many different forms of meditation as I could find - Zen, Transcendental Meditation, Tibetan meditation .....until in 1989, I decided to focus on Vipassana meditation. I quickly reaised if I was to learn Vipassana properly, I had to go to the source. So I decided to go to Thailand and find a teacher - put myself into retreat in a monastery. To that end I wrote to the Thai Buddhist Society for a list of temples in Thailand which might take me, and threw a dart to decide which one to go to. The dart hit upon Sorn Thawee Meditation Centre in Chacheongsao in eastern Thailand, and in early 1990 I began the first of what turned into yearly retreats of two to four months per year thereafter. The training was intensive, entailing continuous mindfulness of every posture and action, and around ten to twelve hours of formal meditation, both walking meditation and sitting. I was instructed in a very practical way of helping the attention to let go of the conditioned thought-stuff that mind builds around its experience – to ‘peel the mind like an onion’ so to speak, so it could see how its own processes are its worst enemy. In peeling away the layers of conditioned reality, that had formed the walls of the prison I had always lived in, life began to open up, and new abilities formed themselves - and life became an adventure instead of the obstacle course it had often felt like. The clarity of the practical meditation methods I was taught swept away all the quasi spiritual muck that I'd always associated with meditation – and it amazed me that the information I was being given was not covered by the commentary on meditation back home. It distressed me that for all the coverage of meditation by the commercial media over the last century, most people still didn’t understand how simple, practical and essential it is as a life skill. Even now, meditation is still either trivialized as a ‘relaxation technique’, or obscured behind culturally incompatible spiritual blather, in which words like ‘chakra’s’ and ‘energy’ only serve to confuse and sabotage the true challenge of meditation. So I began to tell other people about what I’d learnt which morphed into giving lessons and eventually, meditation training eclipsed my other activities. It rapidly became clear to me, both from my own experiences and from the experiences of my clients, that the western mind has great difficulty finding the mental tranquility that the Oriental mind takes for granted - that is the beginning point of meditation. And it’s understandable. We in the West have never in our history been encouraged to be mentally still. Our cultural and social history has been an extraordinary quest for progress, information and acquisition, at the cost of what I would call ‘our internal ecological balance'. My experiences over the years I was training people in meditation showed me that people are keen for someone to explain meditation to them without the usual fog of quasi-spiritual, or metaphysical, or religious contexts that often goes along with it. In stories I was told, there were been too many teachers who have had spiritual agenda’s of their own, or who have not enough experience of the mental states they talk so glibly about. Their teaching often reaches far beyond what people are naturally capable of, and in so doing, sets their students up to fail. It is a kind of arrogance that alienates a lot of people from the very idea of meditation - often those most in need of it. And I know when I first began seeking information about meditation when I was in my 20's, it was exactly those kinds of teachers who, with all their enthusiastic talk about enlightenment and 'god-head', made me feel as if I was un-suited to meditation. All I wanted was someone who could explain things clearly, and help me to understand the true nature of something that seemed all too arcane. So now, from my own experiences, I know that people need to understand the why and how of what they’re doing before they do it, and they want it explained simply and concisely. They want someone who can guide them, knowing that this person has been where they were going, and can help them to deal with whatever happens. It’s exactly this that kind of training I wished I had’ve had when I first began – so that is that kind of trainer I try to be. So in 1994, I wrote a book about my understanding and experience of meditation, including instruction in meditation - the book was entitled ‘Happy to Burn’. It was published in Australia by Lothian Books in early 1997. And when the rights eventually reverted to me, I decided to give it away as a free downloadable E book from my web-site. Over 20,000 EBooks have been given away since. My new book, ‘Love & Imagination', which extends and expands upon the methods I described in 'Happy to Burn', is finished and will be published shortly
Both those books are available for free from sankhara.com.au
Though I no longer am available in Australia as a meditation trainer, I have recorded my meditation course as a downloadable set of MP3's, - also available from sankhara.com.au
