Cosmodaddy is Moving…

To all my readers, both casual and regular, because of the success of this blog, I’m now upgrading! From this point on most political content will move to:

http://www.cosmodaddy.com

Please update your bookmarks and RSS readers accordingly. It’s already up and running, has its own ethos and I’ll be joined by four other admins/writers initially. Submissions will be very welcome in time for regular other contributors.

For the more chatty, less serious content, well that’s already moved to:

http://lewishamdreamer.wordpress.com

And you can update bookmarks/RSS readers for that too. Everything which doesn’t ‘fit’ into Cosmodaddy.com will go over to Lewishamdreamer. I hope to see most of you on both sites, and to have as many comments as you can manage. I will be monitoring continuing comments to this site, and add to them as necessary, but from this point on it’s all change!

Cosmodaddy.com

Coming soon…

Look for tight focus on:

– Pirate Party UK/Liberty/No2ID and civil rights issues in the UK

– Amnesty International and human rights issues worldwide

– Regular film reviews/impacts/countdowns

– Issues affecting Vote for a Change, Hope Not Hate and I’m a Photographer, Not a Terrorist!

There should be a huge number more tools, allowing you to share or clip content easier, not to mention (hopefully) an embedded video player so I can interact with you regularly and more immediately. I hope all my regular readers choose to stick around! I promise the photos of cute boys like Alex Pettyfer won’t be disappearing either…;)

Jason/Cosmodaddy

Antwerp in a Day!

Today I’m heading to Belgium…for the day! In a couple of hours I’ll be taking a whole series of nightbuses from home to St Pancras International, before zooming out along High Speed One from St Pancras International to Brussels. From there I intend to nip up to Antwerp for the first time, for a day’s exploration with the D50 (check my Flickr on Friday), before heading back home later today. It’s the beauty of a week’s holiday – I’ll be shattered, but can sleep in all day tomorrow if need be!

I’m going to liveblog as much as I can (I don’t know how many wireless hotspots I’ll find), and to keep track of my misadventures you should (from 3am BST):

Click Here

Alistair Meditation Mindblog – 4c

This evening I meditated after work for the first time. Focusing on the soles of my feet I saw the quality of my thoughts. It was tempting to see the thoughtstorm of the day as bad (as I have in the past) and something to be changed, but I didn’t. Instead I noticed my thoughts were all responding to lack – fully in doing mode. They felt tight, constructed, and so did my body. I changed neither, just kept going back to the soles of my feet hitting the ground. And that alone brought change – walking for no goal-orientated reason, just concentrating and going back to the experience of walking for its own sake recast my whole mindstate.

I can feel my stress, make no mistake, but the practice did indeed draw a line under the mostly doing of the day (by feeling what it’s like) with the mostly being, which I’d prefer for my evenings. Today really was a huge step forward in developing a more caring and skilful mind.

Alistair Meditation Mindblog -4a

“Alistair Meditation Mindboo – 4” by Cosmodaddy on audioboo.fm

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I thought the presence of my morning thought factory and the accompanying bad moods on the way into work were a sign that thoughts led to an absence of kindness and compassion. Not so. I hit on a good thought and it changed my mood entirely – it was of a colleague who is extraordinarily kind and compassionate, and my mood immediately flipped in that direction. Interesting how it changed through not trying to change it. It was the same theme this evening in Alistair’s class – further great practice of observing and accepting things as they were. I found myself at the end tired, grumpy and impatient but didn’t try to change how I was. Compared to a lifetime of constantly trying to change my mindstate from where it was to where I thought it should be, it was counter-intuitively relaxing. Alistair describes it as ‘quantum’ that ending up with the mindstate you want through mindfulness comes from doing the opposite to what you might expect. Sometimes not changing a bad mood can make you happy.

Alistair Meditation Mindblog – 3d

Walking meditation seems to be really useful for the mindset I tend to be in in the morning. I noticed yesterday morning when being mindful of my footfalls that I was (as on the way home the previous evening) in the middle of a thoughts and thinking storm. I was in the middle of a huge number of thoughts, from future thinking about work, to thinking about how I felt about myself and all sorts of random nonsense which both belonged at the time and didn’t. What was really helpful about being out and active in the world whilst meditating was that I could tell quite well how I was feeling, and what wasn’t there was kindness or compassion. Very simply by being mindful about my walking I noticed that in the morning when I’m thinking like mad, it’s not accompanied by the qualities I’d like to extend to the world around me.

Alistair Meditation Mindblog – 3c

This morning’s meditation walking from the station to work was an enormous challenge. It was good practice, doing it when I really didn’t want to – I had (and still have) terrible neckache – my first attempt at meditating through considerable pain and discomfort. Keeping my attention on my walking, on my footfalls was incredibly difficult, and it brought the feelings about the pain and the sensation itself into sharp relief. It was an enormous struggle to just observe the pain, to notice how my breathing had changed completely, the mood that arose as a result, without changing things.  But as with the feeling of hunger last week I stuck with it, despite the resistence. I’ve a feeling this is going to be a useful practice for days when my mood simply won’t tolerate doing sitting meditation.

Alistair Meditation Mindblog – 3b

So this morning I walked the final stretch to work. And I noticed again just how much effort I was putting into controlling my walk, and how I walked. I noticed too how little I was enjoying the control I was expending so much effort on, and how much resentment was building up underneath about this amount of control – how much I wanted to rebel against it. This deep-rooted, habitual & unnecessary control over my breathing, my walking and who knows what else  have exerted a fundamental control over my mood; a lack of awareness of them has led to an occasionally catastrophic response.

I also noticed though just how flawed my faster walking was. When I let my walk do what it naturally does without thinking about it, being truly mindful of the soles of my feet, I found I didn’t land on my heels properly – my left foot lands on the ball of my foot. I even try to short-circuit the process of walking. It’s why staying hungry at the supermarket last week was such a big step in the right direction – it was a real step forward merely through mindfulness, and noticing how unhelpful this short-circuiting has been in my experience of life. The same was true today – I didn’t try to change that walk – I just increased my awareness of it. There’s a lot building up as a result of this new run with Alistair and mindfulness!

Alistair Meditation Mindblog – 3a

AudioBoo / Alistair Meditation Mindboo – 3

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A lot is starting to come into focus, most of which is in the audioboo. In print though I wanted to look at my final point – feeling negative about good things, be it my husband, my meditation teacher, my boss – having thoughts that they in some way don’t like me or don’t appreciate what I bring, when nothing could be further from the truth. In going round the group for feedback from last week, Alistair took his time to get to me. A thought came up that I wasn’t appreciated, I started feeling negative, despite when he did get to me rather thoroughly validating what I had to say. This happened at work last week, it also happens around Tom. It’s part of my mental landscape, and it’s interesting becoming aware of it, it’s a response to my self-image again.

Of course the very last point really was a doozy. My deeply rooted need to rebel, which has caused so many problems, finally came into sharp focus as a response to my own, self-imposed processes of control, be it of my breath, my walking or anything else.  It’s very simple, and one of the most important realisations I’ve had about my self in my entire life. Approaching Alistair’s mindfulness meditation course when things are good really is paying off dramatically.

Pride London 2009

I can still remember my first Pride in 1994. Stonewall‘s Michael Cashman said ‘we are everywhere’ – I’d never been so inspired in my life. Nowadays Pride is only faintly political, although there were political interests on display in the parade – largely basing themselves on Stonewall’s campaign against homophobic bullying in schools – but we really did show we were everywhere. Gay Christians, Muslims, Hindus, soldiers, nurses, teachers, you name it – being gay was very clearly mainstream in ways it wasn’t in 1994.

I have my own reservations about the event being apolitical, much of which I’ll explore in my next post, but Tom suggested a very good point about it yesterday: that isn’t the way forward anymore. The haters really aren’t going to be swayed by Pride marches or gay visibility – not the true ones anyway. That’s down to better policing and better community organising, and of course the more the police for example are integrated into gay community events like Pride the better. So the awful standard of stewarding ultimately didn’t matter that much – it was not just a party but a great event, further mainstreaming gay visibility in areas of public life previously unthinkable. The usual Christianist haters were there, but barely noticeable this time, and clearly ever more out of step with the public mood. Being out is a good thing.