One of the current trends that I constantly see coming up in the media is mindfulness. If I’m entirely honest I find myself feeling a little irritated by the term as it really is just another way of commodifying meditation. For me meditation is a spiritual practice and to commodify it just seems wrong, although I do accept that it may make it more acceptable and accessible to some people.

Literally half my lifetime ago, I am that old, I was trained in meditation within a Buddhist monastic community. I was not an ordained monk but the training offered to lay members was the same. So what is meditation? In its simplest form it is about bringing attention to bear on a subject, it can be almost anything. The initial technique that I was taught was simply to be aware of my body breathing. The Buddhist term is “Ana pana sati” the mindfulness of breath. It’s about being awake to the flow of the in and the out breath. Easier said than done as the tendency of the mind is to wander and get distracted. The next step is to develop the awareness to know that the attention has wandered and to gently bring I back to the subject, in this case the body breathing.

So how does this link with a blog about Druidry and the title of this blog about little things mattering?

My last blog was titled Feet are wonderful and this is where the two ideas merge. It’s about paying attention to all the nuances that arise from being bare footed. But it extends beyond that. We are bombarded with sense impressions, when I am naked in nature or simply barefooted my gates of perception are wide open, I am aware of the smallest breeze, light and shade, subtle changes in warmth and coolness, thorns, prickles, insects, everything that impinges on me. My eyes pick up tiny details, movement of leaves, reflections on water, the shine on leaves. The world is made up of these fleeting moments.

There is no past, no future, only the eternal now.

Each and every one of us is part of that and if you have paid attention to the reading of this blog then you are in the now. It’s as simple and natural as that.