Losing your grip: if you let go of everything familiar in your life, what do you discover?
Lessons from meditation
Hello everyone!
I’ve had one of those weeks in which I’ve been all over the place: finishing up a book proposal and sample chapter; building a fence in the garden, and a new chicken run (in my part of Yorkshire, we’re in full-on Avian Flu “flockdown”, so all non-wild birds have to be kept in covered, netted housing); proofing The Last Bastion, the book I’ve written for the charity Women in Sport (out at the end of March); and reading a pre-publication copy of the utterly brilliant Bad Friend by my very un-bad friend Tiffany Watt Smith (out at the end of April; and she’s here on Substack as
), as well as the usual mundane rigmarole of ferrying children to various classes and keeping on top of cat litter. With my mind scattered over so many different activities, I hoped that, when I came to sit down and write this week’s newsletter, I’d have a veritable cornucopia of fleeting thoughts from which to select one to work up into an essay. But, actually, the opposite has occurred. I was struggling to think of anything to write about at all. And then it struck me that, actually, that makes total sense.A little while ago, I did an online guided meditation class, run by Esther Ekhart (I’m a big fan of her yoga classes). When she encouraged us to quieten and still our minds, to let passing thoughts just pass on through, she referred to it as ungripping: ‘ungrip from your thoughts’. It’s such a perfect term. When I’m meditating and I’m trying to not think about anything at all, and then a thought begins in my mind and I latch onto it and get involved in it and stretch it out, it feels exactly like gripping onto something for dear life. I can even feel my face scrunching up, my brow muscles pinching together as if they’re trying to pincer something in my frontal lobe.