{ I was sat trying to do a Mindfulness practice one morning and I found myself thinking that I couldn’t wait for it to start having an effect – for it to make me a calmer, better, more Zen person. Then realised that actually the effect was in the practice, in the moment. }

Stop looking forward. Whatever ails you contains its own cure. In waiting for the cure to take place you miss the medicine that the moment provides.

Each ‘here’ each ‘now’ has its own education. So pain teaches, alleviation teaches, recovery teaches.

We never walk the same road twice; neither us or the road can be repeated. We are always moving forward and each moment is an opportunity for conscious being, being conscious. Being.

This state requires work and practice but it is one of uncovering rather than creating, letting go rather than tying down.

Knowing, rather than thinking, that everything required is already here.

Our education, our healing is constant – in each moment. Our work is the conscious choice to honour the experience we are given in the present, fully, without judgement or comparison.

As when we when we fall in love, the experience is of recognition. We learn to recognise ourselves. We start to understand ourselves as constant and containing all possibility, like a growing seed.

This is not a process of introspection or an avoidance of actions and consequences. Quite the opposite, it is the honest appraisal of what is happening now. It is our creation of the space to fully acknowledge how we are without the habitual jump to another state.

We cannot stay with a moment. We can only acknowledge it for its perfect duration.

Like irrepeatable snowflakes, each moment is unique and unspeakably precious for in it is contained the whole of existence. It contains the ailment and the medicine, the beginning and the end. It contains all that is needed, as it is in fact all there is.