I'm at mind body spirit festival and I hate it here. I think it's full of Charletans and liars and bullshit. There are lots of people here and I'm trying to figure out why. I think the overarching theme might be that they want to feel better about themselves. That annoys me, cruely.
To be fair, we live surrounded by messages encouraging us to be beautiful and rich and sucessful and happy. At the same time, we are surrounded by more opportunities to be unhealthy, overspent, caught in a rat race and lacking enough time to make our relationships really good. It's a cruel situation. The consequence? Lots of people feel a bit shit.
This festival feels like a side effect of this, a holding place for people who don't feel much worth and are using the world of Mind Body Spirit practices to try to somehow stay above water amid a constant feeling of gentle drowning.
And am I so very different? Do I not practice yoga so regularly to keep a feeling of stability, clarity and positivity and when my practice diminishes, do I not experience an inundation of negativity?
Yeh, alright. Humm.
Can I just have a bit more of a rant about Mind Body Spirit. This is GMTV spirituality and there's something grotesque about it. Before me are three chaps playing faux indian music to a sound track. They're totally ignoring two basic tenants of Hindustani classical music that provides its discipline, and its beauty: Raga - the specific collection of notes you stick to - and the structure of progression through stages of a piece, from slow and low to high and fast improvisation, with some composition coming in the last quarter or so. It's important and it's formal and it takes years of doing it properly to do it properly. They're ignoring it totally: they've taken the easy route and the singer is hopping about the stage like a madman and he looks a dick. Atman, the band is called.
There's a lady who keeps on singing, but if she's so good why does she need all that reverb?
And Katy Appleton is about to give us a yoga class and her body is unattractively hard and I'm sorry, but I think it's weird for a woman to have such big arm muscles. Things feel unbalanced.
....
OK, I'm going over the top, actually Katy was really good. As was David Olton, Zahara the belly dancer, inversion therapy by the looks of it, Baka Beyond and a couple of other things. But lordy!
I passed by Westminster Cathedral on the way home and stopped in for some kind of counterbalance to my Mind Body and Spirit douching
The building is awe inspiring and beautiful and humbling.
A service was about to begin and I joined it.
God, I said, I am just a speck of dust floating in your world.
“Good,” God laughed, a deep belly laugh. “Good!”
I grinned. I felt better
and my life and beliefs felt like scrambled eggs.
I would like a religion.
Religions seem to have some good things.
One story
of things that are always true.
Some things that are always the same.
A place to gather all the things that are most good
Experiences that speak to your tenderest part and draw out your integrity.
Some songs that everybody knows.
Ways to characterise different periods of time.
An elder who is involved in the lives of the community.
A community.
Rituals that are meaningful.
And overall, it is all a vessel for a set of values, a funnel to whirl the values around and pour them into people's hearts and lives, in a way that makes everything better
more full of love
more meaningful
with less bad stuff
and more good stuff
and solid bases you can really, really trust.
And all of that shared consistently by people through time.
And yet also somehow alive.
I would like a religion like that.
“It's all about you”, reads one of the straplines at Mind Body Spirit. No, it's not. It's about everyone and all of life, now, before, and in the future. Stop trying to be an ever better person. Stop thinking about yourself so much. Accept yourself as you are and strive gently, continually, little by little, to be a good person and live a good life. With a little help from your friends, regularly, like every Sunday. That's what this lot seem to be saying.
I had a feeling in the Church that moments of Gold cannot be separated from the rest of life; that Gold is a way of life.
A little later, the Priest said:
“I will be with you always,” said God. “Even until the end of time... If I am not there, the spirit will not come.”
Maybe Gold is another word for the holy spirit. Maybe the holy spirit is the Christian word for Gold. And maybe the Holy Spirit only visits if you live with God.
Graham has said that of the team, he thinks I have the greatest sensitivity to Gold, the strongest perceptors of its presence or absence.
I said, if that is true, perhaps it is because I practice a lot of yoga
and I am learning to weave the values of yoga into my life
and that is a lot like living with God.
But more than the rest of the team??? I'm not sure.
I just think I've been to more wierd festivals than the rest of the team and that tends to be where gold lives.
Humm.
Samadhi
Fana
Holy Spirit
Gold
?
the exploration continues.
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