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a new home

Thanks to my friend Geoff my website is on the way to a new home. A couple of years of hosting it from my iMac in the garden shed has been enough and its time to move everything to Texas or wherever the hell this comes from. But its not sorted yet. New domain name is courtesy of dicount domain 24 with their nice slightly badly translated from German website. And the site is hosted by webfactions.

Buff review

I got a Buff ‘thing’ for Christmas. I’d never heard of them but being easily impressed was attracted by the packaging and the concept. After wearing it in the privacy of my own home as a kind of pirate headscarf I tried it on another icy cold ride on the motorcycle. As a balaclava it did a fantastic job of keeping the chill off my neck and chin. At £12 I recommend them. Details at http://www.buff.es/index.php.

Breathing in… breathing out

One meditation technique involves ‘breathing out’ unhelpful qualities and habits of thought and feeling, and ‘breathing in’ more noble qualities. For me I find it suprising how a range of mean attitudes that give rise to suffering and sabotage relationships spring from a kind of lack of confidence. So with this in mind here’s a meditation I’ve found useful. You time it with your breath and imagine the attributes:

I breathe in confidence
I breathe in health
I breathe in presence
I breathe in balance
I breathe in power
I breathe in equanimity
I breathe in generosity…

I breathe out resentment
I breathe out a sense of powerlessness
I breathe out victimhood
I breathe out anxiety
I breathe out fear
I breathe out anger
I breathe out despair

Central and Eastern Europe

I’m not sure why I find central and eastern europe so fascinating at the moment. Perhaps its my German mother’s Polish origins and my slightly slopey eyes that I got from her. My plan to ride over to the Czech republic last year didn’t quite happen because I took up an invitation to visit Croatia and had less time. This summer I am hoping to get at least further east than Germany.

Here’s an interesting Internet source for information about these countries (I’ve put some of the links in)
at: http://www.ssees.ac.uk/dirctory.htm

* General resources on the region
* European Union Enlargement
* Albania
* Belarus
* Bosnia and Herzegovina
* Bulgaria
* Croatia
* Czech Republic
* Estonia
* Finland
* Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
* Hungary
* Kosovo
* Latvia
* Lithuania
* Montenegro
* Poland
* Romania
* Russia and the CIS
* Serbia
* Slovakia
* Slovenia
* Ukraine

The Mahaparinirvana-sutra says…

‘All formations are impermanent; this is the law of appearing and disappearing. When appearing and disappearing disappear, then this stillness is bliss.’ This means that when there is no appearance or disappearance in your mind, that mind is complete stillness and bliss. It is a mind utterly devoid of thinking. This is your mind before thinking arises.

From The Compass of Zen by Seung Sahn 1997 Shamhala (p.231)