Introducing myself

Hi!

I'm Geoffrey.

If you're wondering who is behind this website, then let me introduce myself.

I've written all the contents on these pages, and recorded the guided meditations. I've also hand-coded each page. That was a bit of a steep learning curve, but I'm delighted to see the results, and I hope you find the site helpful.

Who I am

I'm a meditator. I've been meditating for about twenty years, though I only discovered the Anapana practice in 2012. I'm also a long-term member of my local Buddhist sangha, though I've already told you (on the home page) I don't identify myself as a Buddhist. I am in fact a retired minister of the United Reformed Church.

My CV may give you some idea of where I'm coming from, but then I'll talk in more detail about how I got into meditation, and more specifically about how I've developed an Anapana practice.

Professional Qualifications and CV

My first degree was a BSc (batchelor of science) in Mining Engineering from Newcastle University in 1973.

I then worked for the National Coal Board for a few years at coal mines in the English Midlands. I gained a First Class Certificate of Competency under the Mines and Quarries Act, the essential qualification for anyone who manages underground work.

Later in life I tackled a second 'first degree', a BD (batchelor of divinity) as an external student with London University. By then I was married with three children.

After that I trained for the Christian ministry at Westminster College in Cambridge. This combined theory with practical placements, and I learned a lot about the human journey and appropriate pastoral care for people at different stages in life, and in varying life experiences.

I was ordained as a Minister of the United Reformed Church in 1997.

In that capacity I served three churches in West Sussex, and one church in Cumbria.

Yet I suffered a mental breakdown during my ministry, and after three episodes of clinical depression I took early retirement.

Once my health had recovered I qualified as an Approved Driving Instructor (ADI) and thoroughly enjoyed several years of teaching people to drive, and coaching them to pass their driving tests.

I'm now fully retired, and living in the North-West of England.

Developing a meditation practice

I developed an interest in meditation during my period of mental ill-health. I couldn't stop my mind from ruminating on all that had caused the breakdown. I couldn't move on from what had happened. That showed me clearly that I had little control over my own mind, and that for all my efforts to look after it, something else was needed. After a chance discovery in a remote village shop I wondered whether meditation could help to restore and maintain my mental health.

This was a struggle

For some years I found it very difficult to develop a helpful meditation practice. I couldn't see the purpose of the exercises I was given, whether it was awareness of breathing or of anything else. I really struggled to keep the breathing or whatever foremost in my mind. Constantly my mind wandered onto other things.

Yet I did persist in the effort, still believing there must be some benefit in the practices. And during this period I did experience one remarkable healing which reinforced my belief that meditation could help to heal the mind in ways that, for me at least, even talking therapies couldn't achieve.

A remarkable healing

Every time I sat in meditation I was aware of a tight "knot" in the pit of my stomach. One day I decided to use my time simply focussing on and exploring this "knot". As I did so, it began to loosen and ease a little.

The next time I sat I continued this practice, allowing myself to accept and fully experience this uncomfortable "knot". Suddenly I had a flashback and realised what it was. It was something that happened at school when I was six years old. Another boy had picked a fight with me. For me, fighting was just a game, and for a bit we punched harmlessly at each others arms. But unlike me, he knew just what he was doing. Suddenly one hard punch to my stomach sent me reeling, winded, and out of the fight.

After that, whenever any kind of conflict situation arose, my stomach tightened up, waiting for the blow, until it became a habit. As a result I could never handle criticism or conflicts in a calm or rational way. I always over-reacted, which only made the situation worse. That was what had led to my breakdown and the subsequent ending of my career.

With this sudden insight I continued to sit, experiencing my hard "knot". To my amazement it faded, and then simply disappeared. Those two hours of meditation worked a great change. After that I found I could take criticism, and I could handle conflicts. I had no need to respond to hostile people. The "knot" was no longer activated in such situations. It was no longer there. In fact I found I had to be careful. I could happily stand my ground rather than try to resolve the issue at hand.

How the healing happened

Notice that the healing happened purely through mindfulness of the body, sitting with a bodily sensation. Something had been internalised in the body. The healing didn't come by identifying what it was, through insight. The healing actually came though mindfulness of the body directly, both before and after the memory of what had caused it. If no identification had come, would it still have been healed? I'm sure it would, for it had already begun to diminish in the first session.

This experience reinforced my belief that simple mindfulness meditation could be deeply healing. But I failed to follow up what now seems to be a clear pointer to the way forward.

My first retreat

Later, a friend invited me to a "Day of Mindfulness" being held by her local Buddhist group. I went to it and found they had two practices, known as breathing meditation and walking meditation. Both seemed to be accessible to anyone, and I was already familiar with both of them. At first there seemed to be very little in the way of Buddhist beliefs or practices, and that suited me. After a time I began to attend the group's regular meetings. The group, or "sangha" followed the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, the well-known Vietnamese peace activist and mindfulness teacher.

Some months later Nhat Hanh himself came to England to lead what proved to be his final retreat in Britain, held at Nottingham University over the Easter weekend of 2012. I went, hoping that some sustained meditation practice would help me to develop my own practice, which I still struggled with. My mind seemed to be all over the place, and fifteen minutes of each of the two practices with the local group did little for me.

Learning to enjoy walking meditation

I was disappointed with the retreat. I found there was very little meditation practice on it. I felt a bit short-changed, and went on to book myself on a different kind of retreat later in the year. Yet in two ways the Easter retreat proved to be very helpful.

First, I came to really enjoy the slow walking practice, especially when I could do it at my own speed. Walking around the campus at the speed of eight hundred other people, all trying to be as unhurried as possible, was excruciating for me.

But one day it rained and the walking practice was cancelled because of the organisers' concern for the health of their eighty-year-old teacher. I was disappointed and set off anyway. Following the same paths, but going at my own slow speed, I really enjoyed it. Halfway round I met someone else doing the same thing in the opposite direction. We acknowledged each other silently, and walked on in the rain.

Meeting Anapana

The other thing that stands out was being pointed to an early Buddhist text which gives sixteen exercises connected to awareness of breathing. Here was an approach which started with the familiar awareness of the breath, but which developed much, much further. It led to some important transformations of mind. It led to what it called a liberation, to dispassion and to an ability to let go of things.

My Anapana Adventure

Thich Nhat Hanh gave a lengthy teaching session each morning on that retreat. More time was devoted to teaching than to meditation, which disappointed me. I really wasn't interested in Buddhist teachings or doctrines.

But on two different mornings he worked his way through the sixteen steps of the Anapana practice, eight each time. I was excited to see how it progressed from one step to another, from one phase of meditation to another, as it led one ever deeper into the experience. Never before had I been shown how breathing meditation could be developed further. It seemed just what I needed.

And at the same time it seemed to be accessible to me and to everyone. There were no Buddhist teachings in it that one had to believe or accept. I immediately recognised its value. This practice seemed to be just what I needed. I decided to make it my practice when I went home.

How to practise the steps?

Yet I quickly ran into problems. The text says the meditator trains to develop a number of qualities, but gives no hint about how we can train. For example in Step 3 we train to experience the whole body. The word "whole" points to an important difference between this experience and the knowledge of each in-breath and out-breath in the previous two steps. But how do we come to experience the body, in its full extent?

Steps 5 and 6, according to the only translation I had available, ask us to experience joy and then happiness. That sounds rather pleasant, but again, how can we train ourselves to experience such feelings? Although I'd bought a book on the retreat about the Anapana practice, it didn't seem to answer my questions. I later realised the book was trying to impose a different type of meditation onto Anapana.

I came to realise I needed to go back to the Pāli text and find out what lay behind English translations. Fortunately, earlier in life, I had learned to read the Bible in its original languages, Koiné Greek and Biblical Hebrew, so I already had the skills needed to interpret ancient documents in their original languages. Pāli turned out to be not so difficult. It was similar to Greek in some ways for the two languages are related.

Learning the practice

After that my progress involved both seeking to understand what the text was saying, and then finding how to put it into practice.

I went on a number of other retreats at Gaia House, a Buddhist retreat house in the Insight Meditation tradition. There I became familiar with aspects of Satipaṭṭhāna meditation, and on one occasion I was able to attend one on Jhāna meditation. At another house I went to a study retreat led by the scholarly German monk Anālayo who has written a couple of books on Satipaṭṭhāna meditation.

I also read extensively. I wasn't much interested in what the different Buddhist traditions have made of what has come down to them. I was far more interested in trying to trace the traditions back to the earliest teaching. What was the original inspiration that lay behind the Buddhist movement? What was it that the Buddha himself had discovered? That question took me more to the academic writers on Buddhist studies than to modern Buddhist teachers.

Back to Anapana

For a time my practice seemed to develop in a lot of different directions. Eventually I came back to the Anapana practice. I began to realise it is a more accessible form of what is called Jhāna practice, which appears to be the earliest form of Buddhist practice, developed by the Buddha himself. But unlike the difficult description of Jhāna meditation, Anapana is set out in a way meditators can actually use.

My meditation skills slowly improved as I made my way through the sixteen steps of Anapana. It took me some years to do so. There were things I had to unlearn, as well as to learn. Then I tried to write down what I was learning to do. A short booklet gradually became a full-length book. Learning and writing went hand-in-hand. The writing helped me to understand better what I was doing, and how to do it, and the practising was essential for knowing what to write.

Will the book ever by published? Some friends very much hope it will, but in the meantime I've built this website in an effort to get the Anapana practice better known. Some of the book has gone into this website, but much of the website had to be written afresh. If ever I go back to the book I can see the next draft will be a great improvement after some important clarifications I've made as I've re-written material for this website.

Is it worth the effort?

Yes, very much so. Half-way through writing the book I had another medical issue arise. I used to be a keen walker, out all over the Lake District fells most weeks. Then my walking became slower and more difficult. I realised I could no longer control some of the muscles in my right leg. The doctor was alarmed and sent me straight to the hospital where, after several scans, a neurological problem was diagnosed.

A small capilliary vessel right inside my spinal cord had leaked a little blood, and this had disrupted signals going up and down several nerves. The motor nerves to my leg had been affected and no longer transmitted the messages my brain was trying to send. And pain nerves back to the brain had also been affected, giving rise to false signals of neurological pain.

From being a keen walker, I soon became dependent on two walking sticks as I made my way slowly along. Without them I lurched about. Walking meditation, which I had learned to enjoy, became impossible. My walk was too jerky, I had too little control for it.

A new adventure

What surprised me the most though was how easily I adapted to this transformation. There is no cure for it. There was one morning when I shed a few tears, realising I'd never return to the high places I love so much. But then the training I'd done with Anapana over the years started to kick in. I began to embrace this new adventure life had tipped me into.

That doesn't mean that such an issue is always easy to deal with. When you get to Step 10 I'll tell you a little more about how it has affected my practice.

Your story will no doubt be very different from mine. Whatever your life may contain, I do hope your own Anapana adventure will enable you to embrace it wholeheartedly, unhampered by the reactivity that so often hinders us and holds us back in life.