I remember what I teach. That the habits of the past come to bear on how we meet what is arising in the present. We easily slip into these well-worn grooves.

I stop when I reach the middle of the park. I’m surrounded by thousands of graves. All these people lived and died, and so must I, and so must we. This is a truth none of us can escape. It’s the great equalizer.

I remember as I’m nodding off that I’ve started to use hashtags and that the most trending one today was #love.

No one’s in a lockdown because of coronavirus. We’re at home, in our luxury prison cells.

It’s so quiet. London is supposed to be waking up and going about its business, but I can’t hear a thing. No cars, no motorbikes, no kids babbling away on their walk to school.

Back in bed and still nursing my coffee, I remember my dream. It comes flooding back with a sudden heaviness that almost takes my breath away.

So much space in all directions, and yet we are held here.

This is life. Right now. And I don’t want to be with it. But I know the only way out is through, so I come back to the breath and the sound of the train and the birds that are starting to sing.

As I lay in bed, unable to move it occurs to me that for the first time in human history we are all grieving in unison.

I wake to my partner bringing me coffee in bed. A daily routine, made more precious by the loss of so many other daily routines.

In the dim light of early morning I wake up and have to pee. It takes from the time I get out of bed until my bum lands on the toilet seat to remember coronavirus.

Today I woke to the sound of birdsong ringing through an eerily silent sky.

We are all in a perpetual dance with the earth as she holds us in place. We pull away, she pulls us back.

Our humanness is at the root of who we are and all of what we experience. And it is one of the keys to our liberation.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your Dharma practice is working, notice what happens during an unexpected, life-changing event.

The price we’ve paid for pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and just getting on with it is a life half-lived. We have been too scared to go beyond what is known to us, too anxious to edge into the unfamiliar, too guarded to let life in, with all its sorrows AND all its joys.

To be a multiplicity of things isn’t as scary as we originally thought. In fact, it is what makes us human and what connects us to one another.

This freedom in knowing directly the experience of this body, my experience alone, to be delighted in, tastes so good.

Staying grounded is my focus and I feel profound gratitude for the beautiful landscape I live in and the gravity that keeps me here. 

We are all deeply conditioned by every event in our lives, and the lives of our parents and ancestors. The unimaginable web of events resulting in us being here now, as we manifest today, is at the same time amazing and terrifying.