Steve Taylor's April Newsletter
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Dear
I hope you are well. The weather has been so beautiful in the UK recently – perfect bright blue skies, a gentle breeze, the trees full of blossom, bright green fields full of flowers blooming…It re-ally does make being alive feel like a blessing. I always feel that in any case, even in the cold and dark of winter, but the spring makes life feel like a giant celebration. It’s also been nice
that the lockdown has partially ended, and places have begun to open up. Last week I went to the gym for the first time in four months and it felt fantastic to go swimming again. I love being immersed in water, the movement and massage of my limbs by the pressure of the water. It makes me really live inside my body and become an animal again. The older I get, the more I love exercise - running, swimming, cycling, resistance training in the gym, tennis, football with my kids, yoga with my
wife...The body is as sacred as the soul - in fact, it's just an aspect of the soul.
When I was younger, I treated my body badly – I used to smoke and drink quite a lot and had a terrible diet. My friends say that they never saw me without a cigarette and a cup of coffee. It went on till I was 29 or 30, when I stopped smoking, became a vegetarian and started to do yoga. A few years later I started to go running and joined a gym, and now I treat my body with the utmost
respect.
New Events
On 12th June, I’m doing a workshop based on my book The Clear Light, with some exercises, meditations and discussions. The workshop is organised through East/West books, details here
New Articles and Interviews
I recently did an interview with the 'Borderline' podcast - I was very impressed to find a podcast and organisation promoting a trans-national global perspective. I speak about my research showing that spiritually developed and awakened people transcend group identity and feel equal affinity with all human beings, despite any superficial differences. You can listen here
The Clear Light Podcast
How can we learn to live in the present? Why do human beings find it difficult to live in the moment? What are the obstacles that stop us becoming present? We explore some of these obstacles - such as thought-chatter, rushing and unnecessary activity - and I suggest how we can overcome them, with a 'gentle mental nudge' back into the present. I lead a presence meditation, bringing our
awareness into our different senses. This episode includes the poetic pieces 'The Two Worlds,' 'The Alchemy of Attention' and 'The Clear Light of the Present.'
You can listen on iTunes here
On Spotify here
Or you can go direct to the podcast host here
Research on Experiences of Unconditional Love
At my university, I’m supervising a PhD student called Rachel Anderson, who’s doing a wonderful project on unconditional love. Please read the following and respond if you recognise the
experience:
Have you had an experience of unconditional love?
This is often described as an all-encompassing love for all beings and things, or a sense that love is a fundamental force in the universe.
Our committee member Rachel Anderson is exploring this topic for her PhD. If you have had an experience of unconditional love and you would like to participate in this research, that would be wonderful! Please follow this link for further information.
After-Death Communications
At the moment, I’m doing some research on after-death communications e.g. when people have a visitation from friends or relatives who have just died, or have encounters with loved ones through seeing or hearing or sensing them, or in a symbolic form. If you’ve had this type of experience, please share it with me, by replying to this newsletter.
New Poem - Everything Comes from your Depths
Nothing real or valuable
come from the surface of your mind -
only the most trivial thoughts,
the most mundane impressions
and the most selfish desires.
Everything real and valuable
comes from the depths of your being –
the intuitions that guide your life
as surely as a compass
the creative flow that carries you
to places you never knew existed
the inspiration that lifts you
to peaks you never knew you could reach
the insights that are shared with you
like whispered secrets from a stranger.
So let your the mind be soft and clear
free of assumptions and beliefs
and of dense swirling mists of thought
so that there is no barrier
between you and your mysterious soul
and so that the endless riches of your depths
keep rising to your surface.
All best wishes and blessings, Steve
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