Vajra Blue

Mindfulness and Compassion. Understanding trauma in young people.

Tag Archives: politics


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Mindfulness: Authority bias and finding out who is really in charge? Changing our inner world.

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A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on,.

Attributed to Mark Twain

Mindfulness is becoming ever more popular and is in danger of being seen as a panacea for all the problems that trouble the human mind. Even when the practice is divorced from the other elements that form part of a spiritual path, it can be a useful tool for self management and helping to create greater contentment for our lives.

Practicing mindfulness can help us to work out exactly who is running the different aspects of our mental lives, and how this impacts upon our sense of fulfilment and happiness in what we do.

It can help us to avoid being fooled by the world and others.

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Being human: Balancing the unique with the commonplace.

Christmas truce

It is the nail that sticks up that gets hammered flat.

I was recently watching a programme commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War. The programme showed clips of interviews with survivors of the Western Front, both British and German. One particular interview caught my interest, it concerned the 1914 Christmas Truce between the British Expeditionary Force and the German army along part of the Western Front in Belgium.

The now elderly, young British subaltern was still bemused, fifty years after the event, by a conversation that he had had with a young German officer.

While they were burying their dead, he had asked what the German was writing on a simple wooden cross. The German replied that he was writing “For Freedom” and “In the Sight of God”. This was the cause of the young officer’s confusion, for this is what the British believed that they were fighting for as well. Freedom, and God was surely on the side of the British.

So why exactly were they all fighting?

For a few brief hours the soldiers on each side gave up their attachment to the idea of country, army, regiment, and war. Instead they let these ideas fall away, giving up much of what they had held to be true since childhood, and celebrated their common humanity.

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