Meeting with the lama

                    I had the great good fortune to meet up with Lama Rinchen Palmo yesterday. She is my spiritual friend. She was on a break from guiding folk through the winter retreat on the Holy Isle.

                    The lama is so wise and well practised that it is always inspiring to be in her company. I would really like to go on some kind of dharma visit with her, and I was able to make that offer to her since my central heating seems to be fixed without it breaking the bank. She took me to Bodh Gaya, of course, around Christmas 2014. Be great going somewhere with her again.

                      When we were talking about preliminary and foundational practises, she told me what I was doing with the heat/warmth was not a preliminary practise. It's the biz. I was so pleased when she told me that. She said the heat would burn off the neuroses. She made the future seem possibly glorious. I can hardly believe it with my bad habits and all. But I have been meditating for thirty odd years.

                       So I left her feeling pretty elated, which I always feel after speaking to her. I became an old age pensioner a year ago now, and my old age is going to just get better and better. I assume this will go hand in hand with my physical and probably intellectual decline. But my mind will get a lot better. The meditations are really galloping along now. It's as if it was pushing from outside, with a momentum of its own. Making an effort, trying hard, etc ... well, all this must get easier. The sensations will improve. The effect of purification on the sensations makes it easier to stay off the drink and tobacco, etc.

                        It's great to speak to the lama because no one else knows what the hell I'm going on about. It's a real shame that no friends of me got into the meditating, but that's not my fault.

                        I told the lama I really want to live now. If I could stay sober for the next couple of years ... and just keep meditating .... what a wonderful life I will have had.

                        Amazing how uplifting it is speaking to someone like the lama. Completely life affirming.

                        Raising heat is often mentioned alongside the illusory body and clear light mind. I had thought you'd have to have the first of the three before the other two. They might all show progress together. Anyway, she explained what illusory body means.

                        I said I liked the heat and that because it re-inforces my ignorance in that it shows that our model of what a body consists of is at best partial. She said it was crap.