This is the funeral service for Sheila Frewin, the artist Sheila Mannes-Abbott, which took place on January 31st 2014, in St Decuman's Church, Watchet.

Guy's Eulogy starts at 4 minutes 50 seconds.
Contributions from friends, family and the congregation begin at 17 minutes.

Sheila Frewin's funeral, 31st January 2014

This is a meditation for absolute beginners, recorded by Jinananda. He teaches meditation at the West London :Buddhist Centre, and you can find other meditations of his on jonfrewin's soundcloud page.

A guided body awareness meditation for beginners, by Jinananda

This is a led meditation practice, as taught at the City Lit and the West London Buddhist Centre.

I encountered this meditation for the first time when I was finding life a little stressful, and there is no doubt that it has helped me immensely since 2007. I would heartily recommend anyone to have a go.

You could start right now, but you might like to read this introduction that Jinananda once wrote:

The first thing is to find a quality of stillness.  It is possible to move or walk with this quality of stillness, but in this practice, you can start to develop it by being physically still.  You can move during the practice, but the invitation of the practice is not to fidget. 

If you need to, you can lie down to do the practice, but if you can, you should sit up, in a chair or on the floor, either kneeling astride cushions, or if sitting cross-legged, sitting high enough on cushions so that the knees are lower than the hips. 

The aim of the practice is to cultivate a concentrated appreciative attention to our moment-by-moment experience of the breathing process. 

There are four stages, or approaches, to the practice.  Each of these stages represents a slightly different way of being aware of the breath, of being aware of in the breath.  Starting with the easiest, and working towards the stage requiring the most delicate focus of concentration. 

Mindfulness is not about closing down or cutting off our thinking, it is not an exercise in fixing or forcing the attention.  It simply provides our thinking with something to come back to when it becomes aware of what it is doing. 

We are being mindful at the very moment that we realize that our mind has been all over the place.  Coming home to the breath, we are coming home to ourselves.  Without trying to stop the mind doing what it wants to do, we are centring the mind, settling it.

You can find other meditations of Jinananda's on jonfrewin's soundcloud page.

A guided Mindfulness of Breathing meditation for beginners, by Jinananda

This is a led kindly awareness meditation practice as taught by the excellent meditation teacher Jinananda, at the City Lit and the West London Buddhist Centre.

Its purpose is to extend your awareness quite naturally beyond the boundaries of your own body, your own self, to explore your awareness of others, to enrich your own life with a deeper sense of life that is not your own. 

You do this by engaging the amazing faculty we all have to conjure up another person in your own mind. 

Find a posture you’ll be able to sustain fairly comfortably. Either lying down or sitting up. If sitting, it helps to tip the weight forward so that the legs are taking some of the weight from the spine. 

So if sitting on a chair, try raising the back legs a little. If sitting on the floor, sit on enough cushions so that your weight is not all bearing down on the bottom of the spine. Make sure your hands are supported.

You can find other meditations of Jinananda's on jonfrewin's soundcloud page.

jonfrewin

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