Be clear in the new year
Come and join me for six weeks of clarity – a new online retreat starting Monday, 10 January 2022
Tea light holder. IKEA.
I want to invite you to come and join me for six weeks of clarity in the New Year.
You can read all the details on my (new) site www.charlesdavies.com/42days, but just now I want to tell you about this tea light holder.
It has a really nice matte finish. Kind of sandy and a little speckled. And it’s a bit shorter then they normally are, so it looks a bit more… reserved.
Also, because it’s a bit shorter it means that it fits very neatly in the Jiffy bag alongside the deck of cards I send out. (42 cards, each one with a piece of advice on how to be clear – one a day for the six weeks.)
And it’s just the right height to fit two tea lights inside it, one stacked on top of the other. So, when you get the deck of cards in the post, before you unwrap them you, you can take one of the candles, light it, and sit with a cup of tea and spend some quiet time, listening in for what you hope you might get from six weeks of clarity. What would you like to get from six weeks of being clear? What might six weeks of extra clarity help with? And what if it all just worked out? Just as you wished? How would that look?
You sit with your tea and the candle and the still-wrapped deck of cards and daydream about it. Don’t just jump in. Take a moment. Because, actually, what shows up in that moment is what matters most.
When you open the deck of cards, the advice you’ll find inside is based on a thousand-year-old teaching from a Buddhist teacher – Atisha. His final teaching before he left his students. He’s summing up his whole life’s work in one teaching – in the hope that it will help them. Help them to be loving. Keep them from suffering. Give them the clarity they seek.
But even that advice – that has been passed down from teacher to teacher and taught anew to students generation after generation – is, in some way, less important than what you find in that moment, sitting with your tea and the light and the unopened cards.
Because it’s in that moment of quiet that you find out what you want. You have the chance, in that moment, to listen in and connect to a genuine desire. And it is that desire that moves you. That brings you to life. And it’s that desire, that life, that will give you the power to find the clarity you need in the six weeks ahead. And, if ever you lose your way, then that moment can be a reminder. A reference point to return to. Put the kettle on. Light the candle. Ask again: “What do I long for?”
Then there’s the second candle. Waiting for you. So that at the end of the six weeks you can light a new candle, reflect on what you’ve learned and done and felt over the six weeks – and turn your mind to the future. The path ahead – and what you’d like to do with your newfound clarity.
I love teaching this work. I love that this advice can be *so simple*, but still so bloody challenging. Even after a thousand years, it hasn’t softened into cliche, but comes with a force.
And I love seeing how we each meet it. I’m just coming to the end of six weeks of taking a group through the advice. We have a WhatsApp group (I hadn’t planned on having a WhatsApp group, because, well, who needs another WhatsApp group? But it’s been perfect.) Each day I share a little recording where I explain that day’s advice – and everyone who joined the group seems to have landed on a habit of listening, handwriting some notes of their own as they listen – and then sharing a photo of those notes in the WhatsApp group. Not every day, but most days. And – oh! – there is nothing like it. It’s like seeing the advice brought to life in each other. On the days where it sparks happy inspiration. Or the days where it meets resistance. Where it finds a little tenderness.
But, though I love the teaching, and I love the chance to dedicate my time to it, and I love seeing others connect to it, I still think that *maybe* my favourite moment of the whole retreat is when I go to IKEA to buy the tea lights.
I live to bring clarity to everyday life. To find these diamond treasures, these timeless truths, that show us how to get through the day. How to be loving. How to get what we need. How to get on with each other. How to be ourselves. And I love to find ways to present them that make sense for now. That mean something for now. I get so frustrated that there can be such straightforwardly helpful information out there, but it doesn’t get to everyone who could be helped by it because it’s tied up with old-fashioned language or supernatural imagery or clunky jargon or bad translation. So, I rewrite and reinvent and betray and reimagine. I’m not scholarly (not anymore…), but I am totally devoted to making something that works for now. Something that is direct and simple and alive now. Something that you can rely on on a difficult Tuesday morning. Out of the meditation hall and into the… wherever you are. Breakfast table. Office. School run.
So, standing in IKEA putting tea light holders in a trolley and taking them to the till, getting ready to post them off to wherever in the world, where they’ll sit on desks and bedside tables, helping to draw the power and beauty of these old lessons into the intimacy of our everyday endeavours – that is the moment for me. I’d like to send a telegram back a thousand years to the teacher on his mountain. “You’ll never guess where I am…” And send him a photo of the tea lights and IKEA and tell him the story.
The six weeks starts on the 10th January 2022 (that’s the second Monday in January). I have ten tea light holders.
If you’re curious, but not-quite-sure, send me a message and I’m happy to chat any day from now until the Christmas holidays.
With love,
Charlie
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