He trained the muscles beside his spine

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• The monk who trained his back muscles with mindfulness

  In brief: A monk with a congenital spinal weakness and severe pain is told by doctors nothing can be done and he shouldn't meditate. Following a…

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  Just like, I won't say who this monk is. He had terrible pain in his spine and that was because he had some congenital deformation in his spine. Doctors at that time... He had a CT scan and said nothing you can do about it. But the doctor said I'd advise not meditating because that makes it worse. Well, I'm a monk! That's what I do! But fortunately he found this excellent book and of how... A long time ago, how to use some mindfulness to cure the problem. Because his spine was too weak and it was causing some problems. But, said this little book, there are muscles on either side of your spine which most people aren't aware of at all because you don't need to be. Much of your body you don't need to be aware of it, so you're not. So the book says start off, take your hand and rub those muscles on either side of the spine as an exercise every day for an hour or something every day. Because when you're actually touching them you can actually feel the sensation of your... And now my thumb touching one of those muscles and that creates a connection in your mind. A neuro connection. The more you do that the more you can be aware of those muscles, the more sensitive they become. Until you can actually feel those muscles without needing to touch them, just as I can feel my nose without needing to touch it. I can feel my hand without needing to touch it. It becomes sensitive. Then once you can actually be mindful of those muscles, trial and error, try and move them. After a while you'll learn how to move those muscles at will. Because now he was mindful of them you can do something with them. Now exercise them: stretch them relax them, stretch them relax them, stretch them relax them. So he did that and then after stretching relaxing them for a few months those muscles became so strong, much stronger than other people's muscles, that they perfectly compensate for the weakness in his spine. Now he can sit meditation, no pain anymore.

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• Bent like an old farmer — healed with the cobra

  In brief: Laying concrete for a Bodhinyana wall that was going off fast, he kept bending to smooth it and afterwards could not straighten — bent for…

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  i was busy just laying concrete for the wall that body down the monastery the concrete was going off really fast i had to keep bending over to smooth out the concrete and afterwards i couldn't straighten my back i really injured it about two or three months i was bent over like an old person like an old farmer's it took me a long time to heal that but i healed it just you know through the yoga position the the the the corpse no that crops the cobra yeah and it was brilliant and i could really feel my back and stretch it just the right amount i never had any problem with my back ever since

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• The 17-year-old bricklayer who didn't look busy

  In brief: Building a Sydney mansion, the wealthy client wants the apprentice bricklayer removed — he doesn't look busy. The builder has him watch:…

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  he was building some big mansion in Sydney and you know it was a very good contract because the owner was some very wealthy person and said look I don't care what the price is I want the best plumbers the best electricians the best Carpenters the best Brick Layers I don't mind paying extra because this is my house my Mansion I want it to be absolutely top quality and then one day when the uh the client this wealthy man just came to check on his Mansion he noticed this maybe 70 or 18 year old kid doing the brick work and he went straight to the building and complained he said look I wanted cross people people know what they're doing not some Apprentice this young guy get him off my building and that's when in the build said come and have a look at this young guy and this young guy didn't look like he was doing much work but when you counted the bricks he was laying those bricks much faster than any of the Old Brick Layers he had his incredibly beautiful Rhythm one brick at a time and every brick was perfect it was just flowing effortlessly and when the owner saw that or the client saw said wonderful great I never realized that because he didn't look busy he thought he was being lazy but when it was effortless one bit at a time it flowed so wonderfully he was an excellent brickl even though he's only 17 or 18 years of AG AG it's just like when you are in the moment

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• Walking up the hill instead of driving

  In brief: After nine years of only driving up to Bodhinyana, Ajahn Brahm gets out at the foot of the hill and walks; the familiar hillside becomes…

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  I noticed the experience of walking up the hill to Bodhinyana Monastery in Serpentine. Now, many of you have been down there, hopefully some of you will come down on Sunday for our Katina Ceremony. We bought that 25 years ago, 26, I think now, and for about nine years, I'd gone up, and down, the road to the monastery, always in a car, in some sort of vehicle. It was like one of those days we had a couple of days ago, just warm spring morning. I remember just coming back from some sort of appointment, and feeling just so positive, so energized, and having plenty of time, I told the driver, "Drop me off at the foot of the hill, I'm going to walk up today." Not for exercise so much, just for enjoying the morning, I had plenty of time. So, I started walking from the southwest highway, up Kingsbury Drive, to the gate of Bodhinyana Monastery. As I started walking I got very surprised. Actually, it was a shock. As I looked around me, I could not recognize where I was. That hillside looked totally different from what I remembered seeing looking through the window of a car. It was totally different. I was seeing things which I never knew were there. What I saw had more detail, had more depth of colour. It was just basically more beautiful. Of course that surprised me, and not being in any rush, not being in a hurry, I just stood still. And as I stood still, the whole hillside changed again. It was like evolving. As a monk you're not on any sort of psychotropic substances, you don't take alcohol, although, during our rains retreat, somebody offered the monks some chocolate cake, and, fortunately, before we ate it, one of the monks looked at the little writing on the cover, saying it had alcohol in it! Fortunately, we stopped in time, because sometimes you're not sure when you get some chocolate cake sometimes they put the alcohol in there just for the taste and then they cook it and all the alcohol goes, it doesn't matter. But we didn't know whether it was put in before or afterwards, and so we decided not to take it. We gave it to one of our visitors who was very happy to be a guinea pig [laughter], Like a food taster. And when he came back the next week he said "That was a lot of alcohol." [laughter] It hadn't evaporated, it was a very good job we were very careful. Otherwise, we may have gone to our monastery just after lunch in a rains retreat and seeing all the monks singing and dancing and goodness knows what else. [laughter] Which would not have done very much for our reputation, so you've got to be very careful. So we don't take such things. We are sort of sober, mindful, alert. So here I was having an experience, like sometimes you have in life, when things become really weird and they start changing in front of your eyes. But what had happened was, what I was seeing, it had more detail, more information. That hillside, you started to see little flowers, started to see rocks, and just the shape of the rocks and the lichen on the rocks. And, just look at the tree barks, and the whole tree bark was just amazing, beautiful. What was also strange was that the colours, the colours of everything you saw, started to grow more intense, more rich, more deep and more beautiful. The whole thing was exquisite. Of course, when a monk has experiences like that, we don't just enjoy, we sort-of contemplate afterwards what the heck was going on. And I decided to analyze it through science, and it became quite clear to me that, when you see things, sight is a chemical reaction on the back of your eye, on the retina. What happens with most people is that when they see something, they move on to another image almost immediately. So, the image on the back of your eye doesn't have time to properly form, and the colors don't come out. They're just maybe 10 percent of what's there, and the detail is all smeared, because the image does not have time. When I walked, I was going slower. The images on the back of my eye, the light had more time, so you could see a much more full picture with more detail, and the colours were deeper because they had more time to manifest. It was just a simple physiology of sight which was occurring. And, of course, when I stood absolutely still, only then did my eyes have all the time they needed to form a full picture. And for the colours, which were out there all the time, to be fully represented in the image on the back of my eye. And for my mind to have time to explore it fully, to appreciate it, and to taste it 100 percent.

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