Mike Reeves-McMillan's blog

I haven't been blogging here for a while - I decided to take my blogging elsewhere and started The Innocent Man over at Blogspot.

If you head over there you'll see that I've started two other blogs as well:

• City of Masks, for my novel (about which, more in a moment), and
• Living Skillfully: Hypnotherapy and Health Science on my hypnotherapy site.

This is a thing I’m working on – in both the “have made but am still tinkering” sense and the “am doing” sense.
A Transforming Practice
1. The Intent:
“I want to listen
to what is highest and best,
to all people,
to everything that exists,
to my true self,
so that I may understand and love more deeply.”

2. The Five Gladnesses: “I am glad that…”
3. The Three Annoyances: Choose three people (perhaps one from the media, one from your past and one from your present) who annoy you. Think about why they annoy you. For each, say: “[person’s name] annoys me because he/she… just like me.”
Extra credit: Express a wish, hope, intent, affirmation or prayer for positive change which covers the people who annoy you and yourself, and addresses the issue that annoys you: “I hope we…”, “May we…”.

As many of you know, I was shortlisted for the Ashton Wylie Award for an unpublished manuscript in the "mind, body, spirit" genre. The ceremony was last night.

I didn't win - the award went to Robyn Speed's "visionary fiction" The Key - but it was an honour to be in the four finalists, especially considering that apparently 70 manuscripts were submitted this year.
I was also pleased to detect some evidence of maturity emerging in the "New Age" zone  (which is basically what "mind, body, spirit" tends to mean).  I saw this in two ways:

Those of you who were at Cityside today may remember me suggesting that a good way to start working towards incorporating spiritual practices into our lives would be to have short meditative and liturgical recordings that we could play in the car, while washing the dishes, cleaning the house, having a walk or whatever.

As a follow-up to that suggestion I have made a recording of my "non-Mary-hailing" rosary available for download - it's linked from that page, which also has the words and a full explanation, or here is a direct link to just the recording. It's 4.5MB, MP3 format (so should play in most portable digital music players and also on many newer CD players and DVD players). Runs about 4 minutes 45 seconds.

I’ve recently discovered another community online that reminds me of Cityside a bit. It’s populated by people who take a mature approach to life and discussion, are mostly nice to each other and listen to each other, and are part of a tiny, fringe movement of what is already a small minority. Other members of the minority tend to call them “hippies”, which they joke about. This community is Story-Games.com.