I’m in “Dalai Lama” land right now. Yesterday I interviewed him and we had a giggle. Tomorrow I’m chairing the Happiness & It’s Causes conference where he’s the guest speaker.

In this shot (with the crew) he’s squeezing my hand over and over. And kept winking.

Then, a few hours later, in the hotel lobby where I was working on my laptop, he and his entourage flurried by and he gave me a double thumbs up and a big grin. It cracked me up.

Some of you have asked “what is he like”. It sounds sappy, but his energy is very magical. In an ordinary way. He doesn’t try, he doesn’t force, he doesn’t judge. He’s “a simple Buddhist monk” who gets it, gets us…this is a skill. A quality. He is able to tap into the Western malaise and give us the right kind of comfort (see my last interview with him 18 months ago to read what he says about our frantic efforts to “still the mind”…his response says it all).

I feel very, very lucky.

PS. I also had a lovely, warm chat with Matthieu Ricard today. It’s been all about the monks!

Just a thought for this morning. It’s an old Buddhist story. Of a student who asked his teacher, “What’s the most important thing?”

The wise old teacher replies, “The most important thing is asking what’s the most important thing”.

Asking is engaging, caring, being alive, diving in. Not really knowing for sure – having an inkling in your heart – is what keeps us connected to each other, I think.

“Literature is a yoga, a soulnerd’s intellectual-spiritual practice of contour-fitting what we know to what is so.”

I read this in a Psychology Today article this morning. It’s given me heart on this Monday morning after a night of not sleeping and feeling really very raw about how I’m “doing life”. The article is about evolutionary thinker Jeremy Sherman’s take on what it means to be spiritual, in the context of coping with our mortality.He identifies that spiritual can either mean:

1. adhering doggedly to a doctrine of some sort that provides the answers for you (and comfort), or

2. existing in the now, such that you “let go” of the notion of the future (and impending death).

True.

But he also identifies a third way. That of the soul nerd. That of studying our predicament with considered curiosity.

This week I eat mindfully

Now here’s a thought: what if all those folk who take photos of their every meal and post them on their blog/Twitter/Facebook were actually onto something? I’m sure you’ve seen them about. I was at lunch recently and watched a table of six whip out their iphones as their food arrived, repositioning the Maldon salt pot artfully and angling the lighting all Petrina Tinsley-like.  In a flurry of thumbs they then tweeted the images on to their cyber followers replete, no doubt, with foodie-ese captions (“River Café-inspired mascarpone-stuffed chook with intriguing heirloom tomato smear”; “Well, if those toffee shards don’t take me straight back to 1992!”).

I’ve previously found such faddish behaviour bewildering. But this week I discerned a point to it all. Fastidiously honouring your food in this way is mindfulness in action.

This week I meet the Dalai Lama.

And can I be honest? The experience nearly turned me inside out, what with the three days of fretting beforehand. I’d been invited to meet His Holiness, the spiritual leader of the people of Tibet, and ask him, on behalf of all you lot, how to make life better. Seriously, what does a girl ask? What’s the one question that will cut straight to the fuggy, constipated, heart-sinky life angst that people like you and me experience when we drop our facades?

So I met His Holiness the Dalia Lama. Much to say (stay tuned…I’ll be filing my Sunday Life column on here shortly). But for now, the evidence:

me + hh chatting head chatter

Anyone from Melbourne? Definitely try to get to his public lecture this Thursday. His message is very important right now as we find ourselves caught in a flurry of ETS debates, Liberal Party mayhem and a general feeling That Things Are Just Not Quite Right. I promise his message will help. He made me feel like It All Makes Sense.