Side effects

There's not much to write about when things are going well with my practice, as they are at the moment. I know that this can't be the permanent state of things; the way spiritual progress goes is like a flight of steps: a steep improvement is made in  a very short time, followed by a plateau where it continues calmly on until the next steep learning. But I do notice, that as I am able to maintain a regular meditation twice a day and for a reasonable length of time two unexpected things have happened:
1. I find in myself a growing and urgent need to read the New Testament. The Gospels, and, surprisingly, the Epistles of Paul.
2. Small things in my body - long standing minor (trivial even) bumps and irregularities - are slowly but significantly healing. Ian Gawler told me this would happen, but I was never greatly convinced. He said that the time spent in meditation was time when the body's immune system could work unimpeded, which is why he makes meditation the centre point of his cancer treatment program.

Whether these things continue or not is unimportant. What is interesting to me is the way that these islands of quiet  at either end of my days are working their way into the rest of my life: colonizing me. Again, I was told that this was to be expected but it's always a bit of a surprise to see it actually happening