Three friends died this past week--two from cancer, one from COPD. Maybe we could say we all die from breathing. We all die from living, from having lived. The cause of death is birth.
Look deeply into the eyes of those you love.
Look deeply into the eyes of those you love.
"Hear rest" is one of my favorite meditations. It's like listening to the sound of silence.
Pay attention to your throat. Relax your throat and keep it relaxed. Notice that every time a thought crosses your mind, you experience a sub-vocalization and your throat tenses up a little bit.
Relax your throat. Relax into stillness.
Meditation can be like that. The more you practice, the easier it becomes. Though sometimes it feels more difficult too.
Just keep adding another minute here and there. Another minute of mindfulness is always good.
Sunrise and bedtime--excellent times for meditation. I've been trying out a new meditation schedule:
5:15 a.m. half an hour by myself
6:00 a.m. 1 hour on Skype with 2 meditation friends
7:10 a.m. half an hour at our local meditation center on Zoom
8:00 a.m. 20 minutes with my neighbors on Zoom
I find this 1-2-3-4 schedule very helpful, like doing repetitions.
And i see the cardinals at first light.
I asked my birder friends, and eventually someone came up with the answer: a Carolina wren.
What i had failed to notice was the perky tail and the ever so slightly curved beak. Now that i see those features, i see them clearly.
Identifying our emotions can be similarly blurry. We know the feeling in the body, although even those sensations are blurry for some people. But what's the name of that emotion? It takes a while to develop the emotional intelligence and the emotional fluency to identify the emotions in our very own body. "Well, it sort of feels like...." What?
Welcome, Wren.
Feeling left out is one of my very familiar go-to places. I could give you a hundred examples, similar to Elizabeth's. They are meeting without me. No one told me about.... Everyone else is (or has).... They all seem to know about [something i don't know].
Elizabeth said, that during meditation, she felt the thought from a place of Awareness, and the thought turned into a pleasant vibration. The thought was gone. Gone.
I said, "Well, that gives me hope."
The following morning, i saw HOPE floating among the trees in my yard.
The belief that I am being left out is just a thought. A thought that, if i pay close attention, is a vibration.
Sound is a vibration. You can "hear" sound throughout your body as it vibrates your bones. That vibration can be pleasant. Though roaring motorcycles might be unpleasant. A thought is nothing more than inner hearing; hearing an inner sound with a very weak vibration. But it does vibrate. Use all your mindfulness to notice this.
The thought/belief of being left out dissipates into emptiness.
Usually, hope is a desire for something different--wanting this moment to be different or wanting an outcome to be different. The Buddhist path cultivates the equanimity of accepting this moment just as it is. We may not like it. We may not like the news, for instance, but accepting what is, as it is, is clear-eyed seeing.
The Buddha teaches us about the path. Desire, wanting, craving are the sources of the problem. When we stop wanting, when we stop resisting this moment, as unpleasant as it may be, our minds and hearts come to rest.
Then we proceed with our heart leading the way.