There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, “Handful; your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left the magic behind.”
— Sue Monk Kidd, first paragraph of The Invention of Wings
People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel… but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage… fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.
— Eudora Welty (quoted by Sue Monk Kidd in The Secret Life of Bees)
Being an Indian means being able to understand and live with this world in a very special way. It means living with the land, with the animals, with the birds and fish as though they were your brothers and sisters.It means saying the land is an old friend and an old friend your father knew, your people have always known… To the Indian People our land is really our life.
~ Richard Nerysoo, Inuit
About seven years ago, I had a “wake up” call. I was entering a retreat at a place with a high concentration of Conscious energy. I was dragging a huge suitcase up a long stretch of stairs. A man at the bottom told me that he would help me but he had a bad back. He also told me I was hurrying.
“Not really, ” I answered. “My problem is that I brought more stuff along than I can handle.” (I also thought to myself, “If you won’t help me, at least don’t criticize me.”)
I soon found out that I was in denial. And that what I took as criticism (and it may have been) was a huge event in my life.
That simple message about hurrying was repeated to me throughout the retreat in various ways. And the awareness of hurrying has become a touchstone for my mindfulness practice all these years. When I catch myself hurrying, it’s my “wake up” call.
Obviously, I did have to admit that I was hurrying, and that I do hurry.
What hurrying is NOT: it is not the same as moving quickly. We can move quickly and not be hurrying and we can move relatively slowly and be hurrying. It’s the state of mind.
I think of hurrying as a racing mind, a mind composed of thoughts tumbling over themselves, a mind oriented in the future and the need to get there. There is a sense of dissatisfaction in not being there, which can become agitation, then frenzy, and, in its extreme form, panic.
The trouble is that when we are hurrying to get there, we are not here.
Mindfulness is the antidote to hurrying. Mindfulness makes a clearing for being present in this very moment. Often, slow movement, like walking meditation, does help us to become more present. Pausing and taking a mindful breath is also a way to come back to ourselves right here, right now.
It’s actually very simple to become mindful. There are a few practices we can do to help us. What is simple can be difficult, though. As my mom has always said, “Practice makes perfect.” If we long to be awake and aware, more free from judgment and unconscious programming– if we want to be more fully alive— we can. And practice does make perfect.
— Pam
The photo is of a sacred fire done after we completed the Inka Medicine Wheel training. Below is a description from our teacher of the first session (there are four sessions in one year as part of the Four Winds Society training program).
I find that this work is compatible with any other path one might be pursuing; it has put me on a whole new footing upon our Mother Earth. I continue to grow in this relationship that deeply feeds my soul.
The medicine wheel journey begins with the South session. It is a three-day group training intensive which initiates the process of healing and activation of an individual’s energy field, by working with the gentle healing energies of Mother Earth. We learn the basics of shedding attachment to the past by examining our perceptions. Working at the level of our core energy field, we learn how to release stories and scripts that program us for repeated failure and suffering. During this session, a participant starts his or her personal medicine bundle, called a mesa, which receives the Mesa Blessing rites in ceremony.
— Tomas Bostrum
The common condition is that we all have these audiotapes playing in our heads that run according to certain themes that we have identified with. Who knows all the reasons? These themes were programmed into us growing up… and/or they kind of fit the way our systems are wired. We may have chosen some of them from our predilections. However we got them, they run on their own endlessly. They provide the lenses through which we see ourselves, others, the world. They serve up to us what we consider to be “reality.” What we have, however, is only a limited version of reality– no matter how sophisticated the tapes might be.
Who would not agree that surely the world is wider than how we see it at this particular moment?
Which is one reason why it’s so important to listen to others’ views that will surely differ somewhat than our own– in varying degrees.
But let’s take it farther. How about if there was a way to get to the very bottom of things? What if we could find out what lies beyond the endless tapes? Might it have some resemblance to the experience of a young child, who sees and feels the world with wide-eyed wonder? Is it possible to ratchet back to something like that state of being?
That’s where mindfulness practice comes in. The great thing about it is, you don’t have to believe in it. You just have to have enough curiosity and desire to try it for a certain length of time.
If you wanted to learn to play an instrument, say, the fiddle, you wouldn’t expect it to yield sublime sounds the third time you picked it up. Mindfulness practice is similar; and while not all of us will become master fiddlers, we can become mindfulness masters if we practice with dedication and a sense of longing for something more.
That something more has been spoken of by the writers of scriptures, poets, saints, and also by artists, musicians, scientists, and so-called “ordinary” people. By reading/listening to what they have said, we may begin to resonate with a possible way of being that just might be real and attainable for anyone.
Mindfulness practice is simple (although it may not be easy). Each person will have a unique path to carve. The fewer mental barriers we have, the more readily the fruit will be experienced. Children respond, on the whole, very quickly to it.
If we wish for inner peace and happiness, if we wish for peace and harmony and an end to suffering in the world, then this is something to take seriously. And this seriousness will yield its seeming opposites– freedom, joy, and belly laughs.
Those are my thoughts for today on mindfulness practice.
— Pam
It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, ‘Being here is so much,’ and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.
– John O’Donohue
And whatever keeps widening your heart… when you get down to it…that’s the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love, but to *persist* in love.
— Sue Monk Kidd
About #concentration #buddhism has identified five key factors for steadying the mind: 1. Applied attention – initial directing of attention to an object, such as the beginning of the breath. 2. Sustained attention – staying focused on the object of attention, like having full awareness of the entire “breathing in and out” process. 3. Rapture – intense interest in the object that brings a feeling of bliss. 4. Joy – opening of the heart, happiness, contentment and tranquility. 5. Singleness of mind – awareness of unity, experiencing everything as a whole. Less thoughts, a feeling of being more present. #mindfulness #heart #meditation #temescalcanyon #trailrun
— Suddha Prem
No wonder planning is such a misleading concept. It takes your eyes off where you are and how your life is now, which is the essential data of existence. You fail to arrive where you planned, not because you couldn’t visualize the place but because you didn’t see that the path you were on was the place – if only you could see it at the right angle to reveal its iridescence.
William Bridges