Soul Whispers
Finding Ground in Chaotic Times
Each week I receive Heart Advice emails from Pema Chodron. Pema is wise, humble and quite funny in a dry Buddhist kind of way. She is one of my all-time favorite spiritual teachers. This week’s Heart Advice is so good that I wanted to share it with all of you.
Sometimes the most profound advice is quite simple:
A BRIEF PRACTICE FOR GROUNDING
“First, come into the present. Flash on what’s happening with you right now.
Be fully aware of your body, its energetic quality.
Be aware of your thoughts and emotions.
Next, feel your heart, literally placing your hand on your chest if you find that helpful.
This is a way of accepting yourself just as you are in that moment,
a way of saying, “This is my experience right now, and it’s okay.”
Then go into the next moment without any agenda.”
~Pema Chodron
Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change
Smoke and Stone
I sit
breathing out my worry
and my wonder
as I silently ask the Goddess
what exactly is compassion?
and can I offer it to myself?
I sit
breathing out my fear
am I brave enough
to love
like a Boddhisattva
without reason, without end?
I sit
watching the Goddess
smoke dances, we sit
suddenly, the stone of me cracks
there is nowhere to hide
I am love.
Shadows and Joy
“We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think.
When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.”
~Buddha
Joy can seem as elusive and slippery as a soap bubble.
Yet once, years ago in meditation, I realized that joy and misery lie just a hair’s width apart within my mind. The image of joy and misery just micrometers apart within me, was so clear that I startled and came out of my reverie giggling. I remember that moment in vivid detail even now years later. And I know that I choose whether I will feel joy or misery or something in between in this moment. And the next. And the next.
It only takes a tiny shift in the mind to move from misery into joy; a micron of a shift; just a slightly altered point of view.
Breathe. And breathe again. Deep, slow breaths that fill your lungs. And feel whatever body sensations are present now; feel the sensations that joy is hiding behind. Breathe and feel your body. Then allow joy to step out of the shadows and be here now.
Can it really be that simple? Yes. Yes!
“A human being is only breath and shadow.”
~Sophocles
☯
Heart of the Mother Shamanic Meditation
I’ve posted a new Elemental Flow meditation / exercise on Youtube and I wanted to share it with you here. Enjoy:
Sitting
I sit in Ridgen shrine room
I sit, I breathe
I scrawl words on paper
I feel happy and peaceful
I sit, I breathe
It begins to snow outside
I sit, I breathe
I write word after word
I feel sad, so sad
an old wound exposed
Snow falls
I sit, I breathe
Machinery hums outside
out of sight but still with me
I sit, I breathe
My hip aches, my nose is numb
I sit, I breathe
and wonder, why numb?
the pitch of a roof outside
catches my gaze
I sit, I breathe
My hip aches
I breathe with the ache
the hum, the roof
Snow falls
I sit, I breathe
I feel hungry
the hum, the ache
and the roof go on.