I am grateful for poetic renderings that so beautifully underscore our mindfulness class themes each week. So many ways to love life and live with heart as we move, breathe and rest together in kind presence.
Smiling as a practice of Equanimity. Lift the corners of the mouth into a gentle smile or invoke the light-filled feeling of an inner smile in both movement and meditation. If you’re having a particularly challenging day, consider it like the knowing smile of a wise elder, with love and care.
When the smiling practice reveals discord within mind, body or heart, it’s a good time to practice compassion. Place a hand on your heart and silently say something to yourself like, “I’m sorry you’re hurting.” This shifts us from reactivity to caregiving mode, bringing us back to the place of Equanimity.
Famous (Naomi Shihab Nye)
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart... (Rainer Maria Rilke)
"I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answeres, which could not be give to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
On Joy and Sorrow (Kahlil Gibran)
...Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,”
and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come,
and when one sits alone with you at your board,
remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
(Entire poem here)
This Morning (David Budbill)
Oh, this life,
the now,
this morning,
which I
can turn
into forever
by simply
loving
what is here,
is gone by noon.
MAR
2021