I feel like I knew you before I knew you.
I am feeling you more these days, thanks to yoga and meditation.
You are in the spring air, that lilt that uplifts.
You are in a smile, a sigh of relief, in effort motivated by love.
You are in the pause between music notes.
Ultimately, poets and saints have tried to define you.
Though I feel you,
your masked identity keeps you a mystery.
Yoga and meditation can teach you to listen more deeply.
Slowing the mind chatter, there’s a lot to hear.
This is the sound of one hand clapping.
Yesterday a close friend of my wife’s died. In her high 50’s. Cancer.
To the very end, she was committed to her humorous endearing warmth, her last post to friends and family anything but serious.
At the end of the same blog, her husband shared the song No Hard Feelings by the Avett Brothers.
What a way to go! Certainly not typical.
What a way to live! Certainly… not typical!
Contemplating this, I find myself asking, “What is worth living to death for?”
What is worth your life?
Meditation and yoga unwind the tautness of the mind’s thought-spring.
In the relative and deepening stillness, you can begin to feel the bliss of existence.
Feel the air and energy change
as you crossover
into the timeless space of the heart’s
infinite love.
Meditation and yoga are a lot like a salt lick.
I return to them again and again to help sustain my being.
The more one feels one’s center, the more one can let go.
Trying to let go is another oxymoron.
So is trying to relax!
I accidentally tripped yesterday over a ceramic Buddha while working in the garden. Hitting the nearby flagstone, it shattered, though thankfully into big chunks–the crown of the head, the right arm in two and the hand also severed.
I gathered the pieces and was pleasantly surprised they fit together relatively easily with little sign of damage.
After being patiently super glued, the Buddha has returned to its garden location.
I began to wonder if we are all somehow like this Buddha–if we, piece by piece, through yoga, meditation, and life, are patiently being reconstructed with love and compassion into this whole Buddha we’ve somehow forgotten.
In meditation, we turn our attention and senses inward to explore our inner landscape.
With breath and/or mantra, we quiet our chattering mind so we have the presence to behold our Grand Canyons, Mt. Everests, our sweet flowering gardens, our wooded rolling hills, our open pastures, our lakes, flowing rivers, and grand oceans.
But unlike tourists, who at times need to venture far for their worthy pursuits, we merely need to close our eyes and breathe to let the adventure begin.
Like vapor, these thoughts and feelings…
come,
and go….
It’s hard to call any of this mine.
The Every Day Yogi 