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Those who know me well know that over the last couple of years I have had some of my first real bouts with any health issues. Prior, I was a pretty dang healthy guy!

Digestive flora shut down for four months, Giardia, and appendectomy with a few complications, and a horrible case of sciatica… Nothing life-threatening but certainly inconvenient, needing lifestyle changes, and the latter being very painful.

As I struggled to recover, I came to realize the following more clearly: celebrate life!

I keep hearing its echo… A dear friend with stage-four cancer of unknown origins now in remission, another friend barely escaping hemorrhaging to death during childbirth, a daughter and friends surviving the recent Ghost Ship fire… Life is fragile, fleeting… Life is a gift!

Enjoy it.  Celebrate it. And know that health and vitality are fleeting and true gifts.

As this season of giftgiving begins, may we come to see and feel what is truly valuable – the presence of life and health.

May your holiday season be filled with life, light, joy, and love and improving health should it be faltering and a grateful heart for our most precious gift, one another to celebrate this with.

“Nothing whatsoever is to be clung to as ‘I’ Or ‘mine.'”–The Buddha

Meditation weakens our dependence on the mind; and, in turn, it strengthens our relationship to it.

My mind no longer has its accustomed stranglehold on me.  My mind’s usual obsessive grip weakens.  I am not so much a captive audience enraptured by the mind’s antics and drama–thought after thought after thought, emotional stickiness pulling deeper into its seemingly inescapable drama.

As I practice meditation focusing my mind on the breath, thoughts and feelings come and go with less entanglement.  My thoughts and emotions and even my struggles and pain become mere thoughts, emotions, and struggles and pain not held so intently by the grip of “my.”

They pass across my mind like clouds across a sky.  My mind, the sky, if you will, does not grab at each thought.  It is mere sky, home to passing clouds.

The mind is mere mind, home to passing thoughts.

Practice…meditate!

Inspired by Rumi:  “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”

The gap between the breath is your gateway to the field.  Allow your mind (as it focuses on the breath in meditation) to enter the gap as a doorway to this quiet field beyond, thought-free and blissful.

Your whole being may vibrate with delight in this respite from the monkey mind’s usual antics.

Go there and roam.

However brief or long your visit, you will return rejuvenated, inspired, and grateful.

We all sometimes sense there is something more than what is right in front of us.  Maybe when it’s a gorgeous sunset…at a wedding of a loved one…in the mountains staring at a beautiful vista… We might loose our breath for a moment and behold something truly awesome.

Is there anything at all beyond the visible?  And if so, what is it?  And if it is not visible, how can we know it?

In yoga and in meditation, on occasion, you might sense some current of energy.  Some call it the flow.  We all know it when we may have dropped into it.  It is a marvelous almost effortless feeling–you are doing or experiencing something with ease and almost seeming perfection as though you and everything was one being moved by some magical force, totally in sync or at one with the world around and within you.  It’s a joyful awe-inspiring feeling.

Being more and more in this space is the goal of yoga and meditation.  Yoga literally means to yoke oneself to or become one with this force.  Some call it God; some the miracle of life itself; Star Wars fans call it The Force.  Some take drugs or hallucinogens to try to experience this space.  (When I first began yoga over 40 years ago, I read The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, and I became convinced that yoga and meditation were “natural” ways to enter this space.)  Many of us seek this connection in the marvels and quietude of nature.  Much of the arts somehow “captures” this and gives us a glimpse or an experience of it….

Is there really anything beyond or within the visible that we cannot see with the naked eye but can somehow feel or sense or just know?  Or might this invisible quality or force actually just be a property or characteristic of the visible?

If you, like most of us, have doubts at times about your worthiness, realize the kundalini shakti, or life force, dwells within you.  This amazing originative  force that shapes and creates life is inside you living and making you.  And this same force lives in everyone as them!

As human beings, we have the ability to become conscious of it, if we chose to.

It is not our ego and our accomplishments and riches that make us truly great.  It is the kundalini shakti, the life force, and our relationship to it that generates true self-respect and love, and engenders great respect and love for all people and life.

Our regular practice of yoga and meditation over time refines and strengthens our relationship to the kundalini shakti, or life force .  We come to see and feel it with the utmost respect and love–that all life as its creation is worthy of this in its own right. We become more and more amazed and in wonder that this force that has created, is creating, and which will continue to create life even after we are gone–lives and breathes inside all of us.

Mindfulness and meditation allow you to honestly see the clouds of moods, emotions, and thoughts that pass through your mind.  They cloud or obscure it.

Do not be attached to the passing clouds and remember the mind’s true nature when thought-free and clear–luminous, joyful, and blissful.

Our glimpses of this in meditation and yoga drive us forward to continue to practice in order to feel and see this dynamic nature of the mind.

How do you hold on to pain?

Old suitcases…things that weren’t “right” in the past…Time to move on past them…

I do not need to carry them into the present.  Holding on to them colors the now.

Accept, respect, and love them as the past and set them down.

Travel lighter into the now!

Honor the same life force in us all.  This is true respect.

What we do with the life force and our relationship to it determines who we are and what we are like.

If we honor the life force, the kundalini shakti, and work to focus more and more on it, it will be free to express itself more clearly.  It will reveal more of its nature through us and our actions.

We will vibrate more with this force.

Celebrate and dance with the life force, the kundalini shakti!

Survivor’s guilt says I should not or cannot feel good after what happened; that it would be wrong.  It is very different from sadness and compassion.  Survivor’s guilt says it’s not okay to be jubilant at one’s good fortune or to enjoy one’s life too much; it would be wrong–unfair, rude, and dishonorable–to those who died and their families. Compassion offers your loving heart–whether it be happy, sad, or whatever– to support those in need.

Compassion is positive; survivor’s guilt is not.

Compassion loves, honors, and celebrates life; survivor’s guilt thwarts loving and enjoying life.

Compassion heals; survivor’s guilt does not.

Compassion honors and uplifts life; survivor’s guilt suppresses life.

Compassion values life; survivor’s guilt does not!

What would those who lost their lives and their families want you to feel?

My daughter who survived the Oakland Ghost Ship fire noted recently the amazing outpouring of love and concern from friends near and far.  I was overwhelmed with all these good hearts reaching out to support her and her friends who were among the lucky ones.

It is funny that in tragedy we somehow open up and offer our best (or at least better) selves to the world, especially to those who have suffered.

If only this could be our normal state–to live in and from such love and compassion.

This the goal in meditation and yoga:  to live progressively more in and from this space of the heart and to bring this into our lives and into that of others.