Baby Wren (barefoot photos)

In Western New York, Spring, the mud-licked goddess of joy and rebirth, has floundered through the melting snows of March and found her way with the warmer, softer breezes, flowering snowdrops, and brilliant birdsong.

Neighbors are sweeping off salt-littered stoops and chatting in the street. All agree: it’s been a long, tough winter.

Mindfulness meditations can bring me right home into the season. I practice opening to what is happening during this, the most ephemeral of all seasons.  Sometimes I sit with a palm outstretched and filled with sunflower seeds for the chickadees.

Whether they land or not doesn’t matter. I’m offering and watching.

Sometimes the garden bench is the most inviting place in the world. I practice listening and find it much harder than watching. Doesn’t matter though. I continue and begin to feel as if life itself has slowed its push and shove. I am no longer a tacit observer of the environment, perched on the bench, waiting for life to begin. I feel the vibration of the sounds move through me. A slight shimmer passes inside my arms and I breathe through the heart center. I am no longer an alien entity; I’m a living being in an alive environment. A sense arises from deep in my spine that I’m home again.

Early spring meditation: Open a window or door, or even better, sit outside in a garden or park, tune your ears to a specific bird call and listen as long and as carefully as you can. If Mind wanders about in that spring restlessness, gently bring it back to the song. Just as you would observe your breath, observe everything you can about this particular song.

The rise and fall of the melody,

the loudness,

the harshness or softness,

the pitch,

the duration of the notes,

the repetition.

Can you hear other birds responding?

Can you feel the sound entering your ears?

What happens when your consciousness is attuned to your hearing, does that affect what or how you hear?

Invite the song to permeate your being.

Allow your life to become this birdsong. Where do you feel it?

Breathe.

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Full moon or Gibbous, Swansboro NC (Michael Grady photo)

gibbous moon slants

poems composed in darkness

feverish heart beats

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“Is It Time To Stop Running?” is excerpted from some journal entries where I speak to myself. Sort of a metta-journal, if that makes any sense. Originally this piece was on the welcome page of Barefoot & Upside Down.

queen anne's lace in snow (ckg photo)

I am creating a post so that I might explain the voice that is used.

This, and some other pieces I hope to post in the near future, are not meant as didactic pieces. As with the practice journal, they are not prescription, rather they are a description of my process.

They are self-talk that I do to lift myself up or give me a kick in the butt, or pats of encouragement to keep going.

It’s self talking to self.

Inspired by Henri J.M. Nouwen’s The Inner Voice of Love, which is a truly incredible work.  You should stop reading this and FLY to the library to pick up a copy to savor in your own meditation.

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Stop running and running and running. Sit still. The universe is speaking. Are you listening?

Can you quiet the ceaseless chatter? The endless drone of nonsensical words in a stream so thick, it gives you the heebiejeebies when you finally take a break from doing doing doing and sit and watch what’s going on in your little patch of gray matter.

And then what happens is you decide to TURN THEM OFF: all those voices cramming your station. You realize the static confuses and throws you off balance. Everything, every thought, every feeling, every “accomplishment” belongs to someone else. You want to know your self, some call it the TRUTH. Like a starving beast, you hunger after your life, no matter what it tastes like.

As your practice grows, so do the small spaces, the little deaths, momentary breaks, the lapses between the thoughts crowding your grey matter. It’s quiet there. Deep within, in the ancient place, probably the amygdala or thereabouts, is a locale where you exist in a pre-civilized state. It’s a state of joy (you can agree or disagree as you wish), a place of primordial bliss.

When sitting in that sweet neighborhood, all sense of time, all direction drops away. This is entering the GREAT UNKNOWN. Funny thing about this place is that you’ve always known it. It’s familiar, no doubt about that. You don’t feel lost when you are there in momentary bliss. Nope, not at all. You feel, for once in your half-century of “living” that you are finally home. Home at last. Home free. And afterward, whenever you are not there, you will remain homesick, unconnected. Not lost anymore though, because now you know the way home.

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Yoga Sutra 1.13 : tatra sthitau yatno’bhyasah

Bernard Bouanchaud’s translation: Persevering practice is the effort to attain and maintain the state of mental peace.

Patanjali tells us here that practice IS the effort to maintain inner peace. I’ve often wondered how I could maintain anything when I am twirling off into anger, or joy, or sadness, or confusion, or any of the other myriad emotions that flit through my being from one moment to the next. Then I re-read this sutra. There is nothing here about annihilating emotions. The practice is the work of maintaining equilibrium of the Self.

I’ve been working a lot with my emotions lately, wondering how do they fit into an awakened life? When am I processing an emotion and when is an emotion taking over? How do the stories I spin in my mind, in reaction to events in my life (shenpa), stir up emotions and feed them? How much leeway can I or do I afford any given emotion on any given day? For years, I’ve sat with the meditation:

I am not my thoughts.

I am not my emotions.

I am not my body.

Though I sat and repeated these phrases, I knew that on many levels I really DID identify myself as any or all of these aspects of my Self and I had no clue HOW one could do otherwise. Really, I know that my body continually changes, ages, and grows tired, but isn’t that big hulking tired person my Self? It’s hard enough to IMAGINE my self with a different body, much less to de-identify with having a body at all!

Thank you meditation.

Thank you savasana.

Thank you restorative yoga.

When I do these practices, I am often able to disengage from identity, whether intellectual, physical, emotional, spiritual (yes, I get caught identifying myself in those trips too!). I can breathe into the larger Self, the connection of us all. It is a spacious place. It is a place of joy. Compassion. Expansion. Beauty. Rest. Stillness. Energy. Awareness. It is nowhere. And everywhere.I am no one. And every one.

In this TED video (yes,I’m becoming a TED junkie Eve Ensler speaks eloquently about the importance of maintaining an emotional life. And true to form, I was crying halfway through. Thank you Eve, for reminding us of our wholeness in this age of fracture.

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Fredonia NY Daylily (ckg photo)

This is a GREAT time to practice METTA or Lovingkindness meditation. HAITI challenges us to step up to the compassion plate. Please try to offer some lovingkindness for not only the Haitians effected by the earthquake, but also for their families,the aid workers, and the governments involved that something may be done to ease the long-term suffering of the Haitians. Teachers, please consider beginning or ending your classes by teaching your students the metta phrases and offering them for Haitians everywhere.

This post is a looooong overdue response to Svasti’s comment on LaughingYogini’s Home or Homeless? post regarding Lovingkindness meditation. In the post I said:

MEDITATION: Georg Feuerstein, in The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali, says that there is a meditation wherein the four virtues: friendliness, compassion, gladness, and equanimity are radiated from the practitioner into the universe. This sounds very similar to metta or lovingkindness meditation that I have mentioned before. Beginning with oneself, and eventually including all sentient beings, the meditator offers the following phrases (or others that resonate more deeply):

May I be free from danger.

May I be happy.

May I be healthy.

May I live with ease and abundance.

Svasti responded to that excerpt:

What annoys me about the Feuerstein quote is the ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’. Generally most prayers are phrased as:

May all beings be free from danger.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be healthy.
May all beings live with ease and abundance.

To me, this is much healthier, because its recognizing all conscious beings and offering to one and all, Self included.

I am afraid that I misrepresented Feuerstein in that piece.There should be a break in the middle of that paragraph, when I begin MY thoughts (& depart from paraphrasing GF): This sounds very similar to metta or lovingkindness meditation that I have mentioned before. Beginning with oneself, and eventually including all sentient beings, the meditator offers the following phrases (or others that resonate more deeply).

The other misunderstanding comes from an insufficient explanation of metta practice in the earlier post. For that I refer the reader to LaughingYogini’s page on Lovingkindness Meditation, which can be found here.

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I know that this is a bit lame: posting a Thanksgiving post two weeks late, (if you’re experiencing any post-feast hunger,try the sweet & spicy pecans because they are very tasty AND easy to make) but hey, though I wasn’t able to post then, I really DO have a LOT to be grateful for.

For instance, during yesterday’s storm, a huge limb from the pin oak tree outside my bedroom window fell on my neighbor’s garage rather than my bedroom. Thankfully, no one was hurt.

And even though Mom is having some new health issues, at least she’s thankfully in a place where there are caregivers available 24/7.

And thankfully, even though the wind is howling and the snow piling up like crazy, it’s cozy in here where I can still communicate with folks outside via my phone, twitter, FB, this blog and others, such as newfound blogging brother, Bob W. from Yoga Demystified. I Skyped with my brother in Connecticut, my sis in Poland, and Marie in Arkansas twice already today, was able to call mom’s nurse to check on her condition even though I’m 900 miles away and 50 degrees colder, advised my daughter who is 450 miles away in another direction regarding her back condition ~ I am THANKFUL to be able to enjoy such connections in my life.

Gratitude is an essential aspect of any happy life. Do you know anyone who is happy and ungrateful? I don’t.

Here is a soothing music video featuring George Winston‘s piano from equivocaly. I invite you to watch, listen, and lean back in your chair, meditating upon what is beautiful in life right now. Afterwards, if you can, drop by George Winston’s site and support his efforts to rebuild New Orleans. I am thankful for folks who, not only create beauty in this world, but who also foster compassion with and through their art.

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I am tackling the NANOWRIMO challenge this month, so blog posting has taken a back seat, I am sorry to say to my loyal readers and friends. However, what a great time to begin a haiku-post tradition expanding Laughing Yogini’s Poetry tradition? 

There is a great tradition of linking haiku and meditation, particularly zen practice ~ look for a post on that topic AFTER November. Photo coming to this page soon.

In the meanwhile, I recommend you check out Mahala’s Friday Flowers. How I could ever have the audacity to post any of my flower pics after seeing her incredible PHOTOGRAPHIC  MEDITATIONS is something I may figure out in the next life.

Enjoy!

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single dandelion

chilly autumn morning breaks

monotonous green

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flower seed head (ckg photo)

For Sean P. O’Rourke (1985-2009)

This has been a season of death. On Saturday, three young men died in a tragic car accident. One of them was the son of a long-time friend and writing group buddy, a member of the extended “Penelope Writers” family.

Watching the faces of the O’Rourke family as they followed the coffin wrenched my heart. What sadness! Sadness heaping upon sadness these past three months.

What’s a YOGINI to do?

It’s healthy to feel emotions, to give them space to exist and pass through. It’s not so beneficial to hold onto them or to stifle them — though that is EXACTLY what I’d often like to do. Sometimes I just want to wallow in negativity, feeling sorry for myself, feeling a victim to circumstances, wishing the world would shake its collective head and join my sad little pity party.

Fortunately,yoga and meditation are such life-changing tools that these depressing emotions can flow through me as if they were rain water washing through sandy soil. I don’t need to IDENTIFY with and embellish the stories that coincide with these emotions. I cringe at how I did exactly that in the past though!!

FURTHERMORE, science is now clearly showing the plasticity of the mind that yogis have claimed for hundreds of years. I’ll collect some of this research in a future post, but for now, check out Buddhist priest, Mathieu Ricard’s take on happiness and mind training from TED. Some call Ricard the “happiest man alive” because of the results of his brain scans.

I’m sure many of the readers of LY have seen these sorts of changes happen in their life. How have you dealt with overwhelming grief?  Have you noticed any effects of your practices on your emotional life? Please share them with us!

Mathieu Ricard’s blog is also enjoyable as well as thought provoking. The link is a page translated from the French.

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Royal Bonica Rosebud (carolyn photo)

Grieving with friends and family of someone who has passed blesses us with stories we may not have ever known otherwise.

While in Houston, E.’s father shared an inspiring account of a homeless man living beneath a highway overpass near their home. Over time, they recognized and began to speak with him. Eventually, whenever father or daughter saw him there, they began leaving plates of food and some clothing. Because of their generosity, I was moved to make a donation to a homeless shelter in Houston. It’s true that generosity inspires generosity!

Patanjali tells us that compassion is one of the tools we can use to calm the mind: Yoga sutra 1.33: maitri karuna mudita upeksanam sukha duhkha punya apunya visayanam bhavanatas citta prasadanam

The projection of friendliness, compassion, gladness, and equanimity towards objects – [be they] joyful, sorrowful, meritorious, or demeritorious-[bring about] the pacification of consciousness. (trans. Feuerstein)

Though I’m focusing on compassion today, the practices of friendliness, gladness, or equanimity would bestow similar benefits that I’d like to discuss in future posts.

This aphorism, or sutra, reminds me of Simon and Garfinkle’s ode to loneliness, “I am a Rock.” The following video is from the unofficial Paul Simon Page, located on 2dannyc89′s Channel.

This is the path I get stuck on …stuck in grief, alienation, and self-absorption….when I don’t practice the outward-looking virtues.

The ideals expressed in yoga sutra # 1.33 have been used to transform human relationships and better society since ancient times.  Barbara Stoler Miller in Yoga, Discipline of Freedom, says they echo early Buddhist monks practices even as they are relevant and useful to us in the 21st century because:

These practices work to demolish the boundaries between oneself and others, and to break through the barriers that lock people into egoism….bring about a transmutation of personal emotions into immeasurable virtues.

We are reminded in B.K.S. Iyengar’s Light on the Sutras of Patanjali to not limit our social work with these four virtues, but to include practice of the five virtues named in the yamas mentioned in sutra 2.30: nonharming, honesty, non-stealing, moderation, non-grasping.

We call these social virtues because they benefit not only ourselves, they also bring society into a state of health. Can we live in a health-ful rather than a dys-functional society? If we take these aphorisms to heart and into our lives, it certainly seems possible!

A friend on FaceBook posted a thought-provoking video that cuts to the heart of this sutra. I hope it will benefit you today just as the story E.’s father shared, inspired me.

Mankind Is No Island from B2GYouth.com on Vimeo.

MEDITATION: Georg Feuerstein, in The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali, says that there is a meditation wherein the four virtues: friendliness, compassion, gladness, and equanimity are radiated from the practitioner into the universe. This sounds very similar to metta or lovingkindness meditation that I have mentioned before. Beginning with oneself, and eventually including all sentient beings, the meditator offers the following phrases (or others that resonate more deeply):

May I be free from danger.

May I be happy.

May I be healthy.

May I live with ease and abundance.

No related posts.

Happy Fourth of July to American yogins everywhere.

Beyond the flashy fireworks and barbecue festivities, this is a day to reflect upon the meaning of freedom and to celebrate the birthday of our country. Revolutionary War soldiers certainly felt as if Colonial powers were impeding their lives and their freedom. For many of us however, the celebration is checkered by a history that was often cruel and pocked by the nether aspects of  humanity.  For instance,  the culture and political community that existed on the continent was nearly obliterated.

How can we reconcile the shame with the pride?

Have you taken time today – even ten minutes – to ask WHO AM I while sitting in silence and listening to whatever burbles into consciousness? I feel truly free when connecting with my SELF, the Source of energy and life itself. Does the past impede your present life or can you free yourself to live truly open to this present moment? Have you ever felt truly free?

Some thoughts to pepper your practice:

Do you feel constricted in your life?

Can freedom be achieved in every single asana? What is the key?

Is there a place or a practice that helps you move and act beyond shame and pride? Do you even think that this is possible? How does this relate to freedom? Is freedom a worthwhile endeavor? What do you consider more important?

What are the chains keeping you from living the life that is YOURS?

Is personal or spiritual freedom possible without political freedom? What price are you willing to pay for each of these liberations?

How can a sense of lightness, humor, and joy infuse the challenge of becoming more free?

Here is a five minute sacred pause meditation from renowned teacher and author of RADICAL ACCEPTANCE, Tara Brach, that was created by OMEGA.

When I watch the fireworks tonight in Swansboro, North Carolina, I’ll think of the struggle for personal/spiritual freedom that this community is dedicated to and I’ll clap for y’all at the first appricot squiggle bursting overhead.

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