Author Archives: Teresa Jordan

Still Do I Keep My Look

Posted on by

A poem for the body

Still Do I Keep My Look, My Identity
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Each body has its art, its precious prescribed
Pose, that even in passion’s droll contortions, waltzes,
Or push of pain – or when a grief has stabbed
Or hatred hacked – is its and nothing else’s.
Each body has its pose. No other stock
That is irrevocable, perpetual,
And its to keep. In castle or in
With rags or robes. Through good, nothing, or ill.
And even in death a body, like no other
On any hill or plain or crawling cot
Or gentle for the lily-less hasty pall
(Having twisted, gagged, and then sweet-ceased to bother),
Shows the old personal art, the look. Shows what
It showed at baseball. What it showed in school.

Published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, November 1944, pp 76-77

Finding Refuge in the Body: Some Resources

Posted on by

Dissatisfaction with the body causes endless suffering and fuels the multibillion-dollar diet, cosmetic and plastic surgery industries — which of course are fueling dissatisfaction with the body. As the Irish Poet John Donahue has written, “We need to come home to the temple of our senses. Our bodies know that they belong… it is our minds that make us homeless.”

A few years ago, a pharmacy in the UK designed a project called “Perceptions of Perfection” that gave a photograph of the same woman to designers in eighteen countries around the world and asked them to photoshop her to look like the ideal woman in their particular cultures. The project has glaring limitations as it focuses primarily on the Americas and Europe with only one Asian country, China, represented and almost nothing from Africa. That said, it shows that beauty really is in the mind of the beholder. You can see the results here.

When we dissociate from our bodies, we dissociate from life itself. As beloved mindfulness teacher Tara Brach has noted, “The most profound and full presence can only be experienced if we’re awake right here in this body – with a quality of sacred presence that comes when, without any resistance or grasping, we really plant ourselves in the universe, in this body, in this being right here.”

Listen to Tara Brach speak on Mindfulness of the Body and Embodied Spirit here.

 

The Tender Heart and Finding Refuge in the Body

Posted on by

This Week’s Mid-week Pause: Studies tell us that an ever-increasing percentage of people all over the world feel at odds with their bodies. The numbers are greater for women than for men, and for girls than for boys, but they are growing across all categories of gender, ethnicity, age and class as Big Beauty, Big Pharma, and the ubiquitous presence of social media conspire to tell us that we don’t measure up.

What might it feel like to experience tenderness, acceptance and gratitude for our bodies as they are, right here, right now?

What: 30 minute opening remarks and guided meditation, followed by an optional 15-minute exercise to help integrate this mindfulness practice into your day.

When: Wednesday, February 24, 1:00 – 1:45 pm Mountain Time.

Where: Zoom. To join the announcement list and receive the Zoom link, please send your name, phone number (so we know you are not a bot), and email address to MindfulnessTree@icloud.com      Be sure to add this email to your address book so the announcements don’t go to spam.

Mindfulness and Vitality: some resources

Posted on by

Listen to Teresa’s guided meditation on vitality (16 min.)

Dr. Ellen Langer, a renowned mindfulness researcher and experimental social psychologist at Harvard University and the author of the groundbreaking book Mindfulness, defines mindfulness as the simple process of actively noticing new things. The beauty of mindfulness is that every moment we spend being truly present is new: this moment, this very moment, has never happened before and will never happen again. We’re not lost in the past; we’re not projecting into the future. And this sense of newness brings renewal, even doing tasks we previously considered mundane.

You can read more about Dr. Langer and her innovative research here.

The Irish poet David Whyte has brought poetry and insight to the role of work in our lives in ways that have revitalized work culture around the world. His books include Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity and The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. 

Here, he writes about a wise friend who brought him insight into the cure for exhaustion:

I felt as if I didn’t have an ounce of energy left to do the work I had been doing…. I could feel how utterly exhausted I was in body and spirit, and how much I needed to talk with someone, anyone, but also how marvelous is was [that I was about to be visited by the person who ] … had exactly the kind of perspectives I needed at that moment.

I could see Brother David already in my mind’s eye….[He] was my kind of monk; no stranger to silence but equally at home in the robust world of work, it’s words, and its meaning… You might be impressed by his extraordinary capacity for compassion, but it did not mean he would let any unthinking assertion  pass him by without a challenge or clarification…

[After he arrived and we sat across the table from each other with glasses of wine,] I looked up at Brother David, the nearest thing I had to a truly wise person in my life, and found myself blurting,

“Brother David?”

I uttered it in such an old, petitionary, Catholic way that I almost thought he was going to say, “yes, my son? But he did not; he turned his face toward me, following the spontaneous note of desperate sincerity, and simply waited.

“Tell me about exhaustion,” I said

He looked at me with an acute, searching, compassionate ferocity for the briefest of moments, as if trying to sum up the entirety of the situation and without missing a beat, as if he had been waiting all along to say a life-changing thing to me. He said, in the form both of a question and an assertion:

“You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?”

“The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest,” I repeated woodenly, as if I might exhaust myself completely before I reached the end of the sentence, “what is it, then?”

The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.”

From Crossing the Unknown Sea by David Whyte, Riverhead Books, 2001,  pp. 129-132.

Artwork,  “Dalmatian Pelican” ©2021 Teresa Jordan

Midday Pause for Vitality

Posted on by

Please join me tomorrow, Wednesday, February 17,  for a guided mediation at 1 pm Mountain Time. This week’s topic is vitality and revitalization … something most of us can use! The opening remarks and guided meditation will last 25-30 minutes and then you are invited to stay on for a brief “breakout” exercise, which is a great way to build community and also explore ways to carry mindfulness into the rest of your life.

If you would like to be on the list to receive the Zoom link, please email me at mindfulnesstree@icloud.com. (Please do not make the request in the comment field as the comments don’t always arrive in a timely manner).

Hope to see you there!

The importance of delight…

Posted on by

Listen to Teresa’s guided meditation on delight.

In January, the podcast The American Life rebroadcast an episode titled A Show of Delights. When they first broadcast the episode a year earlier, during a time of wildfires, racial injustice, the beginning of the pandemic, and ever-increasing division, they called it revolutionary programming. To claim delight in a time of such disturbance, they admitted, can feel frivolous, even disloyal. But the ability to find joy and delight in the midst of darkness is what can give us the balance and strength to go on.

The first segment of the show interviewed bestselling poet Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights. Every day for a year, he wrote an “essayette” on delight, cataloguing everything that had pleased him on that particular day.

He undertook, if you will, a practice of delight.  And he found that he had to train himself to notice delight, to strengthen his muscle of delight. Delight doesn’t just arrive, he realized. You have to go looking for. The more he practiced, the more delight he found.

And Gay wasn’t just singing kumbaya. It’s striking how many losses are in the book: sickness, injury, the death of good friends. As Gay told the host of This American Life: “When I think of joy, grown up joy is made up of our sorrow, just like it’s made up of what is pleasing to us. Often, it felt like I wasn’t going to be able to talk about delight without talking about these other things. Delight often implies its absence.”

Artists know this is true. You need the darkness to see the light, the light to understand the darkness. And scientists recognize it, too: If you gaze at the sun, you will go blind. And if you never look away from the darkness? You will go blind.

Delight is a counter balance to difficulty: yin and yang, darkness and light. The Aztecs believed that the god Quetzalcoatl gave chocolate to humankind to make up for the pain of having to live on earth. The Buddha talked about the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows.

During the Vietnam War, Thich Nhat Hahn and other young monastics worked tirelessly to relieve suffering in the countryside, and to broker an end to the war. Anyone they found, they would try to help: soldier or civilian, South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, or American. Because they wouldn’t take sides, they were shot at from all directions. Their work was tireless and often gruesome. But they went back, day after day after day. Thich Nhat Hahn spoke of what gave them the strength to continue in the introduction to Learning True Love: Practicing Buddhism in a Time of War, by Sister Chân Không:

“One day, Chân Không was preparing a basket of fresh, fragrant herbs to serve with rice noodles, and she asked me, ‘Thay, can you identify these herbs?’ Looking at her displaying the herbs with care and beauty on a large place, I became enlightened. She had the ability to keep her attention on the herbs, and I realized I had to stop dwelling on the war and learn to concentrate on the herbs also. We spent ten minutes discussing the herbs that could be found in the south of Vietnam and the ones in the central regions, and that encounter took my mind off the war, allowing me to recover the balance I needed so badly.”

Read “A Brief for the Defense,” a poem by Jack Gilbert

Listen to “The Show of Delights” on This American Life.

Listen to Teresa’s guided meditation on delight.

 

A poem for joy in a difficult world…

Posted on by

A Brief for the Defense

by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.


From Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert. Copyright © 2012 by Jack Gilbert. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. 

 

Weekly Mid-day Pause

Posted on by
Please join me for a weekly mid-day pause, starting this coming Wednesday, February 10, at 1 pm Mountain Time. Each session will be approximately 30 minutes and will include opening remarks, a 15-20 minute guided meditation, and the option afterwards for a brief small-group breakout to support ways you can incorporate mindfulness practice in your life.
Our first meditation will be on delight, especially important during trying times. “We must have/ The stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless/ Furnace of this world.” — Jack Gilbert
If you would like to be notified of the weekly sessions and receive the zoom link to attend, email me at mindfulnesstree@icloud.com and I will include you on the list.

Equanimity

Posted on by

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather around us that they may see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even a fiercer life because of our quiet. • William Butler Yeats

Today we talked about equanimity, what Tara Brach calls “the heart that can be with everything.”  Others have described it as the ability “to see with patience,” or the ability “to stand in the middle of all this.” The mindful cultivation of equilibrium allows us to respond more skillfully to whatever life brings us.

Jack Kornfield offers a short meditation on mindfulness here.

Read “Equanimity: A Practice for Troubled Times” in Psychology Today.

 

Mindfulness of Thoughts

Posted on by

You can access some resources for working with mindfulness of thoughts here, including information about Byron Katie, who we talked about in class today.

You can access information about 10 breaths practice here.

Dear You
By Kaveri Patel

Dear you,
You who always have
so many things to do
so many places to be
your mind spinning like
fan blades at high speed
each moment always a blur
because you’re never still.

I know you’re tired.
I also know it’s not your fault.
The constant brain-buzz is like
a swarm of bees threatening
to sting if you close your eyes.
You’ve forgotten something again.
You need to prepare for that or else.
You should have done that differently.

What if you closed your eyes?
Would the world fall
apart without you?
Or would your mind
become the open sky
flock of thoughts
flying across the sunrise
as you just watched and smiled.