Invitations around the Power of Intention

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  1. Read Jack Kornfield’s essay “The Heart’s Intention.” Afterwards, if it feels right, journal about your own intentions: for this day, for this week, for your life.
  2. What is your intention for your mindfulness practice going forward? This, too, is something you might want to journal about. It can be helpful to reflect on your particular experiences, bringing to mind specific classes or sitting sessions. Did your emotional state or felt sense of being change from the beginning to the end? Have their been times you have been aware of the practice affecting an interaction or response? Do you feel ready to set an intention toward cultivating or recommitting to a regular practice of meditation, with a time and place to meditate on a regular basis?
  3. Henry David Thoreau wrote “Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed had been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me you have a seed there, and I’m prepared to expect wonders.” You might ask yourself, in meditation or in journaling: What seeds are you planting? What seeds are you watering?
  4. Read “Kiss the Moment” by Frank Ostaseki, the cofounder of the Zen Hospice Project and author of The Five Invitations. This little piece is a lovely capstone for our class together, as he reminds us:

Continue reading →

The Lasting Light of John Lewis

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Congressman and Civil Rights Leader John Lewis’s passing last week felt like a great tree had fallen in the forest, shaking the ground in ever-widening concentric circles and moving the hearts of generations of people committed to justice. And like a great tree, his legacy will continue for aeons, nurturing infinite fresh growth on the moral ground he occupied with such commitment, clarity and courage.

I have just started reading his beautiful memoir, Across that Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America. We need optimism right now, we need strength, and we need faith, and John Lewis’s words—and his example—provide all three. Please read this book. You can also read his last words to us — published in an OpEd in the New York Times on the day of his memorial service, here.

A few excerpts: Continue reading →

Living with Intention: Some poems …

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Half Life
by Stephen Levine

We walk through half our life
as if it were a fever dream
barely touching the ground
our eyes half open
our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are
we watch the ghost of us drift
from room to room
through friends and lovers
never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean
or meaning half we say
we dream ourselves
from birth to birth
seeking some true self.

Until the fever breaks
and the heart can not abide
a moment longer
as the rest of us awakens,
summoned from the dream,
not half caring for anything but love.

Ah, Not to be cut off
by Rainer Marie Rilke

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner — what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.

 

Ah, not to be cut off

by Rainer Maria Rilke

English version by Stephen Mitchell
Original Language German

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner — what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.

— from Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell

Listen: in calligraphy

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In our last class, Carole mentioned she had been looking at Chinese characters for listening, ting in Chinese. kiku in Japanese. Here is one character for the sort of deep, embodied listening that we have been discussing in class:

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As Carole mentioned, there are several characters for listening, and each carries an inflection of meaning. In Japanese kanji, for instance, the word kiku means both listening and hearing, and there are different characters to express different meanings. Continue reading →

Some Help with those Impossible Conversations

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As the nation has grown more polarized, so have—for many of us—our families and friendship circles. Just broaching the question of whether or not to wear a mask in the local Walmart can start the next Civil War. Maybe it’s for the better than we couldn’t all sit down together for that big Memorial Day dinner …

Last Thanksgiving, The New York Times had some fun around the very serious challenge of dining with difficult family members through an interactive feature they named Angry Uncle Bot. He’s still online and he’s still angry … and interacting with him can yield some surprisingly good advice.

 

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Click here to start your conversation.

Communication as an act of courage …

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“Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed. Candor and clarity go a long way in fertilizing the soil, but in the end there is always a degree of unpredictability in the climate of communication — even the warmest intention can be met with frost. Yet something impels us to hold these possibilities in both hands and go on surrendering to the beauty and terror of conversation, that ancient and abiding human gift. And the most magical thing, the most sacred thing, is that whichever the outcome, we end up having transformed one another in this vulnerable-making process of speaking and listening.”

— Maria Popova

Maria Popova is the brilliant editor of BrainPickings, one of the most insightful and provocative digests on the internet. This quotation is taken from her introduction to a discussion of Ursula Leguin’s essay “Telling is Listening.”

 

Invitations for Self Inquiry and the Art of Communication

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The art of communication—deep listening and loving speech—are particularly important when a relationship is in trouble or when someone we know needs help. Before we can communicate with others skillfully, it helps to be in good communication with ourselves, and the same skills of deep listening and loving speech come into play.

  1. Continue regular sitting or walking meditation practice. It can be helpful to set an intention: that you will, for instance, practice five times during the week for at least ten minutes each time. Be realistic, and then do your best to stick to it.
  2. Read Chapter 1 of Tara Brach’s book Radical Compassion, “Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN,” available to read for free online here.
  3. Practice RAIN at least once during the week. Guidance with the process is helpful, and Tara Brach offers a number of guided meditations and other resources on her website:

RAIN can be particularly powerful when practiced with a partner. Tara explains the process, and offers a guided practice, here.

4. If RAIN does not seem particularly helpful to you, there are other models for self inquiry. The Work of Byron Katie is a way to question our beliefs and narratives through a series of four questions followed by turnarounds. I have worked with this process (and in fact attended a 10-day training with Byron Katie) and find it very powerful. A student alerted me to the AWARE process—mentioned in this article “15 Things Therapists Do When They’re Worried About The Future“—and it sounds promising but I don’t have personal experience with it. Whatever model you use, be patient and try more than once. It takes time to learn any new skill, and self inquiry is not only a skill but an art.

 

The Winter of Listening

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Kabli Hands on fire

The Winter of Listening
by David Whyte


No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years
listening to those
who had
nothing to say.

All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.

All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.

Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.

 

“The Winter of Listening” by David Whyte, from The House of Belonging. © Many Rivers Press, 1997.

Photography Credit: Detail from “Seeking Warmth”: A Kashmiri man warms his hands over a fire on a street on a cold morning in Srinagar, India,” by Fayaz Kabli/Reuters.

Poem and photograph found on A Year of Being Here: daily mindfulness poetry by wordsmiths of the here & now.

 

 

A Walk in the Forest

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This lovely moment of presence from Nancy:
ponderosa10-09-2017This morning, I walked in the forest.  In a moment of joy, I closed my eyes and stretched wide my arms to drink in the cool silence.  When my eyes opened, they focused on a majestic old ponderosa, barren and gray, yet still standing with unmistakable dignity.

I imagined that the ponderosa told me her story, and I listened.  She told me of her good fortune to have taken root as a seed in a meadow bright and clear enough for her to grow without distraction.  She told me of her growing years, of how strong she had been, and of her pleasure in taking part in the ponderosa wind chorus.  She told me of the night lightning struck, burning her needles and branches and leading to the slow shedding of her bark.  She told this without sadness, for she said she found other, subtler joys in her current embodiment.  She chuckled as she told me of the honored place she holds among the ponderosa community, how they believe her to be wise and resolute.  And, she told of her patient anticipation of the day she would return fully to the earth to nourish fresh new growth.

I bowed in reverence, thanked her for sharing her story, and continued my stroll, feeling full and blessed.

If you have something you would like to share with our community, please send it to me.

Mindful of Sheep … and the Nation that Depends on Them

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2020_0119 Sheep on hot ground 1000My husband and I recently gave four Navajo Churro sheep to the Navajo Nation. The tribe has a saying: Dibé éí Diné be’iiná at’é, sheep is life. They developed the Churro to thrive in the desert, beginning in the 16th century from Spanish stock. Twice, the US government tried to annihilate the breed. Only recently have they been brought back from the edge of extinction. My husband, Hal Cannon, and I acquired a few after Hal reported on the breed’s revival for National Public Radio. They became beloved pets and my favorite life models.

The Navajo Nation is experiencing Covid-19 infection rates among the highest in the world. In the midst of wide-spread sickness and loss, many children who rely on school breakfasts and lunches are going hungry. Hal and I felt it was time for these sheep to return to their people.

I miss them every day. But that is not the biggest hole I feel in my heart. I ache for the terrible inequities of the virus, and the toll it is taking on Native people and other people of color.

Two days ago, in this heartbreaking article in Scientific American–“Corona Virus is Attacking the Navajo ‘because We Have Built the Perfect Human for It to Invade‘” –traditional Diné storyteller Sunny Dooley relates the crisis in the Navajo Nation and the spiritual, physical and economic travesties that underly it.

A few excerpts: Continue reading →