Monday Mindfulness

Cultivating Strength, Joy, Calm & Resilience

Category Archives: adversity


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Witness Healing

My body is a part of me. It tells me when it needs nourishment and rest.

I can manifest the most horrific diseases by ignoring the signs in my body that are saying slow down, ease off, make a change.

There is no way my body can stop being ill until I care for it.

It is time for me to take responsibility for the way I feel. I do not need to be sick to care for myself. Sick is a reminder that I have neglected to care for me.

These are real symptoms – not of some outside force taking over, but a means of communication from the inside – me sending a message to me that something is out of alignment – the schedule, a relationship, nutrition, work…my connection with me.

Each of us has ignored signs that our bodies needed more care until we were really sick, feeling that powering through is a sign of strength. We don’t need to go there.

True strength lies in respecting myself enough to rest, eat well, choose to receive kindness and love from others and to forgive and let go of those who are in a position to diminish my sense of worthiness.

My body should be held and loved by me as a baby bird that has fallen from its nest. Given a chance to be seen, heard, and to heal.

When I carry my body as it carries me, my body allows me to witness the capacity I have for deep love and profound peace and healing.


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Currently Connected

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We are connectors… the shifts and moves below the water’s surface that produce the current.

When we move with ease and grace, the currents meander and flow.

Tension, gripping, and resistance make the waters turbulent and difficult to maneuver.

We can choose the experience we give to those who swim in our waters…knowing that they are counting on us to usher them safely to the edge and leave them feeling nourished and refreshed from our connection.


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Emptying

When I start with the exhale, I start with a release, emptying space so that I can fill it just so. Filling becomes not as urgent when I am no longer grasping for the next inhale but expanding intensionally to receive it.

Emptying allows the filling to happen with less effort, with the simple purpose of fulfillment as opposed to rescuing or catapulting me.

With intensional emptying comes graceful, careful filling.

For it is not the act of filling that carries me on as much as the emptying which provides the space and focus for me to move on more fully.

Slowing down and extending the process of releasing creates more emptiness, more space for nothing that in return leaves me more ready to fill with everything.


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Doable

passion and common sense (2)

When passion and common sense come together they bring with them a whimsical assuredness.  Their rhythmic dance is reverent and focused, yet meandering and joyful.  Together they carry me forward with comfort and ease.

With a balance of passion and common sense, life seems quite doable…anything seems doable…everything is doable when we walk this path together.

 

 


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All Wrapped Up

All Wrapped Up

There comes a time and space where each of us longs to curl up in a snuggly blanket, to feel the pressure on our skin, the cocoon of warmth and connection.  This need for contact, pressure, and restriction is also the driver for the invitation of struggle, suffering, and conflict into our lives.

With difficulty pressing in upon me, I will always still find the same comfort and ease on the inside if I allow it.

It is simply a matter of the material of the wrap and the lens with which I see it that determines whether I feel it as nurturing or limiting.

The wrap is just a reminder to feel what’s on the inside – to know the true essence of me, undefined by the fabric of my experience.


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Choices

There is always peace.

There is only joy.

Unless you choose otherwise.

It is always your choice.


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Blending in to Stand out

Going unnoticed…floating in the background…allowing the focus to drift to others…blending in.

Tuned to the swirl of activity around me, I hunker down and shift my shape to listen, to allow my edges to fade into the corners of my surroundings.

It is then that I begin to be noticed for my striking ability to be still, to be flexible, adaptable and part of something bigger.

It seems that by blending in I actually end up standing out.

Photo by Brian Danahy


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The Real Heal

You can’t fake healing. It’s gotta come from the heart, filled with love and kindness and an unconditional knowing you are worthy of wellness.

You must believe that you are worthy of wellness…always you are worthy of wellness.


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My Story

There is a story in my body – a story of joy and a story of suffering, a story imprinted in my flesh of adopted beliefs and weathered patterns of being.

I have a belief. My body records it. With devotion to my higher good, my body informs me of my ways.  It unfailingly wears my happiness, fears, pain, doubt, informing me through these tissues and bones in service to my heart, all knowing, all seeing.

My body hears my heart calling for a change in that belief, so it demonstrates the belief in physical form in order for me to transform it…on the physical level, the thinking level, the feeling level, the being level.

I pause to listen to the advice of this worn vessel and then almost as soon as I acknowledge the pattern in the body, the beliefs begin to dissolve, reshaping my existence, restoring my wellness.

The body lets go of tension, no longer gripping to accommodate the familiar.  The battering patterns melt away, initiating a flow of healing…through the body, into the heart.


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the donning of my awareness

I hear the birds calling.

I feel the rustling of the earth as outside the dawn awakens.

Sleep fell so swiftly upon me as the full moon watched over and with a new sense of soft inquiry my eyes flutter open. My awareness rustles with the sounds, colors and shifting environment around me. The morning presents itself to me, as my awareness awakens with the dawn.

In this moment, as my awareness shifts from my inner state of attachment to an interconnection with what is around me, I feel a different state of aliveness. An aliveness of knowing simultaneously what is happening on the inside and the outside of the container that I perceive as me.

This awareness is scintillating and soothing, clear and not completely definable. I am aware of all and nothing.

My awareness flutters and swirls like the newly arising birds that sing and dance just outside my window, tuned as well into the mystery of awakening.

It is in the awakening of the dawn that I can explore the awakening of my awareness. It is in the awakening of my awareness where I come closer to knowing the true sense of who I am…if I am who at all.

I begin to wrap myself in the dawning of this awakening. In donning my awareness, I welcome the awakening of this harmonious interconnection with all that is around me.

…nurturing the I iN All.