Monday Mindfulness

Cultivating Strength, Joy, Calm & Resilience

Category Archives: awareness


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Awakening

Why is it when something good happens, I assume I am dreaming? Good fortune couldn’t possibly come to me just because it is a way of living.

Our dreams allow us to live out endless possibilities, to experience great joys and work through sufferings. Yet it is more often the sufferings that we bring with us into the waking world. It is the sufferings we expect to find in the daylight hours.

As we settle into the darkest time of the year, let us awaken in this darkness to the fact that we are intended to live in joy and peace, and to thrive in the living more than in our dreams.

It is the suffering that is the illusion, not the success. It is the discomfort that we can relinquish to the dream state.

In the darkness, I awaken to know that this being is intended to be miraculous, exuberant, joyful and abundantly filled with ease.

It is time to give ourselves permission to celebrate our successes and well-being, fully awake and aware in our right to thrive.


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Befriending

It is easy on some days to feel like my body had betrayed me or is out to get me. There is weakness, soreness, or illness. I could see this body as unattractive or failing. I could label it as the enemy. Instead of interpreting the condition of my body as messages intended to inform and perhaps even inspire me, my mind perceives threats, expresses disappointment.

When I experience my body as misaligned with me is precisely when I need to remember that my body is less like a vulture and more like a little baby bird simply needing to be nourished and loved.


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Contain It or Let It Roll?

These days are like scooping mercury. Chasing after it can be so exhausting as it beads and evades more with each attempt to contain it.

Feeling the need to clean it up, but might just have to sit here for a bit and just watch as it glides and rolls around making beautiful patterns and shapes.

Remarkable how something so potentially harmful can have such valuable purpose and be so beautiful.


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Presumed Flavor

On the surface rests an assumption of flavor, texture, and tartness. Neither color, nor shape, nor size can truly tell me what’s inside.

I can’t necessarily rely on prior experience to guide me. I am informed and intelligent, yet my predictions are never risk free. There is always a chance of finding sourness, mushiness, under ripeness or rot. Even in the bitterness there is nutrition.

Am I willing to let down my guard, to go against the odds, and to look past the outside appearances and find a way to see all as just ripe for me?


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Feeling in

Through your accomplishments I gain confidence in my ability to move the world.

In your mistakes I recognize your willingness to be my teacher.

In your humility I lay down my need to fight for my existence.

In your weakness I see the most incredible power.

Each time I pause to notice, I cannot help but shed tears of incredible gratitude and honor in feeling into life through your heart and eyes.


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Rev Your Engines

On this road of life, we are fortunate there are many places to stop for nourishment and refueling.

The key is to listen for sounds of rumbling and feel for the vibrations of imbalance, to watch the gauges and keep a keen lookout – from the inside – for what’s needed on the outside.

Know that your intuition is powerful and your breath like fuel.

Listen up,

fill up,

tune up,

and rev up.

Make wise choices and the road is yours.


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The Good Nut

Of varying form and purpose, we all arrive in a beautiful and powerful way – the key is to remain here not with force but with formidable grace.


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Settled in the Ocean of My Unsettledness

The ocean rolls in and out, finding a rhythm in the irregular beat of its waves on the shore, a consistency in the inconsistency.

It asks that I bend more, stay more still, listen more closely, find my entry, consider a way to dive in while still feeling my feet.

Restless…rejecting…beautiful…inciting…matching breath to motion.

Sometimes steady and full, sometimes roaring in…sometimes barely there.

Here together, a push and pull of synchrony.

Even in the struggle you connect me with my breath.

You awaken my senses.

You remind me what it means to exist and give me permission to settle into my unsettledness.


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Going Bigger

I breathe in, filling with the life force that moves me into every adventure, like the climbing of a roller coaster to the peak of its highest rail.

I teeter at the top, momentarily suspended in the gap of the breath the frozen space of fear.

And then I soften, surrender, and remember I am bigger than the gap. When I become bigger in the space of fear, fear becomes a place of play.

I can wade, jump, dive, trickle or race through the gap, inviting the breath to meet me at the other side. As I move more fully into each turn, each bend and dip in the rail, I become bigger and bigger with every breath.

In the bigness, I am fluid and free. There, in that space, I cannot help but smile in the excitement I find in being me…in breathing excitement into fear.


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Brushes with Bromeliads

Every day, I tenderly pluck and sort the unwanted guests between the treasured plants in the garden of this life of mine. I carefully reach between the stalks and flowers I choose to keep and arrange them all just so.

And, even with the most careful attention, I never leave my garden without scrapes, brush marks and bruises.

Yes, some of the most treasured plants in my garden have thorns. I move with particular sensitivity around them lest they snag my flesh. And somehow even as they cut me, I am still able to see their beauty and feel their special worth. They reach out and brush against me as if they just want to touch, to say “isn’t this all so grand that we are here?!”

It is at that moment when I am wounded but still capable of loving – even those plants with thorns – that I recognize that this coexistence is the essence of thriving.