Friday, January 20, 2012

You Are Here


I've been reading Thich Nhat Hanh's book, You Are Here, and am being encouraged again and again to sloooooooow down, not just my life, but my steps, my thoughts, my breath. If I can just DO this.... my life will be happier, more open to love and joy.

But it's not a matter of DO-ing, is it? I can't DO anything to slow myself down. I have to let myself BE... that is how it is "done."

Most days I am able to spend at least 30 minutes in quiet meditation. Sitting still rather than standing still. Sometimes I just focus on the in-out... in-out... in-out... of my breath, my stomach rising and falling. And sometimes I go into the netherworld of my imagination and spend time in my Inner Sanctuary, which is a big cozy house on the ocean with a forest behind it. And sometimes I do a bit of both.

One of the things he says in his book, and often, is that we are to stop judging ourselves, stop being unkind to ourselves. And just to be with what is. Just to let it be. To surrender to what is.

There is a fine line, I am finding, between settling for what is and surrendering to it. Like, my Naturopath tells me that certain of my blood levels are rising instead of falling. If I settle for that, and say "Oh well, that's how it is, I guess the cancer is back," then I am giving up. But surrendering to it means accepting those blood levels just as they are. Not punishing myself because the levels are elevated instead of lowered. Not wondering what I did wrong to make this happen. And as soon as I can find that space of true acceptance, as soon as I surrender to WHAT IS, I have opened a space in my being for change to occur.

I am still working with this, but I can tell you that everything he says in this book is true, true, true!

I had the thought, reading it this morning, that when I finish reading it I will start reading it all over again, because the book itself (altho small and slim in volume) is a compendium of wisdom, a classroom on mindfulness in 135 pages... and I could keep on reading it forever and ever and still get new things out of it every week, every month, every year. But I have underlined and highlighted and circled and written in the margins. So I will buy another copy of it, fresh and clean, and read it again. And again. And again. Until the lessons within start to adhere to my soul and to the pages of my own days. Until all my thoughts and feelings are coated with compassion and acceptance. Until the lessons in surrendering are as habitual to me as my breath.

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