Thoughts about Meditating and a Haiku

January 29, 2014January 29, 2014Leave a comment

Sitting on a bolster

Eyes downcast, thoughts turned inward

Ice reflects on walls

When I meditated today, I thought about what I would write for this day’s mindfulness writing challenge. But I need to forget about writing when I sit to meditate.

My imagination is another distraction I don’t need to add to my deck of wandering thought-cards. Thinking about what I will write is delightful and entertaining, but I want to focus on the breath, on the happiness I feel having, for the length of one breath, nowhere to go, no one to talk to, nothing to do.

Mindfulness Writing Challenge, Day 29, Writing Our Way Home.

End of the Day Haiku

January 27, 20141 Comment

In the sink, broken glass

We each pick up the pieces

No one cuts a finger

Mindfulness Writing Day 27, Writing Our Way Home

Today I read poet Jane Hirshfield’s The Heart of Haiku. In this wonderful essay, Hirshfield explains some of Basho’s life story, traces the history of haiku, and then offers translations and interpretations of some of Basho’s poignant and deeply mindful verse. A practicing Buddhist, Jane Hirshfield has insight that allows her to shed light on Basho’s poetry for those who are unfamiliar with Japanese culture and Eastern philosophy.

Another short article well worth the time is Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “More than the Birds, Bees, and Trees: A Closer Look at Writing Haibun.” She emphasizes the importance of cultivating aware, “the quality of certain objects to evoke longing, sadness, or immediate sympathy.”

Jane Hirshfield also mentions this important aspect of haiku and how it was Basho who encouraged his students “to feel sabi.” She goes on to explain that “to feel sabi is to feel keenly one’s own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence.”

Daily mindfulness writing and writing small stones are a beautiful way to feel sabi and to cultivate aware in poetry and in life.

January Light

January 26, 2014January 26, 2014Leave a comment

Red lies on his belly
In a bar of light.
Face to the wall
Hind legs splayed,
He abandons himself
To the warmth.

Day 26 Mindful Writing Challenge, Writing Our Way Home

Indoor Swimming in January

January 17, 2014January 17, 2014Leave a comment

If you close your eyes and focus on the space between your eyebrows, a white light will appear. Sometimes the light will crystalize into a sphere lined with purple. Some longtime meditators who maintain focus will even see a white lotus lined with purple. I have only seen the sphere, sometimes called the pearl.

Today swimming laps the sun spills into the pool through the glass wall. On the other side of the wall is a stand of very tall pine trees. Beyond the trees, a robin’s egg blue sky and a single cloud.

I focus on the breath, sometimes kicking a little harder to increase the amount of air I need to take into my lungs. I don’t try to go too fast, just fast enough so that my mind stays focused on the sensations of swimming–my shadow swimming with me along the bottom of the pool, the shaft of light I swim through each time I reach the deep end, the axle of my shoulders as my arms arc up and down, scooping the water, driving the rest of my body forward through the water.

There is no rush, just back and forth through the water from one side of the pool to the other, pushing gently with my feet off the side of the pool to propel myself back into the lane. Nowhere to get to, no goal other than to breathe, glide, and enjoy those moments at the far end when the sun shines on my face.

Maybe it’s the memory of the sun that allows us to see the pearl in the mind space when our eyes are closed. Even when we’re in the dark the light exists.

Mindfulness writing, Day 17, Writing Our Way Home.

Meditation on Sounds

January 13, 2014January 14, 2014Leave a comment

Click-click, a metal zipper taps against the drier drum.

Click-click, the house birds have come back to reclaim

their timeshare above my window.

A fledgling creature clicks and mewls from the upper branches of a tree

outside my window.

A crow creaks a greasy call across the street.

The whoosh of tires on asphalt, wind parted by metal hulks.

The cool swish of air on the in-breath, the warm puff on the out-breath.

Drawing air up to clavicles, I hear the click-click

of spines expanding along my upper back.

A thin click as lips part then close.

The muffled click of a wooden bead as a mala passes through my fingers.

***

Many beginning meditations instruct practitioners to listen to the sounds that come and go outside the room where they are sitting. We notice the sounds rise and fall away, without labeling them or trying to find out what is making the noise.

We then focus our awareness on sounds in the room where we are sitting. The point is to notice how sounds come and go, just like feelings and thoughts come and go. In between the sounds, feelings, and thoughts, we continuously draw the mind back to the breath.

I found that today I kept labeling the sounds. I knew I was going to spend time writing after I meditated, and so my mind kept sifting through the sounds and placing words on them.

But when I think back to all these tiny moments of small noises, I remember a gentle popping, clicking, humming– these are the continuous sounds of life. They are always there, rising and falling like waves in an ocean. We swim in a broth of sound waves.

Day 13: Mindfulness Writing, Writing Our Way Home.

Thoughts While Meditating Under a Light Therapy Lamp

January 12, 2014January 12, 2014Leave a comment

Imagine our first home, a time when we knew no fear.

Close your eyes and turn your face to the sun–this was our first light.

Hold the webs of your fingers above a flashlight– that red glow was our world.

The plush warmth of a giant membrane, a kind of palace.

Between systolic and diastolic

Between rising and falling, a gentle rise, a gentle fall, a fluid absorber of shock

Between in-breath and out,

We lived in a symphonic buzz of warmth.

When we left this palace, our tender flesh bumped against cold plastic and table edges.

We couldn’t see above countertops where the palace guards chopped carrots and onions

for our broth.

We swam in the flux between fear of death in this cold, sharp place

And a desire to please the palace guards, the ones who had control over our survival.

The guards had forgotten they too once lived under the protection of the symphonic membrane.

All they remembered was their desire to survive.

Day 12, January Mindful Writing Challenge.

A Clear Stone for a Clear Mind

January 10, 2014January 10, 2014Leave a comment

Yesterday, Elizabeth started yoga class with a meditation. She asked us to think about our “feeling-tone” and to notice how it felt to be us at that particular moment. She said she was referring to lessons she learned from her teacher, Erich Schiffmann, who writes about levels of stillness in his book, Yoga, The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness.

In this book Schiffmann advises the yoga practitioner: Immerse your conscious awareness into your own unique feeling-tone, the feeling-tone of the Universe expressing Itself as you are. Do this deliberately in order to experience the truth of who you are. (7)

Elizabeth put her instructions to us within the context of the New Year and the Western tradition of making New Year’s resolutions. She suggested that we learn to accept our current feeling-tone, to even celebrate it, while being open to the potential for change. This is a much different way of looking at goal setting and resolutions. A gentle, self-accepting approach.

In yoga we often refer to sankalpa, a sanskrit term that is roughly translated as a resolve or an intention. During a state of deep relaxation, the yogini forms an intention, and then keeps that intention alive in her heart until she realizes it.

At the end of class Elizabeth recalled us to our initial feeling-tone, and again asked us to think about our potential for change. She asked us to think about an intention for the coming year that would involve our feeling-tone, and then she offered us a talisman to keep as a physical reminder of our sankalpa.

She had drawn symbols on smooth glass stones of different colors–the OM symbol, flowers, a peace sign, a cross, etc…, and she then had us choose a stone from her selection.

Om Talisman

I chose a clear stone with the OM symbol. My sankalpa is to cultivate a clear mind, clear speech, and a clear heart/body. I intend to meditate every day to tune into pure, clear awareness, to dive beneath the waves of mind chatter and to listen for the deep hum of primordial sound.

Peaceful mind, peaceful heart, peaceful speech, peaceful actions.

Mindful Writing Day 10, Writing Your Way Home.