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Swimming Lessons

1/25/2018

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Picture
Born of the Light by Meganne Forbes

​Biology tells me that skin is porous, but not a completely permeable membrane. Meditation and reflective journaling ask me to make space for everything: thoughts, feelings, sounds, sensations. “Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. No feeling is final.” (Rilke) Is it possible to be a spiritually permeable membrane, defying skin and the rules of biology through metaphor?

In a guided meditation, I saw a girl shackled to ball and chain throw herself into the ocean. I felt the weight of her body, the heaviness inside her heart. She was responsible for all painful misunderstandings in relationships. Drowning felt like the only option, the only redemption.

Invoking the loving presence of DoriMa, beloved teacher and mentor, I saw DoriMa’s glowing image in the sunrise above the water. She reminded the girl that the ball and chain were remnants from childhood experiences, representations of comparing mind and thoughts of deficiency. She reminded the girl that Kwan Yin’s spirit was always accessible, could permeate skin and pass through water all the way down to the abyss, the darkest places of consciousness.

Who is this woman now? What is the wisdom in waves? She is learning to swim, to make space for each rise and fall of experience. She is learning to let each thought, feeling, sound, and sensation pass through her without making a solid mold of the self.

She is learning that skin can completely be permeable with pure presence, that foreign, unpleasant substances don’t need to be attacked by the immune system once they are recognized and rendered as safe. Safe spaces can only be created when she lets everything pass through her. Beauty and terror.

​No feeling is final.
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The Peace of Wild Things

1/8/2018

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Picture
Photo by Liz West

Fools gold or the perfect diamond. The ego swings between deficiency and excess. What is the middle way between these two extremes? How does one uncover the True Nature inherent to all sentient beings?

I find my own life pendulating between both sides. At one end, other mindfulness teachers attract a larger audience while I’m screaming on the inside for attention. My daughter idolizes my husband and looks past me with irritable tolerance. I am not welcome in certain homes and hearts because there is something wrong with me. 

At the other end, I am a unique healer who offers compassionate, healing presence, a writer who articulates sincere reflections from the heart better than others. If someone else displays these traits, they are a threat to my very existence.

Over time, even a swinging pendulum will evolve towards a state of equilibrium, a still point. Where is this place of stillness for the ego? What is my name here? Who is writing this blog piece right now?

Mind and heart agree to meet in this moment. Mind agrees to project poignant memories free of a solid self. Heart agrees to the virtues of compassion, patience, trust. Bodhicitta awakens.
​
No teacher or student, no mother or daughter, no insider or outsider, no healer or patient, no writer or reader.


The Peace of Wild Things 
by Wendell Berry 


When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
 in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
 I go and lie down where the wood drake
 rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
 I come into the peace of wild things
 who do not tax their lives with forethought
 of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
 And I feel above me the day-blind stars
 waiting with their light. For a time
​ I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


Sometimes in nature or meditation, while writing, parenting, holding space for patients and class participants, or engaging with others, the bobbing ego rests. There is no need to move towards a state of deficiency or excess, but rest in the True Nature pattern intrinsic to the fabric of all life.

May 2018 be the year i come into the peace of wild things, resting in the grace of the world, sensing hearts beating, meeting, blossoming open like lotus flowers still anchored to muddy egos, yearning to be free.


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    Kaveri Patel, a woman who is always searching for the wisdom in waves.

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