This morning I am beginning a new 40 day meditation course.
Although I have studied/practiced meditation over the past dozen years and know well its benefits in my life, I want to better establish a daily practice of sitting in meditation in much the way my inspiring husband devotes himself to his daily sit.
I find that rather than daily sitting, I more typically just hope I remember to utilize mindfulness to help navigate my own tendency to re-activeness. I try to remember to do this as I prefer it when I am able to respond rather than react to my life as it presents itself to me. I expect that sitting will better help me to kindly remember to be more mindful in my relating to self and other.
I also want to welcome myself back to beginner mind and with a sense of playful curiosity, explore the possibility of uprooting some unskillful mind habits.
From day one, this lovely, spacious wisdom poem:
Clearing by Martha Postlewaite
Do not try to save the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create a clearing
in the dense forest of your life
and wait there patiently,
until the song that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize it and greet it.
Only then will you know how
to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue.
And because right now the dense forest of my personal life could use some skillfully trained tending, I sit and breathe, knowing that cultivating a sense of spaciousness surrounding difficulty is, quite literally, the breathing space that I, and this whole blessed world so desperately needs.
Thanks for reading!
Be well,
Jill