Day 42: What to do, or How to Do it?

Going slow.

This is “hard” for us sometimes, or maybe all the time. We have an image of ourselves as “getting things done.” Or, the other side of image: we are hard on ourselves at the end of the day if we don’t “get enough done. And in order to please other people, we often say we are going to do more things than the day has time to hold.

Or we slip up and get present in one of our tasks of the day, and just “waste time” enjoying a conversation with someone, or simply being present in their company.

And then the “next thing” on our list gets shortened, or cramped, or rushed, or cancelled.

It’s a funny thing, this linear time bit: people want a lot out of us. We want a lot out of ourselves. There are lots of fun and amazing things to do, and lots of just “get this done” things to do.

And where are we in all of this?

Hey: that’s the task for today: to go slowly inside of each and every event/ task/ job/ subset of our day. Take time to just sit, to take a walk, to listen and not respond right away, to take two breaths before you respond, to sense yourself and feel “I am alive” all the while that you are doing whatever it is you are doing.

Feel your Being inside of all your Doing.

Day Thirty: Waking to the Life we are living each moment

To be reborn, this is our birthright, as any moment when we wake back to the realization: I am alive, right now. This is my life.

To be alive—this is true. And we forget. Luckily, in every moment, including is famous one and only one right now, we can wake up to this miracle—I am alive, right now.

We can remember our breathing. Ah, yes, a good sign that we are alive, this breathing thing. We can remember our breathing and sense the breath coming in and out, the shifts in our ribs and lungs and back and sides and diaphragm area. We can notice something more profound: the shift in our sense of who and how we are, when we return home to following our breathing.

Knowing we are alive as a felt experience. Not just, “Oh, yes I am breathing.” Not just noticing the breath come in and out and sensing how our bodies are going about that. But sensing at an awareness level, how something like “Who we really are” wakes up when we bring our attention to the felt and experienced NOW.

Shift happens when we wake up to now.

This can be another set of words, another set of rules, or it can be an experience we find delightful, and uplifting, and calming all at the same time.


This might be our central “job” in life, for without being present, we are condemned to always re-acting (over and over, re and re and re acting) in the ways we’ve been programmed and taught ourselves to act.

And with awareness, we can take that little step back, that little awareness induced pause, and in that pause we can notice: now my urge is to be angry, or now I am tensing myself as I type, or now I am rushing with my food and not really tasting each bite, or now I am not listening when someone is talking but am busy preparing my next little speech.

But from the wakefulness of now, we can feel these tendencies, and in that space and time that the pause and our awareness give us, we can decide: do I really want to express my anger now? Wouldn’t the food taste better and my health feel happier if I tasted each bite? What would it be like to actually listen to this person for who they are, and not as the lead in to what important me, me, me has to say next?


This is life. A happy choice: to wake up to now.

From this wakefulness, certain Christian concepts, like praying ceaselessly, or loving your enemy, become not a tough burden, but a delightful route to being Fully Alive.

We can be what we’ve been programmed to be, or we can wake to the moment and act from what we really see and hear and notice is going on. This is huge. This is delightful.

This can be our “game” today, and is it a game or a necessity to remember we are alive in all situations, and to look out on all the others in our life and remember: they are alive?

Maybe both.

You decide, and not in words, but in your hearts while you experience yourself treating yourself as you treat yourself when you are present and you experience yourself treating other people as you are present. Experience the difference. Learning is noticing differences. Go ahead and learn. This is everything.

And if God is beyond words and concepts and limitations, what would loving God be like from the present? Maybe very different than that we’ve been programmed to believe. The discovery is yours. The experience is yours.

And start small. One breath at a time. What is the experience of coming home to yourself in the moment. Taste it, savor it, learn from it, live from it.

Good.

88: Heaven's gate: attention on attention

Knocking at heaven’s gate:

When do we lose our attention on the present?

When can we keep it there?

This is the game of life and the game today: paying attention to what we do with our attention.


Smile a lot.

This is just finding out about who we are.

Enjoy this.

Christmas Day, Christmas Songs

As part of Joy to the World,
the happy Christmas Carol,
these words end one verse:

"Let heaven and nature sing,
let heaven and nature sing,
let heeeeeeeven and nature sing."

I like the singing of nature,
and of heaven,
a nice gift of the world,
the universe,
God,
to us,
eh?



Another carol, It came upon a midnight clear,
has this advice
for getting closer
to the divine spark
of it all:

"Oh hush the noise
and cease your strife,
and hear the angels sing"

Only in our silence
and calming from the usual
"I am right/ you are wrong" wars,
can the angels sing to us.

A good day for hearing that,
today,
perhaps.

DAY NINETEEN Arms, and legs AND spine

DAY NINETEEN
Arms, and legs AND spine

If a child draws a person, they draw five lines with a head on top. Two legs coming together in a cone shape, then the spine going up with the head on top and two arms sticking out. Sometimes a dress is drawn on this, far easier to draw than pants and shirt.

Let’s add the spine to sensing our arms and legs.

This is a good step, a sweet step to having an ongoing sense of our skeleton as we go about our day.


This is a fantastic way to be present.

Also fantastic to be aware of when we your slopping ourselves around in our sitting and standing and moving and not taking advantage of the miracle of having our skeleton and awareness as a sweet unity.


And as always, when is a grand time to “do” these sense our legs meditations? These sense our arms and legs meditations? And now this one, this sense our arms and legs and spine meditation?

Now?

Yes, now. As we read this page on this book, our legs are in some position in the world and so are our arms. Somewhere in between them, connecting to the pelvis, is our spine. Somewhere holding our arms via our ribs and shoulder blades: our spine.

For fun, lets round our spine a little, right now, no matter where we are. And then arch it. And breathe easily and freely with delight and ease.

Good.

And then some rotating, head to the left, ribs to the left, pelvis to the left and back to the middle a few times. With ease and delight. Then some rotating to the right. That’s right.

All day, best we can, spine, arms and legs. And breathe.

Day Nine: Loving Our Spine

DAY NINE
Loving our spine

Yesterday’s idea: sense your posture all day. How did you do? What did you do?

Did you combine it with sensing arms and legs? And thinking, “this is my life now?” You can keep the previous activities going any and every day you want.

Find your own way in adding as much exploratory wakening into your life as you can enjoy and benefit from. That is a purposefully vague statement.


Today, in as many ways as you can, sitting, standing, lying down, talking on the phone, walking, riding a bike, making love, reading a book, round and arch your spine.

Which means, rounding into a little ball, with your nose coming down toward your belly button, and your pelvis rotating toward your nose. This can be felt as slumping. It can be felt as curling up in the fetal position. (Do this lying on your side. It’s a lot of fun).


And then unfold, uncurl, expand out so that your chest and ribs rise away from the center, your back arches so your belly comes forward and the small of your back comes forward, your sternum (breastbone) lifts, your head tilts back a little, and your pelvis rotates so that your bottom pushes toward the back of your head.

Do this now, in a chair.

Do this now, standing, with your hands on your knees, if you can. Feel as if this may do wonders for your “posture.”


Mess around today doing this while driving the car (just a little bit), while standing in line at the bank (even littler, people will think you are weird). Do it in your room, do it even, somehow, on a walk.

Keep your spine rounding and arching and wake up to its glories, to the lengthening of you.

Day Eight: Getting Straight

DAY EIGHT
Getting straight.

Many of us, at one time or another, get the idea into our head that we want “better posture.” Often this idea was drilled into us in teenage years, with some adult saying, in usually not so pleasant a voice, “stand up straighter,” or “stop slumping.” Or some such commandment.

Whatever the baggage and past conditioning, it does feel better to stand with a fuller and longer spine. Much of yoga works toward this, and we’ll go for a sort of brain yoga as this book unfolds. I am trained in what is called the Feldenkrais Method®, named after a man, Moshe Feldenkrais (1904-1984) who was a physicist, engineer, judo master and student of babies and human development. He wanted to heal something in him that medical surgery couldn’t repair at the time, and he did, discovering along the way a system of attentive moving that awakened awareness and propelled people into all sorts of improvements in their life.

I’m also trained in the Anat Baniel Method, developed by, not so surprisingly, Anat Baniel, a student of Moshe Feldenkrais who has spent 30 expanding and deepening his system.

Be that as it may, stand in this cross of ours, as per yesterday, and begin to roll your arms forward, so the thumbs orient from up, to forward to down. And as you roll your arms forward, bend your knees, and let your whole upper body round toward your pelvis, as if you were curling up in a ball. Then uncurl yourself and rotate your hand and arms backwards, so the thumbs come back to up, and rotate to point to the back.

While this is happening, arch your spine and let your head look up a little and soften your belly and let your belly come forward as your lower back comes in a little.

Go back and forth like this. Read the directions several times, and figure it out. DON’T SKIP IT. DO IT. SENSE YOURSELF IN MOTION, SENSE THE SPINE ROUNDING AND ARCHING.

Breathe as you do this. Sense both arms and legs.

When you finish doing this, sense your “posture” all day.

Day One: Sensing Legs

As long as I am alive, I am breathing. Can I have the richness of life, where many times in the day, I know I am breathing, when I feel the sensation of my breath coming in and out?

Sensing.

This is the word for feeling myself physically. For you feeling yourself physically.

Can you sense right now where your right arm is, and the shape of it and the feel of it from the inside and outside, the bones and muscles and skin and aliveness of your arm?

Now sense your left arm.

How did you make that switch?

Who made that switch?

Now sense your right leg. Now sense your left leg, filling in all that you can, your toes, your ankles, your knee, your calf, your thigh, all the way up to your hip socket.
Where is the hip joint?

Sense and see if you can find it

Now sense your right leg, all of it.

Now sense both legs. See if that brightens your sense of yourself, bring you back in a concrete way to NOW.


Sensing.

This is an extremely down to Earth / can’t-fool-yourself way to wake up to now. It’s easy enough to say, “Oh, of course, I’m being present,” and to just be saying words without any ongoing anchor in the present. To sense ourselves, we have to be present to ourselves.

Sensing our legs, both right and left, that is the game for today. Give it a try. Have fun. Keep coming back and back and back. To now. To sensing. Even now, as you read these words.

Right now.

The journey will last 108 days. Each day will offer something small or large to follow in our awareness, in our waking up to now.

the fun of messing up

the fun of messing up:


what i consider messing up
now

is to be grumpy
ever
about
What Is.

and so,
this morning,
grumpy because of
a racket with a leaf blower
thing

and whose business is it
what some sweet guy
does with his time
and energy?

his.

and for me
to grump out
about it
is to make a mess

and the fun is this:
realizing
that
I'm insane when I do that
laughing at myself

and then
going about a much brighter,
happier
day

Exulting the Changing Seasons

Exulting the Changing Seasons

today is cool in the morning
it was cold last night
warm to almost hot yesterday

ah, fall,
falling open into our lives

change
of leaves
of temperature
of our lives
if you are me,
and the sweetie
and I are going to travel apart

so sad.
no,
joking,
so sweet.

is fall sad,
or an awakening
into newness

each day is that:
sad because yesterday
is totally, irrevocably gone

or a sweet blast of now:
new to each moment
we are awake to the moment

good