Pulling threads
Notes and news from the present moment, on its swift way to becoming past.
Turn the Year: A Meditation Retreat
It is natural to take time to reflect as the year turns — a time for meditative retreat in the darkest days after Winter Solstice. Let us close this year with a dedicated space for that reflection, to integrate and inquire…
December 28, 2020 – January 1, 2021 8:30–9 a.m.
Winter Solstice Prayer
Winter’s medicine is inward time. Making our life circles, in cycles, in waves: resting and dreaming, brewing, percolating, moving slow beneath the frozen earth, cold sea. Like sea lions and arctic whales, or the iron red rivers moving through the stones beneath my home since the last ice age.
How Spacious the Meadow
To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.
Zen teachings are enigmatic, the language circular and contradictory often, which creates puzzles and potential for sparks of insight. This brief line led to much thought and discussion about the nature of freedom and constraints. What are the right constraints for us to know freedom within? How spacious our meadow?
Asteya - The Yama of Non-Stealing
The third yama in Patanjali's Yoga Darshan is asteya, or non-stealing. Not committing acts of theft seems like an obvious virtue. More subtly, asteya also applies to speech and to thinking — to not claim what is not ours, to not cheat, nor misappropriate. How do we steal, how do we take what is not offered? We may do so in unawareness, unconsciously; or, more deliberately, out of a sense of not having enough, of not being enough. Could this apply to this end-of-year and a seasonal hunger for what we don't have — for the future, for the past, for things as we wish they could be?
Life Is Art Is Life
At the beginning of 2020, besides thinking about the yamas and niyamas, I chose a word to be my focal aspiration for the year. (Much more helpful than a resolution!) My word was “concordance,” which is to bring all parts together in harmony.
In Essence
Essence, harmony, truth … satya is the glue that holds the formed universe together. Precepts and seed-thoughts for thinking through…
Revery: A Year of Bees
Jenna Butler’s new book Revery: A Year of Bees is launching tomorrow with Wolsak & Wynn’s Autumn Prose launch. I’ll be attending online, to celebrate Jenna and three more writers as they bring their books into a most challenging year.
Ahimsa and the Centipede
For a period at the beginning of this year, I framed my yoga classes with the yamas and niyamas: ten guiding principles or ethics of yoga philosophy. I listed them at the beginning of each class, and invited participants to choose the most resonant precept, the one that caught their ear, and to draw into deeper consideration of it.
The precept that continues to resonate for me through this whole year, is the one taught first, the seed of all the others: ahimsa, or non-killing, non-harming, non-violence. Read how sangha, aversion, and a big bug show up as teachers.
Turning the Year
It is natural to take time to reflect as the year turns — a time for meditative retreat in the darkest days after Winter Solstice. Let us close this year with a dedicated space for that reflection, to integrate and inquire…
December 28, 2020 – January 1, 2021 8:30–9 a.m.
Attunement
I am excited to add a new yoga and meditation class to my weekly teaching schedule: Attune Body+Mind, Mondays at noon, eastern time. This 75 minute class includes a 15 minute meditation — if you only have 60 minutes, there will be a natural break to return to your day at 1 pm. The first class will be on November 16, 2020.
Featured in Uppercase Magazine #47
Look what came in the mail! I am so pleased to be included in this gorgeous issue of Uppercase Magazine — on words & images and art for healing. Check out this independent Canadian magazine “for the creative and curious.”
In the Moment
Does this feel like a week of new beginning? I am astonished at the amount of energy I have, now that the heavy wait for U.S. election news is behind us. I feel light and such joy — I hope you have access to something like this feeling too. I have been hearing from dear hearts, a great mixture of feelings. Relief manifests in many ways. It may need to pass through grief and uncertainty before we can fully absorb the lightening of any traumatic burden.
#Skyproject2
The sky calls again for daily attention. What do we learn through looking, skywatching, daily practice, noting this moment, these three breaths, this sky? Join in!
The Notion of Refuge
I am grateful for a mini-retreat with a gang of you, just last week. Another opportunity to set new patterns, to contemplate teachings, and to simply SIT with it all and each other, five mornings in a row.
I chose the timing of these events deliberately, to build support into a time that was easy to predict would be fraught with tensions and anxiety.
October Retreat
A balm for difficult times — let us rest into supported community practice together, for one week of morning practice in the last week of October.
Happy Thanksgiving
What would an authentic practice of gratitude look like for you? Can we nurture natural gratitude without burying “non-gratitude”? Let's play with this idea!
Riding the Wave
Many feel this season and the next will be long ones. I hear resignation and some dread. I feel these things, yet, I also experience a glimmer of excitement for the deep inward turn that will come with winter. A time to dig deep into rich material, dream-time, integration and quiet creation time.
Late, Late Summer
For the month of September, the meditation circle which I lead has been working with a metaphor practice:
body as mountain
breath as the sea
sky — mind
This is an invitation to think / sense / feel into these archetypes of the natural world, to contemplate their qualities and notice how our embodied experience might echo them. The imagery is boundless, but we can start from here…
Beginning Anew
Like the fish circling a reflection of the full Piscean moon, let's turn our attention to that bright, shining mirror; see, how clearly can we see?
August Retreat
Join me August 17–21 for one week of morning meditations, a miniature self-retreat, in community.