Pulling threads
Notes and news from the present moment, on its swift way to becoming past.
Turn the Year Retreat
A Winter Solstice Mini-Retreat
8:30–9 :30 a.m. December 27–31, 2021
As each calendar year ends, on the heels of Winter Solstice, I make a point to mark the transition with intention. There is something so delicious about retreats at this time of year. I find a sense of newness emerges by paying attention to how the natural world changes with the season, and dropping into resonance with that. There is an inward quality to the season of winter, and an outward quality to our holiday celebrations. With tempering and balance, this can be a rich time of rest, and if we are lucky, a deeply generative quality can be found in these dark, cold days.
Inspire / Respire
inspire … to fill (someone) with the urge or ability to do or feel something, especially to do something creative;
respire … to recover hope, courage, or strength after a time of difficulty.
Familiar Ground
It was so wet, and varied, as it is there in November. Such dynamic skies! The rain and wind and mist, the drama — things I know, deeply, but after such a long time away, my embodied perspective has shifted. I saw anew the scale of hills and mountains, and the hovering, dawn-coloured light that hugs the horizon’s mist for most of each day. Cedar and salt. A northern, maritime, rainforest place.
Notes on Blues
Picasso: Painting the Blue Period, at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
When I was about the same age Picasso was when he made these works, the Blue Period was my favourite. I was not alone — while Picasso could not sell them when they were new, they eventually became hugely popular. There is much to appreciate in the exhibit, yet as I view the work now, I do not have the same love for this Blue Period that I once did.
Giving the Monkey a Job
As I sustain a meditation practice over many years, I notice that there are similar mind-states that show up in day-to-day life. A formal, silent and still practice has helped me get better at noticing subtle shifts in states of mind, but those states of mind are not attached only to sitting meditation.
Poiesis
The practices I have been gathering and that I share when teaching, are things I experience as methods of “homecoming” — coming to rest in being, whole. “Creative” or not, I believe we all, by the fact of living, are in the process of bringing forth what has not before been expressed, what has not before been realized. This is poeisis.
A Living Being, Feeling the Sun
I am working on a book that follows the lives of several families in the early 1900s, in a very rugged and remote part of the west coast. I have been reading widely many writers from that time period, to understand more deeply how that literature depicted it’s own time, to get a feel for how people understood the historical moment from within it. One of the writer’s I have come to read in this quest is Willa Cather, and her story of an orphaned settler boy. She writes this 10-year-old character with great tenderness, and through him, in two brief passages, Cather delivers a profound teaching that sounds like buddhist or yog philosophy to me.
Welcome Summer Retreat
When we sit together, we practice resting into our experience.
We practice sharing, and we practice listening.
In these ways, may we become skillful.
July 5–9, 2021
8:00–8:30 a.m.
Pearls of Wisdom
Working with the reflex to DO rather than BE when faced with suffering, remembering: it is skillful to bear witness, without jumping into distracting action; to listen, without dissociation, or minimizing, or denial; to return to presence when facing pain.
Context and Action
I practice what I teach, taking care and discernment with media consumption — yet I am caught in emotion with this week's news. Centered as it is around grave violence against the earth and indigenous peoples in the province where I grew up, it hits very close to home. We must hold our remembering, even if forgetting seems like it would be easier.
Using Discernment
A translation of bramacharya that works well in my mind is right use of energy. In yoga and in meditation, we spend a lot of time discerning HOW we are using our energy—on gross and subtle levels, social, interior. What is the quality of our experience, and how are are we directing our vital energy?
On Being Whole
As a much younger person, a teenager, in my early twenties, even into my forties — the question was still: WHAT SHOULD I DO? WHO WILL I BECOME? I remember the blessing of wise, older friends, who shared with me that it all just made more sense when they got to their fifties — all the disparate things that had called to them in their life had a logic that became clear. Maybe it hadn't made sense in a rational “career path,” but all those things pointed toward themselves.
Tending the Root
Tending the root for growth and bloom — in the throes of creative process, complication and simplification, I see how this process is constant in all growth. Elaborate expression, and pruning…where does this show up in your life?
Compassion in Action
Study, choose, act, expand — compassion in action is one way to work with crises, near and far. I am grateful for the meditation practice that helps steady me as I embrace compassion in action.
Attend to Your Mind
Within a culture, pattern is imbued with meaning, and that meaning deepens through repetition of practice or ritual, and through teaching those patterns, reflecting upon their shared meaning. These are fundamental human strategies for getting along together, and for working with the discomfort of uncertainty, the pain of change, and fear of the pain of change. They are strategies at the cultural, interpersonal level, and intrapersonal.
Waves of the Mind
I have been thinking about the ways human beings find meaning in pattern, how that serves as a strategy for coping with uncertainty, and the ways this ability can be both benevolent and not.
Awakening Spring: A Meditation Retreat
With this seasonal change I will call upon an archetype of earth, the fecund and great Mother, in all her lustiness and intensity. She brings us the flowers and honey, the sweet colours of spring, and the terrific force of birth. She is one who will not be denied, and we do not control her. Join me in meeting Spring with a seasonal retreat: March 15–19, 8:00–8:30 a.m.
Spacious Mind
When we practice noticing how our biases and attachments show up in body and mind, we are more likely to be able to perceive them in the context of daily life. As we become more adept at noticing and unpacking our stories around them, we are more able to discern, with awareness, what to do with those signals. Sometimes aversion really is about danger, and you need to get out of there. Or attraction might point you toward something benevolent that supports your well-being. Regardless, there is real benefit to bringing unconscious bias into consciousness, to notice what we are holding onto despite our better intentions. It gives us the ability to self-correct and act in the world with more clarity.