Coming home

  • Coming home

Practicing coming home to myself

Last month I was listening to Lama Rod online as part of the mindfulness meditation teacher training.  Lama Rod Owens is an author, activist, and authorized Lama (Buddhist teacher) in the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism.  I recommend his book Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger and a coauthor of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation.

Since listening that online presentation and reading his book I am consciously including the 5/7 homecomings he writes about in my practice.

  • silence
  • community i am part of
  • sacred earth
  • ourselves (all our energetic bodies, gratitude)
  • ancestry

    Making friends with your monkey mind

    • Making friends with your monkey mind

    … While driving on Sunday to our family Sunday lunch I shared that with my husband that I was preparing earlier for the Mindfulness of thoughts meditation I was about to guide on Monday. He first asked me but how does that go together meditation Mindfulness of thoughts? Isn’t meditation supposed to be about quieting and being without thoughts?

    I was so happy he asked that and offer me an opportunity to practice the answer to that question which is so frequent for all people who are starting with meditation.

    So when we do a formal sitting meditation, we let go of the expectation that there will be no thoughts. Our mind secrets thoughts. To have the expectation that it just quiets down is a bit far reached. When we start with the breath, we can be with a breath for a while, feel the body, and after a while there the thoughts start appearing. In our daily lives people often without realizing just get lost in thoughts or follow a stream of thoughts that Is actually not serving them.

    In the mindfulness of thoughts practice we practice becoming aware that we are thinking, naming our thoughts, not pushing them away, maybe with some thoughts staying and feeling into the underlying feeling tone, without getting lost in the depth of that thought. What we do, is befriending our thought.  When we allow it to sit right there, as it is, without going further into planning, or making scenarios, or getting lost in memory, we notice the stillness and spaciousness within. This way we just made friend with our monkey mind and that is a gateway to more peace within.

    If you want to work deeper with thoughts – those thoughts that you would define as judgement or belief, i would encourage to journal them and use your writing as an anchor to really work with them. Byron Katie in her book for example states the following:

    “Once the mind is stopped on paper, thoughts remain stable, and inquiry can easily be applied. Avoid
    the temptation to continue without writing down your judgments. If you
    try to do The Work in your head, without putting your thoughts on paper,
    the mind will outsmart you.    ” (from “Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life” by Byron Katie, Stephen Mitchell)

     

    What would bring more peace to me right now?

    • What would bring more peace to me right now?

    Living in the moment, Jason Mraz

    I was in meditation the other day on the theme of peace and I inquired what would bring more peace to me right now…

    Because of focusing on forgiveness this month with mindfulness meditation teacher trainer, one part of getting and insight into peace was through the process of forgiveness.

     

    Forgiving myself for how I have hurt myself and bring hurt to others,

    Forgiving others how they hurt me.

     

    Accepting that it is part of human that we knowingly or unknowingly hurt eachother or have done so in the past.

     

    Being patient with myself because forgiveness takes time and needs deep healing.

     

    Finding peace in the moment, true peace, without spiritual bypass, requires sitting with all that is. Tending to our emotions and feelings, thoughts (I would use RAIN for that practice)

     

    We can find that feeling of peace whenever we take a moment and intentionally get in touch with all in us.

     

    We cannot attain a feeling of peace in moments of depletion. Lama Rod Owens says in relation to forgiveness: we need to be grounded, have a feeling of being supported, a feeling of being connected to a community, then we have healed enough to start forgiving to others. Adding to this we also need to understand the common humanity in all of us.  Then there we can have reach a place of more peace within us.

    My choice of song for this month.. connected to mindfulness of thoughts and topic of forgiveness is Living in the moment by Jason Mraz. 

    “I’m letting myself off the hook for things I’ve doneI let my past go pastAnd now I’m having more funI’m letting go of the thoughtsThat do not make me strongAnd I believe this way can be the same for everyone”

    I am connected

    • I am connected

    "My roots reach deeply, I am connected to the core of me"

    On the morning of my morning walk in the forest today

    My mantra today was

    “My roots reach deeply

    I am connected to the core of me”

    This is part of the lyrics of the “I am connected” by Beautiful Chorus

    For me in singing those lines

    feeling the connection between the nature and myself

    I enter the feeling that enables all other feelings to be

    And still be still like a mountain a tree with all that.

    Feeling of Belonging

    • Feeling of Belonging

    Feeling of belonging and connection

    Feeling of longing familiar to many people. I am no exception. Often this longing also includes a further illusion, fantasy that is a coping strategy to escape even more out of the present and body to the mind. Instead of getting more in touch with the uncomfortable, you go away in something that creates a further longing, desire. Have you ever thought how close are words Longing and Be(longing)? The journey to add Be to Longing is what Michael Singer in his podcast from Fighting to Harmony describes when we stop fighting with “No, I don’t want this, I want that. “ In Enneagram1 word and embodiment practices this means learning more about Willfulness, Will and Willingness. How do we do that? By practicing mindfulness, sitting, establishing true intimacy with self.

     

    A true feeling of Belonging is possible only when we are connected with our bodies. That is the core message of Sebene Selassie in her book You Belong (2020)  Chapter 3 is a great read on how to Ground yourself in your body.

    In the 9 steps to inner peace coaching program we usually start with establish ing a good connection with body. We use the body guidebook that I have gathered from my studies with Hippocrates institute, Mindfulness meditation teacher course, Breath coaching course. The guidebook includes essential topics for  a solid, grounded body. Session 1 of the guidebook is all about body connection.

    I want to share here couple of lines that Sebene writes on belonging (Selassie, 2020, p. 74)

    1. Belonging is: we belong simply because we are alive
    2. Belonging is in the present moment- if you choose to open to it. *My comment: this is such an important point. It reminds us that the feeling can dissipate if we don’t cultivate presence and high frequency in our body. It explains to be why sometimes I totally feel connected to people I meet and some other time I feel like looking for reasons for separation from other people. At the end this is an outer representation of my own quality of being. And as life goes, it is inevitable that we go through challenges and if in those times we do not know how to respond in a skillful way, with compassion we can notice that we are closing off, we don’t want some feelings to be part of us and it’s even hard to recognize them, let alone welcome them and say You belong. You too, are my beloved.
    3. Belonging is revealed through awareness: when we cultivate the capacity to know what is happening in any moment, the we can connect to belonging
    4. Belonging is embodied: We can only experience belonging in these bodies.