Hello Beautiful SoulBodies –
Beauty is necessary for the Soul to be able to navigate life and its burdens. The Soul needs pleasure for its ongoing capacity to hold grief and challenge. Gratitude gives us the capacity to be with grief. Beauty and Burden are sisters and they are deeply entwined and need each other. Gratitude can give us the ground and capacity to be with loss and pain and the challenges and pain can give us a perspective of preciousness and purpose found through beauty.
“The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.”
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Recently I reordered my bookshelves so that they are organized by color rather than by subject. Thank you to the folks who inspired this by having their shelves bring a smile to my face and heart on Zoom and during gatherings. This simple act continues to bring me immense joy and pleasure that feels like a soft hum in my belly and expansive opening in my chest and sweet smile on my face each time I glance at them. I am not sure why I never thought of this before but it seems incredibly important to take the varying pages of different and seemingly opposite topics and bring them into relationship with one another…a cross pollination if you will. This reflects the call of dismantling the attitude of separation and specialization and a need to come into a relationship of wholeness and inter-being in all aspects of life.
I love books and the few that I have choosen to keep over the years of my reading life carry important information for me. When I read these tomes I not only bring to them the complexity of my multifaceted being but also the other words that have touched and taught me. So it feels so right to have the trauma healing nestled up against the poetry, the anti-racist teachings leaning into the embodiment practices, the yoga philosophy sharing contact with feminist mythology and so on. And then there is the beauty of the colors dancing together on the shelf and the call to really search and see the books and rediscover them when looking for a reference. Where might you invite more relational contact with disparate aspects of your life?
May we take the time to look for glimmers of beauty and pleasure throughout our day
May we look for opportunities to welcome cross-pollination of wisdoms and stories and words
May we find ways to evoke deeper conversations across assumed barriers to discover connection
May we bring wild blessings and fierce love to all we encounter
Practice Prompts:
- Take some time to cultivate a space of connection and beauty somewhere in your world…perhaps a re-ordering of your book shelf (wink), clean and tend your altar space or place some rocks in a circle around your favorite tree. Take time to notice the dance of the various aspects that come together in this creation.
- Explore the tendencies in yourself of compartmentalizing ideas, practices, people, and see what might happen if you invited things to meet and relate with one another. This could be internally as well as externally.
- Look for small glimmers of delight in your day…the purple flower emerging from the crack, the smile between a parent and a child, the feel of warmth of the warm cup of tea. Another way to feel these glimmers is to offer simple delights and glimmers to another…a kind word, a reflection back of something you witness, a willingness to take time with another.
- I offer one to one sessions, in-person in Bend, Oregon, and virtually all over the world. These sessions are centered on supporting you find nervous system capacity and resiliency through various practices including but not limited to Somatic Experiencing, embodied movement and sensory perceptions. Please email me or schedule a free 20 minute Exploratory Session.
Live Streaming Practice Opportunities:
- Yoga for Resilience, Mondays, 9:30-11am PT, livestream through Body of Insight
- All Levels Yoga, Sundays… Apr 21, May 12, Jun 23, Jul 21, 9:30-11am PT, livestream through Two Dog Yoga
- On Demand Yoga Practices…All Levels… through Two Dog Yoga
Inspirational Wisdom:
V’ahavta
Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up,
when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning
and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts,
embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your shoulders,
teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies,
recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire:
Another world is possible.
Thus spoke the prophet Roque Dalton:
All together they have more death than we,
but all together, we have more life than they.
There is more bloody death in their hands
than we could ever wield, unless
we lay down our souls to become them,
and then we will lose everything. So instead,
imagine winning. This is your sacred task.
This is your power. Imagine
every detail of winning, the exact smell of the summer streets
in which no one has been shot, the muscles you have never
unclenched from worry, gone soft as newborn skin,
the sparkling taste of food when we know
that no one on earth is hungry, that the beggars are fed,
that the old man under the bridge and the woman
wrapping herself in thin sheets in the back seat of a car,
and the children who suck on stones,
nest under a flock of roofs that keep multiplying their shelter.
Lean with all your being towards that day
when the poor of the world shake down a rain of good fortune
out of the heavy clouds, and justice rolls down like waters.
Defend the world in which we win as if it were your child.
It is your child.
Defend it as if it were your lover.
It is your lover.
When you inhale and when you exhale
breathe the possibility of another world
into the 37.2 trillion cells of your body
until it shines with hope.
Then imagine more.
Imagine rape is unimaginable. Imagine war is a scarcely credible rumor
That the crimes of our age, the grotesque inhumanities of greed,
the sheer and astounding shamelessness of it, the vast fortunes
made by stealing lives, the horrible normalcy it came to have,
is unimaginable to our heirs, the generations of the free.
Don’t waver. Don’t let despair sink its sharp teeth
Into the throat with which you sing. Escalate your dreams.
Make them burn so fiercely that you can follow them down
any dark alleyway of history and not lose your way.
Make them burn clear as a starry drinking gourd
Over the grim fog of exhaustion, and keep walking.
Hold hands. Share water. Keep imagining.
So that we, and the children of our children’s children
may live.