Embracing my Body - a meandering

My Heart calls to me to stop, to just sit
- sitting meditation - breathing -
resting in the inner Stillness of Being...

My Heart wants to commune with
the Infiniteness of Silence.

It is the Light that brings awareness
to all hidden places...

It is the Spaciousness from which all knowing
and all needed action arises
with clarity...

Heart says:
'just sit'
in the depths of Silence

breathing
with the Infinite Silence -
the inner movement of "The Mystery" -
experiencing the Embrace,
and intelligence of what lives us...

~

But, at 75, I have a body that requires a lot of attention
now, which I must attend to...  Sometimes I get
caught in the ailments of the body - its unexpected fragility;
 the body needs to be embraced,
held in the Heart - like a child...

So I started doing what I lovingly call "Body Holding."
I start with the Heart, laying both hands 
over the Heart - embracing the Heart,
until its tingly static feels calm and at peace.
Then I hold the Solar Plexus;
sometimes with both hands,
sometimes with one hand on the Heart -
until its intense waves of pressure feels smooth and calm.
Then the belly just below the navel, and hold
my hands there.  If my mind has been overactive,
as it usually is, I hold one hand on either side 
of the top of my head and feel the electrical
buzziness of thinking, until it subsides.

All the while being aware
of the miracle of my Humanness and Infiniteness -
as One Rhythm - embracing the body...

~

The Infinite manifests in the finite
The Truth of Existence...

The  Pure Vibration of Existence
in form - in a human body...
We are a whole package
an embodied humanity -
enlivened by the Source of Life.

The body is not separate.
Spirit is in matter...

The Light of our Essence is in
the body...

Our Humanity is Embraced...

Mystic Meandering
2025

Art: Mystic Meandering
 Held

 

Everyone Is Wounded - Rachel Naomi Remen

All people are wounded, but people who come here can't cover
it up the way the rest do.  Everybody has pain, everybody is
wounded.  And because [Commonweal] participants can't cover up
 their woundedness now that they have cancer, they can trust each
other. I can trust another person only if I can sense that they, too
have woundedness, have pain, have fear.

[When you have cancer, or other chronic or serious illness]
you feel separated from the whole  human race.  You feel
 as though you're looking at the world through plate glass. 
You can see other people, but you feel as if you can't touch them
 or be with them, because you are different.  They say that the
sense of isolation, of being separated from people who are
well, is as painful as chemotherapy, as cancer itself...

Years ago, when I was Associate Director of the pediatric
clinics at the Stanford Medical School, one of my
colleagues, Marshall Klaus, did a study which at the time
was extremely innovative.  He was chief of the intensive
care nursery, where all the babies were these tiny little
people you could hold in your hand.  Each incubator was
surrounded by shifts of people and millions of dollars worth
of equipment.  Everything was high-tech. Of course, we
didn't touch these infants because we'd get germs on them.
But Klaus decided to do an experiment in which half the
babies in the nursery would be treated as usual, and the 
other half would be touched for fifteen minutes every few
hours.  You'd take your pinky finger and rub it up and down
the little baby's back.  And we discovered that the babies
that were touched survived better.  No one knows why.
Maybe there's something about touching that strengthens
the will to live.  Maybe isolation weakens us.

Rachel Naomi Remen
Cofounder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program,
as interviewed by Bill Moyers in
Healing and the Mind

with thanks to Rod MacIver 
at Heron Dance
Rod is a survivor of 4th stage Lymphoma.

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

~

"People don't care how much you know,
until they know how much you care."

whatever happened to compassion...

 

The path of reality - Nathalie Delay

The path of reality is a non-path, because it is above all
an exploration of life int its wholeness... without falling
back on our models and our repetitive, comfortable
pat-terns.  It's a non-path.....because we recognize in
real time how we negotiate with reality, how we 
cling to a belief or to our need for control, and how this
outlook keeps us from being in tune with the moment 
and creates our suffering...

The path of reality does not require us to conform to any
model, because it is not attached to what we do, think or
feel.  It invites us to see how we behave with our opinions,
our emotions, and with living beings.

The path of reality is more than anything a path of self-
knowledge, not in the psychological sense but in the
most essential and profound sense there is.  It helps
us rediscover our absolute aspect while incorporating
the most human part of us. It brings us back to the
roots of our being, making a complete humanity
possible...

Nathalie Delay

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering