Episodi
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Touching Joy
There are many contemplative traditions that emphasize the importance of balance. First Nations traditions - in reference to the Medicine Wheel - will speak of balance, the balance, for example, of the emotional, physical, spiritual, and intellectual aspects of ourselves. Many First Nations traditions will hold that, by bringing these aspects into balance, we become a balanced, whole, harmonious person.
Chinese traditions, historically, have also had strong influence in our understanding of balance. The symbol of the yin yang is, at least in part, about the balance of opposing principles. The inner and the outer, the black and the white, where there is white inside the black and black inside the white. By coming together in a balanced way, often our parts are understood to become a whole.
The ancient Indian tradition, from which Hindu and Buddhist traditions arise - the origin of Indian understandings of enlightenment – sees harmony and wholeness in a slightly different way.
We are part of a whole. We will be whole to the degree that we connect to that wholeness of which we are apart. The means to connect to that wholeness is not so much a question of balance as it is a question of alignment. Our inside world and the outside world is composed of many composite elements. Our well-being depends, they would say, on those composite elements coming into alignment.
In this view, there is an organic alignment of things. Humans are connected to a cosmic whole: the inner world of the body and the individual person can only mirror this much larger flow.
It is similar to the Chinese understanding of the Ta0. There is a way of things, an ordered and sequenced flow of things.
For my students, I illustrate this idea by telling a simple creation story which outlines this view. Once upon a time, there was a golden egg. It floated on an ocean that existed in the time before time. This ocean has always existed: it will always exist. There is nowhere for it to go. The golden egg floated…and it moved. It opened…and the top became the sky, the bottom became the earth, and the space in between became the atmospheric realm in which we all live.
The ocean is life itself. Although it would be perceived and articulated differently as Buddhist and Hindu traditions would develop each in their own way, both traditions would begin - in the time period between about 1500 and 500 B.C.E. - with a view that says: there is life itself which pervades everything. It is just like water: the water in our bodies, the water in my teacup, the water in the rivers, and the streams, in the oceans of the earth, in the ocean that is the sky (for if it were not an ocean, it would not be blue! If it were not an ocean where it could rain come from!)
There is this quality of the mirror, a reflection. Life is just life. Water is just water. It will take different forms, and different shapes, in different places or different times, perhaps a bit in the way that water is liquid, or solid, or steam. Yet life is just life. It is present with us. We don't earn it. There is no question of deserving. It just is, in the way that oxygen in our atmosphere is. We are enough.
Life is just life. Will we vibrate with it - celebrate with it - be fed by it as if connecting to an electrical current, or will we somehow come to feel cut off, or atrophied and desiccate . We are parts of a whole. We will feel whole to the degree that we connect to that wholeness of which we are apart.
At its most basic, the old Indian worldview is a tripartite system: heaven, and Earth, and the space in between, where the opposing poles of anything serves simply to define – to help us to see - that space in between in which we all live.
Watch a sunrise or a sunset, and notice. Because of the opposing poles of heaven and earth, we are able to see this space which is everywhere, inside and outside the world of form. The hand, or the body, or the stars under an electron microscope will show itself to be 99.999% space, the space inside of us and outside of us in which we live. It is as omnipresent as water. This space is life itself. We are able to see it when it is defined by this structure of colour and shape and form, because of the limits of earth and sky.
We can see the room that is created as a result of the structure of the walls. The one is dependent on the other.
In some counts of the system, heaven, Earth and the space in between are each understood to have their own top and bottom and space in between. So the vision of the world by that count has seven elements. The bottom, the middle, the top of the earth, which is the bottom for the middle and the top of the atmosphere, that is the bottom for the middle and the top of the sky. It is like a three-story apartment building: it has seven parts.
It wasn't just seven elements, though. It was eight, because the wholeness which was the entirety of this composite group of seven was also considered to be an element. So eight would become, an ancient India, the number of wholeness representing a cosmic infinity. 108, 1008, 100,0008: eight would come to symbolically represent the entirety of the cosmic whole of which we are apart.
The part and the whole would be a fascination for much of ancient Indian ritual and philosophy. We have wholeness because of a seemingly infinite series of elements that somehow all seem to line up and come into place: the ordered succession of the seasons, the ordered movement of the planets and the stars, the ordered unfolding of the generations one after the next.
Like the individual human body, it would come to be understood as a system of systems of pieces joined: the skeletal system, muscular system, circulatory system, endocrine system, the mechanism of sensory perception, of cell division, the layers of the skin. It is a system of systems of pieces joined.
For me, among the most easy to visualize is the spinal column: a system of systems of pieces joined. There is fluidity of movement because of the precise alignment of these composite parts. One small piece slightly out of place and the movement becomes obstructed, the body loses its flow.
Life is like that.
In this vision of the ancient Indian world - with its pictorial description of enlightenment - we relate to our lives like the bones of a spinal column. It is a system of systems of pieces joined. When these pieces relax into place, there is a flow of movement that happens without obstruction.
This alignment - as a real for the individual, as for the social, the natural and cosmic whole - was named with an ancient Sanskrit word “rta”. It is a vocalic “r”, rolled a bit like the Scottish or Gaelic “r”.
How this vision, or idea, becomes rendered into European languages varies with the cultural lenses that have sought to understand it each in their own way. German Indologists have tended to render it as “truth”. Trained in Paris, it is perhaps my cultural bias to appreciate the French understanding of one of the tradition’s early female Indologists, Lillian Silburn, who described it as “agencement exact”, the harmonious alignment of things, like the movement of the spheres, the movement of the stars and the movement of the spine.
“Agencement exact”, an alignment that is “juste”, or “true”, in the way that an arrow flies “true”, without obstruction: when our pieces come into place, we experience wholeness, we feel the flow of things.
“The flow of things” is how the ancient poets saw it in 1500 BCE, like a golden river in the sky. It was the union and transcendence of water and fire, the union and transcendence of masculine and feminine principles, the experience of the enlightened mind.
This golden flow of things pervades life itself; it is life itself. We, as individuals, come and go: the sun, and the sky, and the ocean remain. It is in us. It is of us. We do not possess it. We live our life; we do not own it.
The central story in the oldest Sanskrit text of the Indian sub-continent describes how to remove obstacles to this flow. The great hero, whose name is Indra, wields the thunderbolt and kills the dragon whose name means literally “obstacle”. We become the hero ,in the story of our lives, to the degree that we wield our thunderbolts and overcome our obstacles. It is the prototype - the origin story - for both Hindu and Buddhist understandings of enlightenment.
Obstacles to what?
The hero wields the thunderbolt and destroys - or overcomes - obstacles to the flow of things. The sequential unfolding of time, the in-breath and the out-breath, the expanding and contracting of the heartbeat: our lives are a system of systems of pieces joined. When the parts of our lives come into alignment, we taste the flow that is joy.
This self-existing flow, the life principle, is always there. It cannot go anywhere. We may be born and die: life itself remains.
In the same way, our health and vigor, our vitality and joy, our inspiration: it cannot go anywhere. It is like the sun in the sky. We may see it or not: this is irrelevant. It is the Earth that turns: the Sun remains. The sun doesn't go anywhere. There is nowhere for it to go.
Our joy is like that. It is self-existing, inherently enough. We may connect with it or not, as we work with the obstacles that show themselves in the course of our days.
If you are feeling cut off from your joy, consider the possibility: is there something here - in my life, in the unfolding of my world - which has somehow come out of alignment? Is there an obstruction that somehow needs to be overcome in order that I can reconnect with my delight? Do I need to pick up my thunderbolt to cut through an obstacle? Or is there some other adjustment – a re-alignment of my wheels - that needs to take place?
The joy is self-existing. We either cut ourselves off from it or not.
When our parts come into alignment, we connect with the flow and touch joy.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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Roll in the Sand
As some of you know, this week was moving week on the university campus where I teach. Extensive renovations in one of our main office buildings meant that we moved out of that office building into temporary housing for about one year's time. They stripped that office building down to its bricks to do a major renovation. This week we, and our countless boxes, moved into the completed new building.
While I was unpacking one of those boxes, I came across an envelope of photographs that had gotten lost at the back of a filing cabinet about 10 years ago. It contained one of the best photographs that I have of Sarah The Wonder Dog, my magnificent golden retriever who died just over three years ago.
In the photo, Sarah – as a two year old – is sitting on the beach, at sunset, chewing on her stick. Where else would she be? And what else would she be doing there? Of course she is on the beach chewing her stick.
The beach in that photograph is about a 15 minute drive away from the beach where she had her last big play before she died at the age of 13. It was a miraculous Christmas day here on the East Coast of Canada where - very oddly - the snow had melted, and the sun was warm, and the weather tasted of spring. As a Christmas present to both of us, Sarah and I went to her favourite beach. It was a very flat beach, that we could access from very close to the car: at the age of 13, she could no longer climb over rocks or walk up steep hills. This was a very flat beach, with very shallow water, and it was possible to walk on a flat surface for quite a long distance.
We walked for about a half hour. It felt like a long time, because at home – with her sore hips – we would walk about two blocks before it was time to head back.
On one side of the beach was the ocean with its waves and the pull of the tide. She knew that she wasn't strong enough to be in the pull of that tide, but she realized that on the other side - maybe some hundred metres away - there was an inland lake without tide, and she had even managed to get a little bit wet in that water. We were both so delighted by the treat of this!
We had finished our walk on the beach, and we were heading back to the car, when suddenly there arrived a Christmas miracle: three dogs and their humans, all six of them visiting from away, came out of a car.
There was a big, black and fluffy, very friendly and lovely, Newfoundland dog. There was a smaller dog who had been hit by a car and recovered with some difficulty. So this dog also knew what it was to have to struggle a bit in order to play on the beach. Then there was a blond, gentleman dog, a golden retriever just like her, an elegant noble gentleman dog slightly larger than herself who was wise enough to understand her perfectly. In all of her years, I had never seen her look at another dog with such love.
It was as if this Christmas day on the beach – the last big play of her life - had been predestined for many lifetimes before and dreamed of in many dog dreams. The humans who belong to these dogs knew what it was to work with a pack and how to play in a way that included everyone. They had helped the smaller dog heal from the car accident. So they knew how to include in the play someone who moved more slowly than the others.
Sarah was so happy when she encountered these dogs that she immediately lay down on her back and began to make snow angels in the sand, wiggling back and forth with such joy - paws flailing in the air - and all of us, the three dogs, the three humans and me, stood around in a circle watching her as she made a full 360 Dog Angel in the sand. She was ecstatic.
Then it came time to play with the stick on the beach. Now the younger dogs, they could run far and fast to fetch that stick, and if the stick went into the water they could swim against the current in the ocean in order to bring back that stick. Sarah understood this, and you could see that she was both engaging the play but also holding back, tentative and feeling a little bit sad that she couldn't quite run like the others. She was happy to be with them, but also knowing that she wasn't quite a part of it, until - in a moment of genius - one of the other humans did a fake throw of the stick, pretending to throw the stick far into the water. All of the other dogs ran madly after the fake throw of the stick, but the humans showed Sarah that they still had the stick, and they threw the stick right in her direction, about 18 inches away.
She was able to pick up that stick. She was the one who got the stick. The others came running madly back, and she had the stick, and the miracle of this moved through her entire body. It is perhaps the happiest moment that I witnessed in her life that - even at this very end of her days -she got the stick. The other humans, and the other dogs, somehow understood the miracle of this and celebrated with her.
The gentleman golden retriever - so much like Sarah that they were hard to tell apart except that he was larger - understood Sarah's situation. When the play moved into the ocean, into the pull of the tide, he would swim slightly behind her and very close to her: it was very obvious that he was taking care of her. He knew she would not be safe swimming in the ocean by herself. So he stuck by her and - because he was there - she could swim out into the waves of the ocean, and then swim back again because he would be there to help her if something went wrong. Again and again, the two of them went out into the ocean and back again. In her 13 years, I may have never seen her so consciously feeling cared for and loved by another dog.
In another great moment of that miracle Christmas Day play, the gentleman golden retriever took this stick and gave it to her, in order that they could play pull the stick, in the way that dogs play the pulling game. He pulled on the stick as gently as one would feed an infant with a spoon - so unbelievably gently - in order that Sarah was able to play the pull game, but she would not be hurt by it. It was, I think, the most glorious day on the beach of her life.
The day of her very last big play Sarah the Wonder Dog taught me about sticks.
Action and reaction. Cause and effect. In our reflections on karma, we have observed that humans, by nature, must act. All creatures that move, by our nature, act, and when we act we must also receive the result of that action. So it is that we, too, will pick up both ends of a stick.
The trick is, what we do with those sticks once we've got them? In my experience, it is an oddly short list of options.
Sometimes we hit ourselves with our sticks or hit other people with our sticks. In that action and reaction, sometimes we cause harm to ourselves or to others.
Some sticks are fun, and we pick them up, and we play fetch in the companionship of our pack. We pick up our sticks, and we toss them in delight. We run after them, and fetch, for the pleasure of picking them up again.
Sometimes we chew on our sticks. Is there a stick that you're chewing on at the moment? Something that's eating you, that you can't quite digest? So you keep chewing on it… enough to get splinters in your jaws?
If you play fetch with a dog on the beach, you may observe that – sometimes - among the hardest things is to know how to drop the stick.
How do we let go?
Sometimes we couldn't hold on anymore even if we wanted to. Sometimes we simply decide to drop it. Sometimes we forgive, and our end of the stick naturally falls away. Because we’re ready to forgive? Because it hurts us less to forgive than it does to keep holding on?
Action and reaction. Cause and effect. We pick up both ends of the stick. Then what? Do we hit ourselves with it? Do we hurt someone else with it? Do we sit and chew on it? Do we delight in the tossing of it and the playing of fetch? Do we trip over it? Who is to say?
But I learned from Sarah the Wonder Dog that we do need to drop the stick before we can roll in the sand.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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Episodi mancanti?
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A Blue Moon
This Saturday May 18, at 6:11pm Atlantic Standard Time, is the Blue Moon. It’s the time to do things that you would only do once in a blue moon!
The May 2019 full moon is a seasonal Blue Moon. Usually there are three full moons between each astrological season. That is the time between each Solstice and equinox. In some years, there are four full moons in a season. When this happens, the third full moon is called a Blue Moon.
This year, for we in the northern hemisphere, the astrological season began with the spring equinox on March 20th. The first full moon was less than four hours later on March 21st. The second full moon was April 19. The third - the Blue Moon - is May 18. The fourth, and last full moon before the Summer Solstice, will be June 17. A blue moon occurs only roughly every two or three years. So make the most of it!
The full moon day in the month of May is celebrated in Buddhist tradition as Vesak Day. It is sacred to Buddhists because the full moon day in the month of May is the day of the historic Buddha’s birth, the day of his enlightenment, and also the day of his parinirvana, the day of his passing at the age of 80.
Vesak Day is celebrated by Buddhists around the world. It is believed to be a day when the karmic result of anything we do is amplified – is increased – 100,000 times. What we do on Saturday, may we do it wisely!
So in honor of the blue moon, and the full moon day in the month of May, today we reflect on karma.
Karma is the relationship between cause and effect. We eat the fruit of the seeds that we plant. Traditionally, it is said to be like the full moon reflecting into one hundred bowls of water. The moon has no desire to reflect into them all, but, because there happen to be one hundred bowls of water, there are one hundred moons at the same time. They are part of one moon, the full moon in the sky.
Action is just action. Each action will have one hundred – an endless number – of effects. We don’t necessarily desire those effects, but because there is action, there will be the results of that action. They are all part of the one action.
The Sanskrit word “Karma” is derived from the verbal root “KR-” which means “to do”. So, the noun means “action”. There is no such thing as “good karma” or “bad karma”. Action is just action, like the full moon in the sky.
Gravity is just gravity. It is impersonal: it will be experienced in the same way by any being on the planet. Actions have reactions. It is not personal. The principle applies to everyone on the planet. It is part of the natural world, like us and like the moon.
Some actions will yield desirable results; we might think those are “good actions”, from “good karma”. Some actions yield undesirable results; we might think those are “bad actions”, from “bad karma”.
Yet the principle of cause and effect doesn’t care if you like it or not, any more than gravity cares if a bird falls from the sky. If you plant apple seeds, you will get apple trees. You may wish they were oranges. It doesn’t matter: the apple tree yields apples.
Cause and effect are two ends of a same stick. We pick up both ends of the stick.
Traditionally, it is said that there are four different types of action. The first of these is “pacifying”. Action which is pacifying is able to calm a situation or make an environment peaceful. It softens our rough edges and helps things go smoothly, in the inside world or in the outside world.
The second and third types of action are “enriching” and “magnetizing”. These are inter-related. “Enriching” action is able to see the inherent richness and potential of a situation and draw that out. What we need, we already have: “enriching” action helps us to see that. “Magnetizing” action comes from our strength of presence, our “beingness”. It is the ability to draw what we need – opportunities, people, situation – to us as naturally as metal is drawn to a magnet.
The fourth type of action is “destroying”. Pacifying, enriching and magnetizing have a quality of compassion: can we be present with what is in an elegant way and work with this to be of benefit to beings. The action of “destroying” is understood in this context. Can we let go of what was in order to create space for new growth and new life to come? Can we let go of what needs to be released? Can we destroy what needs to be destroyed, in the same way that we might prune a tree in the spring, removing the old dead branches that are no longer necessary in order to support the growth of new life to come.
It is traditionally believed that one who is brave, and kind, and wise will have the ability to work with pacifying, enriching, magnetizing and destroying like so many tools in a tool box. Can we draw on these abilities to offer whatever a situation may require?
In this ancient, traditional world view, the full moon reflects on one hundred bowls of water. This is the relationship between cause and effect: there may appear to be a difference, but there is not. It’s two ends of a same stick.
In the same way, the full moon reflects on one hundred bowls of water. You may think there is separateness between you and the situation or person who receives your action, but there is no more difference than the full moon reflected on the water.
The actor who acts is playing in a racquetball court. It is not a tennis court. It may appear that this ball that we have set in motion is going away from us and is directed at a person or a situation outside of us. This is an illusion. It’s a racquetball court. What we set in motion will come back to us.
If you spit on someone, you yourself will get wet. If someone has spit on you, notice that – no matter how you may feel in that moment – it is they who got wet. If you work to sink a ship (your home, your relationship, your workplace), you yourself will drown.
Finally, let me offer something that I learned from my garden about the planting of seeds. Weeds come first.
Where I am in Atlantic Canada, we have quite a short growing season. Our last frost of the year will take place in late May or early June. For the moment, I have about 450 tiny seedlings growing indoors under grow lights. These are the flowers and herbs I will plant outdoors later in the season.
Outdoors, the weeds grow first.
The wonderful professional gardener that I co create this land with did a first weeding of the property some weeks ago when she did our spring fertilizing. Today, I began my first outdoor weeding of the season.
The weeds grow first, long before herbs, and vegetables, and flowers. They flourish. They grow especially well in manure.
Is there someone in your life who is a weed in your garden? You know what to do with weeds. I have a wheelbarrow full of tools to help me handle weeds. So do you.
Are you yourself a weed in someone's garden? Are you an obstacle, or obstruction to the happiness and success of a person or a situation? You also know what to do with weeds. If you spit on other people, you yourself will get wet.
The 16th Karmapa is credited with saying, “When you do things, then obstacles will come, and you can go through them. Obstacles are a sign of success.”
If you do something brave and wonderful, something creative and rich in potential, something bold that expands horizons, there will be pushback. This is a sign of success. People may try to stop you. There will be obstacles. Then you can overcome them. This is how you build your strength.
Weeds come first. Herbs, vegetables and flowers follow.
Weeds are a sign of rich soil.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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Dance into May
In my neck of the woods, in eastern Canada, the midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice will be May 5th, at 2 minutes to 4 o'clock in the afternoon. This is the moment when we astrologically step from the end of spring to the beginning of summer. Since ancient times – since the Iron Age - it has been celebrated as the final victory of life over death, light over darkness, and the return of life to the earth as the heat of the sun makes its way back into our world.
In the wheel of the year, this is the opposite pole to Samhain. Like Samhain, it is believed to be a time in the year when the veil between the world of the spirit and the physical realm is at its most thin, and humans can more easily connect with the spirit of the land. The celebration of coming of summer, honors fertility, abundance, sexuality, sensuality, creativity of all sorts, and the growth of everything beautiful on earth.
Bealtaine is named after the Celtic god of light known as Bel or Belinus. It celebrates the return of the heat of the sun – and the heat of our passions – by the stoking of large bonfires, usually lit by striking two pieces of wood together, and rubbing and grinding till the sparks fly. A symbolic union of the earth and the sky, it represented the inner heat of light, insight, intelligence, and the fecundity and creative passion of life. The bonfire was believed to foster and protect the fertility of the growing season to come.
In ancient times, Druids would kindle great “Bel-fires”, or bonfires, made from nine different kinds of wood. The fires would blaze on top of Beacon Hills. Each village would have its Beltane fire, believed to protect and bring healing and fertility.
Cattle would be released from the barns after a long winter. They would then be driven between the two fires to cleanse them of disease ,and ensure their fertility, and the richness of milk yield, in the coming months. Young couples would leap over the twin Beltane fires, running between them or dancing around them clockwise. Young unmarried people would leap the bonfire wishing for a husband or a wife. Young women would leap the bel-fire to ensure their fertility, and couples leap through the twin fires together to strengthen their bond.
Beltaine celebrates the fecundity of the earth, and the fertility of we humans who are also part of that natural world. Beltaine became the traditional time for hand-fasting in Celtic culture. The hands of the couple would be tied together in the symbolic gesture of tying the knot. It marked the engagement of the couple. A trial marriage would then last for a year and a day at which point the couple could decide to officially marry or to go their separate ways.
Beltaine was a time for young couples to make their way to the woods for nighttime love-making. The village would welcome the “children of May” nine months later. It's a time when a broomstick could be laid on the ground, and a couple jump over that threshold together, as an early form of marriage.
In Scotland, sometimes juniper branches were added to the fire to increase the smoke’s purification quality. The bright fire - or White, shining fire at Beltane - would protect a couple's love, just as it would protect cattle from disease. To pass between the fires, or to pass through the smoke, cleansed the spirit - burning up and destroying any harmful influences - bringing health, vigour and vitality. On Beltaine eve, all the hearth fires and candles would be doused, and at the end of the festival they would all be re-lit from the Beltaine bonfire, renewing the fire of life.
In old Roman culture, the first of May was celebrated as Floralia, the festival of Flora, goddess of flowers. Flowers are part of the Beltaine celebrations in many parts of the world. Hawthorn blossoms would be used to decorate homes and barns and turned into a sweet wine. May baskets were filled with the first flowers of summer and left on doorsteps of friends or family, loved ones or the elderly. Branches of the hawthorn tree, or other types of trees, would be decorated with bright flowers, ribbons and painted shells. Sometimes there would be dancing, and singing, and celebrating in circles around the May tree.
In many parts of the world, a very large pole or trunk of a tree would be erected high in the sky as a symbol of fertility. Ribbons would be interwoven around the May pole as people danced in circles around the tree to celebration fecundity and the flowering of life.
Yellow flowers, such as Primrose or Marigold, were set in doorways and windows. Sometimes loose flowers strewn on the ground at thresholds of doorways. Yellow flowers, representing the sun, were fastened to cows to encourage protection and abundance of milk.
At Beltaine, people would journey to visit sacred wells, rivers or lakes to ask for blessing and protection. People would leave offerings at the well, sometimes throwing a coin into the water or making a food offering to the spirit of the land. It was said that to wash one's face with the morning dew at Beltane would maintain youthfulness and increase one's sexual allure. It is a time to celebrate the magic that is life itself.
Beltaine is the time when those seeds that we planted in the spring – in our gardens and in our lives – become fertile and potent. Whether it’s the conceiving of a child, or a business venture, a new relationship, or any kind of creative project, now is the time for things to flower and grow.
Beltane continues to be celebrated in many parts of the world as May Day, the eve of April 30th and the day of May 1st or 2nd. In Bulgaria, the holiday is associated with rituals to protect people from snakes or lizards. In the Czech Republic, bonfires are lit to celebrate the holiday of love. In Finland, it is one of the four biggest holidays of the year. There is a great carnival-style festival with sparkling wine, singing and dancing, freshly baked cakes and mead, an alcoholic beverage made from honey.
It was May 1st, 1561 when King Charles the IXth of France received a lily of the Valley as a lucky charm and decided to offer lily of the valley flowers each year to the ladies of the court. The custom continues, and on the first of May lilies of the valley are sold tax free in bunches of flowers to be offered to loved ones. In Germany, there are bonfires, and May tree covered in streamers can be taken to the house of the girl that you love: in leap years, the women bring one to the men. In Greece, flower wreaths are purchased from flower shops, or woven from wildflowers, and hung at the entrance of the family home. In Serbia, May 1st is a night to spend by a campfire, and it marks the official beginning of barbecue season.
The beginning of summer: it’s a time for singing and dancing, and feasting and drinking, bonfires, flowers and delight, a time to celebrate the sexual, and the sensual, and any creative union which brings life.
So in this season of celebrating the coming of summer may you be inspired to give pause and notice the magic of a world that has come into flower and bloom.
If you wish, build a bonfire on the beach, or a fire in the hearth, or light a large pillar candle and reflect. Notice the cleansing, protecting quality that comes of stoking our inner flames as we burn off what it is that we need to let go.
If you wish, bring yellow flowers into your world. Prepare something fun for a feast; there should be something sweet. Watch a sunrise. Dance. Spend time in nature. Make an offering of birdseed to the spirits of the land. Place a flower wreath on your door. If you feel inspired, you may wish to wash the front door, and clean the glass, as we cross the threshold into summer. Pay attention – take joy and delight – in the pleasure of your own sensuality, or sexuality, whatever that looks like for you. This is the time for a romantic weekend, or a romantic evening beside the fire. Pay really close attention while you enjoy excellent chocolate. Walk barefoot across the lawn.
Beltane, the coming of summer, is hedonistic. Celebrate the abundance of life, fertility, fire and fun. Stoke your inner flame and welcome the sun. We will feel whole and alive to the degree that we connect to that wholeness of which we are a part. So, shake off what it is that you need to let go, and dance into May.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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Being and Becoming
It's wonderful to be back having taken some time away – at semester’s end - to take a deep breath. Today we explore being and becoming.
I had a wonderful conversation last week with a remarkable student in one of my classes. It was a long conversation over tea as we made our way to semester’s end. Among the questions she asked was: “what is the relationship between being and becoming?” How do we become what we are? How do we become what we are meant to be?
She was exploring the question because a very dear friend of hers had told her: “You have not yet planted the flag in the ground and declared, ‘this is who I am’”. Do we ever plant the flag – like Neil Armstrong on the moon – and declare “this is who I am”? Is the work of becoming ever complete?
My student, like so many of her colleagues, is getting ready to graduate. She will move from one stage of her life to the next, from the known to the unknown, and into the next stage of her own journey of self-discovery.
I have watched hundreds of students cross the stage at university graduation ceremonies. They cross the stage, often at about the age of 22 or 25, and have all the rest of their lives stretching out before them. The thing is: so do I. The power of that potential is always with us. I have all the rest of my life waiting for me, in front of me as well. So do you. So does everyone else.
To be alive is to engage the journey of self-discovery.
What is the relationship between being and becoming? What we are is the result of our choices, as we take our next step or place the direction for the rudder of our boat. Through our choices we become who we are.
The great high renaissance sculptor Michelangelo: they asked him, “How did you make your statue of David?” He is reported to have said, “It's very simple; you just chip away the stone that doesn't look like David.”
How do we become ourselves? It is a work of artistry. We are the artists who carve our lives and make the choices that shape what we become. As we chip away the parts that aren't ourselves, we increasingly become who we are.
Becoming: from one perspective, it is quite simple. One who lies becomes a liar. One who steals becomes a thief. One who bullies becomes a bully. One who cheats becomes a cheater, just as surely as one who paints becomes a painter. It is a common sense observation which is part of old Indian karma theory.
The idea of karma is understood slightly differently in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions. Each would agree that the effect of our choices shapes – in very physical ways – who we become.
Have you ever walked down the street and looked at someone and thought to yourself, “Oh that person is slimy. That person gives me the creeps.”? What we do creates a residues that stays with us and is hard to wash off.
Have you felt someone walk into a room and said to yourself, “That is a good, decent and honest person. That is someone I can trust. I feel good when I'm in the presence of that person.”
What we do – how we behave - determines what we become. It is part of the basic principle of cause and effect, as inescapable as gravity. One who manipulates becomes a manipulator. It has a smell, a texture, a look, a stench: it becomes part of the presence of that person. It cannot be hidden. It cannot lie. As we behave, so we become. The weight of bad behaviour, that coats people with sticky residue, covers up the beauty of what we could become.
Genuine becoming is a question of taking the unnecessary bits away.
So how do we engage our hammer and chisel to take away the unnecessary bits? Is it by planting a flag in the ground like Neil Armstrong on the moon, declaring, “This is me!”?
If I look back on the journey of becoming, there are a series of occasions, when in some sense, I would have planted the flag. So it's not a single incident, unveiling a finished work of art.
The person, like life itself, is in a constant process of unfolding. Any organic process is characterized by change. We unfold, gradually revealing what we are, just as surely as the seasons, the flowers, and the trees reveal themselves through their unfolding.
Yet there are a series of flags that I see behind me, left like sign posts along the path. I see them at the important junctures, the small number of places where the decisions I made would set the course of my unfolding such that there was no going back.
It is not in the big, public moments, with fireworks or applause. The big moments – like the student crossing the stage at graduation – are the results of our choices. These are not the moments that are decisive, that carve away unnecessary bits.
If you look back on your life what are the decisive moments that have shaped the person you have become. Are they the visible, public events, the high rituals of our rites of passage?
I lived here. I moved there. I had this job, then that job. There was this relationship, then that relationship. What has shaped the person that you have become, like the artist chiseling away at the stone? Can you name five moments that were pivotal in shaping who you are?
If I look back at my five moments, part of what I see is that these were private moments of decision. No one on the outside – and likely not even me on the inside – would have recognized at the time how that event, or that decision, or that conversation, would shape everything that followed.
These moments of artistic self-creation also happened in the spaces in-between. They weren’t the busy days of running between task lists and deadlines, stop lights and traffic. Self-creation, like any creative process, happens in the open space in-between.
One such moment happened in Banff National Park in western Canada. I was visiting a friend who lived in Calgary. Banff is a very easy day trip away. It was a weekend when I needed to make a decision about my education path. Where would I do my master's degree? Who would I study with? What would that subject be?
I spent a day with myself in Banff. I took a gondola up to the top of a mountain and spent time with the winds. There was a cave halfway up the mountain, and I spent time sitting still in that cave. I went swimming in the hot springs - the hot, mineral spring waters that come out of the mountain – and I listened. Can I listen to the winds, and the waves, and feel what I should do next, where my foot should next touch the ground?
Much of the unfolding of my adult years is traceable to that moment of decision. That step of the foot landing on the ground directed the shape, and line, and flow of all future consequences, for me. Anything that followed was in some way directed by that decision.
If I look back on the act of carving my life, the next decision is a French language decision. It was the moment “j’ai fermé la porte de la Sorbonne”.
It is custom in France that if it is your birthday you bring the cake to share with your friends. In the same way, it is custom for a graduating doctoral student to host the celebration following the Ph.D. defense. In my case, it was a three hour debate – three hours of questioning from my teachers - and then I, as the student, hosted the reception. This is the social rite of passage: you were a student; now you become a colleague. Is it the right champagne, served at the right temperature, with the right hot and cold canapés?
It was dark by the time the reception was finished. Myself and my two Italian friends were among the last to leave the old historic Sorbonne building. This university, founded in 1253, is among the oldest universities in Western Europe. It is a very old stone structure. The historic Sorbonne building has large, medieval doors, of the kind that might see in the “Lord of the Rings”. These massive medieval doors have door handles, about a foot in diameter, that you grasp by reaching up above your head. As we left the building that night – with my two Italian friends beside me -– I got to reach up to that large brass door handle and close the door of that ancient historic building. There was a resounding thud. It marked the end of about a ten year time in my life. This is part of the journey of becoming - as we chip away the unnecessary bits and gradually reveal ourselves: what doors do we open, and what doors close?
It is in small and private moments that we trace the shape of our lives. The visible outside changes are merely the consequence of those internal moments of decision. What do we hold on to? What will we let fall away?
Is there some finished sculpture inside the marble that one day I will reveal? I shall have to live longer to find out.
In the journey of becoming, we make our choices and choose our directions. We engage the process with hammer and chisel, doing the physical work of the artist. In our moments of chipping away, we feel of loss of what was, the letting go of the familiar - and the polishing of our rough spots - as we unveil ourselves, taking away the unnecessary bits one piece at a time.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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Own Your Strength
I received a fun email this week. It said: “Loved seeing a strong woman in a key position of power yesterday. You were fantastic.” Who wouldn't want to celebrate that?
So, today we reflect: what is it to own our own strength? For the key position of power that we most genuinely occupy is the power, authority and responsibility that we hold in relation to the choices that we make in our own lives.
A position of true power is not assigned from the outside world. A position of true power is claimed by owning our strength in relation to the inside world.
There's a metaphor for this that comes from Buddhist practice. When one sits on a meditation cushion or bench, this cushion or bench is often placed on top of a larger, thin cushion. This larger cushion, about two feet wide and three feet long, softens the impact of the ankle on the ground. So the space that belongs to you in a shared, community shrine room is the size of that cushion: three feet long and two feet wide. In the meditation practice, this is the size of the world for which you are responsible. Can you take your seat? Can you own the strength of that world? Can you rule, like a sovereign, that world, within which you sit: three feet long and two feet wide?
Can we own the strength and confidence that we bring to our own bodies, and the power and strength that we embody through our own voice?
That’s how I described the exercise of final exam preparation to my students this afternoon. We will have a final exam. It means that there will be grades to support them as they move towards graduation, but the test isn't actually about writing the test. The test is one of growing in our capacity to own the power and strength of one's own voice.
Can they think in an interesting, creative, flexible and sophisticated way? Can they own the strength of one's own voice and say what they have to say? Just like in life, there is no single one right answer. There is only the answer that we claim as being right for us.
Can we own the strength of one's own voice? The real test is how well we know how to do it in our lives.
What is it to own one's own authority such that one's voice becomes heard?
Let me offer some suggestions.
First, I propose that it is an error to confuse kindness with weakness or aggression with strength. Aggression - in the sense of dominance, control, territoriality and the old colonial perception of “success” - the capacity to manipulate, to expand one's territory of control - is an expression of fear. It is rooted in fear. It seeks to compensate for an internal sense of “not enough”, grasping for more on the outside because there is some sense that there's “not enough” on the inside. Because it is an expression of fear, it merits my compassion not my complicity. We don't need to empower cowardice by confusing aggression with strength.
What then is strength? It is that which creates, supports sustains and maintains life.
Genuine strength is honed and polished like a well-tempered sword.
Owning the authority of one's own voice, owning one's own confidence, owning the capacity to vibrantly “be” is honed over time. It is polished by means of the friction we have with others.
We become increasingly strong because we have to be, for whatever reason. Then, because of whatever it was, we have become more strong. How could my strength have been developed were it not for the hard things, the undermining or the oppressive presences, that I have encountered?
The overt expression of forcefulness is sometimes required. Strength itself is more often revealed through the spaciousness of our being, not the hardness of our edges. It’s in grace and joyfulness, subtlety, playfulness, elegance and discretion. Genuine strength seldom shows itself through the pushing of buttons, any more than it allows one's buttons to be pushed. It's not a pushing and shoving situation.
The meditation posture – sometimes called the “mountain pose” because it is so strong – is characterized by a straight back. Because of the strong back, there is an open heart. It is an interdependent relationship. It is trained in meditation practice, among many other disciplines.
Can we be where we are when we're there? Can we know with confidence that we are able to meet what arises, without pushing away, or clinging, without being blown over by the winds?
Genuine strength comes from connecting with the deep, inherent strength of one's own being. So one would neither take from - nor be taken by - others. There's no need to lean on, or steal, the power of others. Strength isn’t what we accumulate on the outside.
Strength is inherent. That's why it shows itself through behaviour which is creative, life supporting, and life maintaining. It comes from connecting to life itself.
No one is stronger than another from that perspective. It's rather that one more deeply relaxes into the inherent, self-existing strength of “beingness” itself.
This inherent strength - honed and polished by the frictions of our days – can be trained, just as we would train the strength of body. For what is the difference between the body, and emotion, the voice and the mind? It's only as different as we choose to believe it to be. To strengthen one is to strengthen the other.
So let me offer you a passage called “Build your Strength”. It is an excerpt from my book Mindfulness: How to Cope with Hard Things, A Workbook”.
“When we train the body at the gym, we tear down the muscle fibres slightly so that when they grow back they will become stronger. The mind is like that. As we engage the journey, working with hard things, the mind becomes stronger. As we are able, as we grow, it seems to me that often – somehow - weight gradually gets added to the bar. The hard things are part of how we build our strength.
Will we be cut apart? Will we be broken open? Is our life torn down? We will find the strength we need for it to be re-built stronger.
[There is] construction happening on the campus where I teach…: [the building’s] renovation will strip all of its interior down to the bricks. They have begun to paint the bricks.
Why not tear down the whole thing? They would have, if they could. They couldn’t.
Neither can we….
If it is in our experience today, it is because we are able to find the strength, engage our resourcefulness, build our intelligence and awareness, and choose how we will work with it, and when we will work with it, in our own way and our own time.
We don’t tear down entirely. We renovate and re-paint the bricks, are re-born and re-built.
What distinguishes destruction from construction?
We are pushed: we push back. We are constrained: we come through. We are tied: we cut loose. It is how we are born. It is how we are re-born. Everyday.”
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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Self-Existing Joy
Where do grown-ups come from? Where do the children go?
It was my great delight this week to make a new acquaintance, the friend of a mutual friend. This person spent an evening with me and my students in class, bringing the wisdom of someone who has lived, rather than simply having circled the sun.
He has lived long enough to enjoy many adventures: a children’s doctor, a poet, an artist, an activist, a writer, a gardener….and one who continues to actively create through the course of his life. He did ground-breaking, profession-changing work bringing art therapy into hospitals at a time when most people in hospitals - those who are helped and those who work there - had long forgotten how to play.
He came and did art therapy, with me and my students, as we reach semester’s end. We played with coloured markers. We sang and we danced. He taught us about those in ages past who knew, in their practice of medicine, the healing power of music and art.
Among the many gifts he gave was the reading of one of his poems: “Children’s Doctor”:
I began by aligning bowed bones;
learned the trick from an ER nurse
who lacked the license but took license anyway,
there being no other mentor.
A vain and sloppy art it was:
their pliant ulnas [bones] lined up straight whatever I did.
So I learned another skill: cartooning stiffening casts,
my clumsy craft surmounting puckers and whimpers.
Later we’d play, as I chased them
over and under cribs for H-and-P’s: [history-taking and physical examinations]
outrageously fit-to-bust, go-for-broke,
sweet-as-nuts playful they were.
So where do they go to, these young ones?
And where do grown-ups come from?
It was wonderful to have full permission to play together with my undergraduate students for an evening, and to watch them all remember how to laugh.
We coloured, and made art together. We created space, space in-between the action of our days. It is because of the rests between the notes that our lives make music.
It was marvellous to notice, in that moment, that those undergraduate students (many of them a generation younger than me), and this wise one, who knows ways of healing and medicine, (perhaps a generation older than me) stepped into a space of timelessness, in that space in between where all of us played together.
So where do the children go? And where do grown-ups come from? Do we grow old only if we stop growing?
We tend to think of human development in terms of childhood development. There is prenatal development, infancy, the toddler, early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, early adulthood: a movement from dependency to relative autonomy. So this would be where grown-ups come from. Children move through stages of development and enter into adulthood.
It is assuming that time is a line, that somehow what came before is past, and somehow what is to come is future, as if somehow we do not take all of ourselves with us wherever we go.
It can have the illusion of finality: “Now we have become grown-ups. Now we are adults, and so we don't behave like children anymore”, as if somehow we have traded in our ability to play in exchange for our ability to work.
For this poor grown-up - who has traded the ability to play, in exchange for an ability to work - is there somewhere to go from there?
What is it that makes the elders old, when so often - it seems to me - it is possible to encounter someone who is timeless? Four or twenty-four, forty-four, sixty-four, or eighty four: when we play together it can all look oddly the same.
Let me offer some suggestions.
It is my experience that we do indeed take ourselves with us wherever we go.
Time, therefore, is not a line. It occurs simultaneously. For the toddlers and the children, the adolescents and the grown-ups exist simultaneously in the texture of the layers of our being.
If I look to those who are twenty or forty years older than me, who have somehow grown timeless instead of growing old, I have the impression that they accomplish this by stepping into the now. They are living not in the past, or in the future, but in the now, and they remember how to laugh, and how to play. They know self-existing joy.
Somehow, with elegance and grace, they have accompanied themselves - taken themselves with them wherever they went - and somehow mended the broken bones enough to remain intact in the process.
We do not leave the children that we were behind, and my sense is that we risk to grow old if we stop growing.
It is the ability to connect with joy that makes the growing possible. Not that it’s easy, or comfortable necessarily, but that in the process we have remembered how to laugh. For joy is not the result of an external circumstance: it is a state of being.
Time isn't a line. It can only be now. In the moment, we are timeless, and self-existing joy is right there waiting for us.
We all know 60 year old’s who are children - who never really managed to grow up - and some of us know adults who are 6. When do we reach a stage of a relative maturity, independence and self-reliance? When we must.
It is no small feat to bring all of ourselves with us wherever we go. It implies that we are sufficiently whole to have integrity. Can we accompany ourselves in the journey of our lives, and work with what is and what was, such that we can simply be what we are, and not be haunted by it?
Let us listen again to the story told in the poem “Children's Doctor”.
I began by aligning bowed bones;
learned the trick from an ER nurse
who lacked the license but took license anyway,
there being no other mentor.
A vain and sloppy art it was:
their pliant ulnas [bones] lined up straight whatever I did.
So I learned another skill: cartooning stiffening casts,
my clumsy craft surmounting puckers and whimpers.
Later we’d play, as I chased them
over and under cribs for H-and-P’s:[History-taking and physical examinations]
outrageously fit-to-bust, go-for-broke,
sweet-as-nuts playful they were.
So where do they go to, these young ones?
And where do grown-ups come from?
Our bones never stop healing themselves. No part of our body ever stops healing, or re-creating, itself. It may be supported by outside intervention: the body itself heals. We can line ourselves up straight, and make ourselves whole again.
Yet, what gives the most healing: the cast that holds the bones in place, or the cartoons coloured on it?
Joy is self-existing. It is there in the beginning, there in the middle, and there is the end. There is no-where for it to go. It is as natural as breath, and it is deeply healing.
It is not dependent on space, or time, or circumstance, on companionship or solitude, on wholeness or wounds. It is there for us when we laugh, and in the spirit of play.
It implies a basic sense of safety, that we have turned off our inner surveillance cameras sufficiently to relax: in the company of ourselves or others, with crayons or dance, in the woods or by the beach.
Yet, it is the ability to connect with joy – at every stage of our lives - that makes the growing possible. Joy is perhaps the most visible sign of growing.
Joy is self-existing. Connecting with it connects us to existence itself.
I went for a contemplative walk with some of my students this afternoon. We got to watch a puppy learn how to play fetch. Who enjoyed it more: the puppy, the humans giving the lesson, or those who got to watch?
If you feel you would benefit by more actively, more consciously, more intentionally connecting with joy in your life, schedule regular time to spend with children, or animals, perhaps especially baby animals. Find a place where you can volunteer, if there are not children or animals in your immediate world. This afternoon I talked to a student who taught young children how to skate this winter. Often, children and animals – especially young animals – help us to remember the taste of self-existing joy.
Joy is self-existing in the way that humor is a natural part of our being. Make art. Use your crayons. Play music and dance. We are fed by it.
Instead of growing-up, or growing old, we will just keep growing when we actively foster our natural connection with self-existing joy.
The poem “Children’s Doctor” is re-printed with permission. It is written by John Graham-Pole, M.D., - children’s cancer specialist and author - is included in a poetry anthology entitled, “Quick: A Pediatrician’s Illustrated Poetry”. You can further discover John at: www.johngrahampole.com.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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Sweetness is the Antidote to Bitterness
It was a week for an unusual amount of baking. For me, this week, there was baking for co-workers, and baking for students, and baking for classroom guests.
Amongst these was baking as part of a thank you gift for a group of four nurses who had traveled to give a talk to one of my classes on campus. They had had a full day, and a hard day, in their hospital workplace before driving the two hours to spend time with me and my students. They would then drive two hours home, after our night class.
As part of their thank you gift – one of several thank you gifts I baked this week - there was a gift bag full of a series of treats, as - with the help of Angela Liddon from Oh She Glows - I continued to experiment with the new paradigm: it doesn't have to be bad to be good.
So, there were vegan, and gluten free, refined sugar-free, “real food containing only”: dream bars, and cookie dough snacking squares, and brownies, and peanut butter truffles, and a really fun little jar of caramel sauce.
In one case this week, I made a batch for a work colleague, knowing that peanut butter/chocolate treats were among the favorite treats of his wife. So, there was the box for him, and the box for him to give away to her. It was just so lovely to observe that one of the best gifts I could give to him was something he can give and to her.
Sweetness - it can be easy to forget, and sometimes hard to see - is the antidote to bitterness, in the same way that kindness is the antidote to aggression or humility the antidote to pride.
Hard things happen. They can leave a bad taste in the mouth. It can be good to know the intentional skill of how to make things sweet again. It can be an exercise in paying attention, and awareness, to know how to distinguish, and choose, the kind of sweetness that will actually nourish.
Perhaps that's why I enjoy the playfulness of the vegan, gluten free, refined sugar-free, so- healthy-it-hurts, utterly easy to make and yummy delights from Oh She Glows: it doesn't have to be bad to be good. It can just be “all good”.
What actually is this sweetness that can help us to feel that good taste in our mouths again, and help to bring us back to a place of relative balance when we're working with hard things?
I'm here in eastern Canada, in the north, so perhaps it's like asking the question “can we choose maple syrup over white sugar?”; “can we choose something that's real over something ‘wrapped in plastic’, that might look good but is likely to actually cause us pain?”.
Part of what happens, in the beginning of the beginning of spring in the north, as we've explored together, is that the sap of the trees begins to flow again. The sap will pull deep into the trees through the depth of the long winter, and part of coming out of that period of cold and darkness is the time when the sap begins to flow again.
Here on the east coast, in Maritime region of Canada, in about February or early March, it's possible to put a tap inside of a maple tree, and to draw out the sweetness of that maple sap. It is then boiled, and condensed, to make the sweetness of maple syrup, then transformed into any amount of breakfast – and other - works of magic.
It can be useful to observe that tapping into sweetness like that is part of how we can get our own sap to start flowing again.
In my experience, when hard things happen, it can be possible to pull deep inside ourselves, and to somewhat cut-off: like having nicks, and corners, and parts of ourselves where our own juiciness has somehow spilled out onto the ground, or hardened deep inside, like a tree shivering its way through the winter.
Hard things happen. It can leave a bad taste, and become frozen slightly like that. It can be hard to wake our way out of it again, the way that our trees do in the spring.
So it becomes an exercise in remembering how to reach deep inside of our inside worlds, or how to reach deep inside of our outside worlds, and get our juices flowing again.
Can we reach in, and touch once again, the sap or the juiciness of life itself, to once again begin to feel more alive?
Most often I drink my tea black. An uncle, now several decades deceased, used to tell me it was because I was sweet enough. From time to time, it does happen that it's good to put milk and honey - and often some ginger in that tea to warm me up again - and bring back some sweetness after hard times.
Where does that sweetness come from? How do we reach in and touch that juiciness of life again?
It is actually like the sun in the sky. The sun might be covered by clouds. For a time we might feel like there is no sun. We can say to ourselves, “there is no sun out today”, when in fact the sun doesn't go anywhere. It is the earth that moves. The clouds are not as solid they appear. They are not really real. They come, and they go.
It's an old Buddhist metaphor for the nature of mind, which is said to be - like the sky – clear, bright, warm and wise, radiant, intelligent and aware. Thought and emotions: they come, and they go, like the clouds. The sun is constant.
It's a older metaphor of the Indian subcontinent that life itself is - in its nature - juicy, and rich in sapfulness. It's a word we've seen, called “rasa”. This vitality and vibrancy, richness and delight, like maple syrup or honey: it is the basic taste of life itself, and it is always possible to discover it again, even if it may feel - from time to time - that instead of honey in that tea there is lemon.
How do we find that sweetness again?
That sweetness hasn't gone anywhere. It is constant. That sweetness is the nature of life itself. Yet sometimes we do need to remind ourselves of this.
So let me tell you about the visiting nurses, who were my guests in class this week. They had had a hard day in the clinic at the hospital. They had worked very intensely, especially with one woman who was in a very difficult domestic situation. By virtue of their role, the nurses had offered: counsel and support, information and advice, and a safe place to come to where this person could shape some perspective, and work through the process of perhaps choosing to make different choices, helping her situation to become more safe, more respectful, and more kind.
That particular day, one day among many - when that client at the clinic may choose to do something very different tomorrow - they had had to watch the client return home, knowing it was likely to be an environment that was unsafe, disrespectful, and unkind. They talked about how hard it was to watch her go home.
Then they came, and spent time with my students and I, and there was such joy in the quality of the companionship that they had amongst themselves that it was utterly contagious. So we shared in that joy, and delight in the companionship, as we met each other as friends of a common friend.
They were so happy to talk to the students. The students were so happy to talk to them, and there was sweetness in that exchange that was medicine of a kind that is real, even if it’s not prescribed by doctors or sold. There was sweetness, that was medicine, in the quality of the companionship, and delight in the company one with the other.
Knowing that they were coming - and boldly experimenting the new paradigm that yummy treats don't have to be bad to be good - part of their thank-you gift was: dream bars, and cookie dough squares, almond brownies, and peanut butter truffles, and magic no-cook caramel sauce: creations Angela Liddon, the Canadian Food artist behind “Oh She Glows”.
There was something delightful in that exchange of sweetness, the delight of the companionship communicated in the gesture that somehow embodies the sweetness of life itself: no refined sugar, but a touch of maple syrup, and the sweetness of the laughter and the warmth, the support and the care, the honor and the respect of one and the other.
What is this sweetness, this delight that is the antidote to bitterness?
The love and the kindness, the warmth and the friendship, the compassion and the care, the humor and delight, the wisdom and the patience, the forgiveness and the generosity: the sweetness of life itself that we offer to one another all the time.
It is our basic nature. Sometimes it comes in a gift bag with tissue paper. More often it comes with a hug.
It is obvious as the space in the room, as obvious as the warmth of the blood in our veins, so obvious we can forget how to see it, so obvious it can be hard to notice.
Why are there gifts on birthdays? Chocolate and flowers on Valentine's Day? Why do we celebrate with feasting?
The flowers, the chocolate, the feasting, the gifts: they are ways that the inherent natural sweetness that is life itself symbolically takes form, shifting and moving from one to the other.
I gave my work colleague two boxes of treats: one for him and one for his wife. The sweetest gift that I can give to him is a gift of favorite treats that he can give, in turn, to the one that he most loves in all the world.
It is warmth, and kindness, respect and love that moves from one to the other, through the offering of sweetness. It moves between us as humans – from one to the other – in the way that the sap that is life itself moves through the many branches of a single tree.
Sweetness: it is the antidote to bitterness.
There are, perhaps, ways that we can try to explore this that arguably hurt us more than help. It is possible, I'm told, to take refuge in a box of Haagen-Dazs ice cream, wishing to numb away the troubles of the world, in the way that one might do with alcohol or drugs, choosing a processed “what appears to be real, but isn't really real” kind of sweetness, the kind that will hurt instead of heal, and be poison instead of medicine.
Yet, the sapfullness, the sweetness of life itself - vitality and dynamism, kindness, compassion, warmth and well-being, generosity and open-heartedness: this moves, in many vehicles, from one to the other, making all of our lives richer and stronger.
We know how to make juice out of our lemons, how to handle the hard things and overcome them. We can also put honey in our tea.
An old Indian tradition, the sweetness of life itself - the sapfulness called “rasa”- was not so much described in terms of maple syrup. South Asia isn't a land of the big red-leafed maple trees like Canada.
This “rasa”, or the sapfulness of life itself, is embodied in the classical Hindu offerings that humans give to each other, and that humans offer to the gods in the context of temple ritual practice. So it's flowers and fruit, rice, milk and ghee, and this often symbolized by the sweetness of honey.
So let me offer you a passage from the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, one of the early works of philosophy in ancient Indian tradition, dating from the Axial Age of human philosophy, in about 500 B.C. From the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, Book 2, Chapter 5:
“This earth is the honey of all beings, and all beings are the honey of this earth. The radiant and immortal person in the earth, and, in the case of the body, the radiant and immortal person residing in the physical body. They are both one's self. It is the immortal. It is life itself. It is the whole. (1)
The wind is the honey of all beings, and all beings are the honey of this wind. The radiant and immortal person in the wind, and, in the case of the body, the radiant and immortal person residing in breath. They are both one's self. It is the immortal. It is life itself. It is the whole. (4)
The sun is the honey of all beings, and all beings are the honey of this sun. The radiant and immortal person in the sun, and, in the case of the body, the radiant and immortal person residing in sight. They are both one's self. It is the immortal. It is life itself. It is the whole. (5)
This space is the honey of all beings, and all beings are the honey of this space. The radiant and immortal person in space, and, in the case of the body, the radiant and immortal person residing in this space within the heart. They are both one's self. It is the immortal. It is life itself. It is the whole.” (10)
Sweetness is the antidote to bitterness. If we're feeling torn apart, reconnecting with that sweetness of life itself can help to make us feel whole again.
I offer you some sweet treats to try from Canadian food artist Angela Liddon’s “Oh She Glows”.
Here is her vegan, gluten-free, soy-free, grain free, freezer-friendly, five minute Magic No-Cook Caramel Sauce.
1/3 cup (75 ml) virgin coconut oil softened
½ cup pure maple syrup
¼ cup smooth raw cashew butter (home ground from nuts or store bought)(you use peanut butter instead, if you wish, for peanut caramel sauce).
2 tablespoons raw coconut nector [for best flavor and caramel colour. You can swap 2 tablespoons (30 ml) brown rice syrup and 1 teaspoon (5 ml) fresh lemon juice, if needed.]
¼ to ¾ teaspoon (1 to 4 ml) fine sea salt, to taste
Process ingredients in a food processor. Spoon them into a jar (makes 1 cup or 250 ml). Serve immediately, chill in the fridge for up to 2 weeks or freeze for 1-2 months. It will firm up when chilled; it will easily melt heated over low heat on the stove top. Serve over dairy or non-dairy ice cream, with nuts if you wish, use as a fruit dip, or otherwise enjoy according to your imagination.May you enjoy the sweetness of life.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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Spring in Your Step!
You can feel it in the air. In my neck of the woods in the north, it's this coming Wednesday March 20th, at 6:58pm, that we will astronomically cross the line: the sun will shine directly on the equator – at the moment of the spring equinox - before continuing its journey which shapes the cycles and the seasons of our lives.
The spring equinox is the time when day and night are equal. We will rest – poised and balanced at that mid-point for a moment – before we cross the line, and the days will once again begin to get longer, and we step out of darkness into the time of the light.
While Imbolc, in early February marks the “beginning of the beginning of spring”- a time when the frozen ground begins to thaw, the sap of the trees begins to flow again, the equinox marks “mid-spring” as – here in the north – our lives, and our natural world, begin to come into bloom. South of the equator, the movement is the counter-balancing opposite pole: they will move inward as nights begin to grow longer.
This experience of changing and shifting and moving together, along with the cycles of the movement of the spheres, is among the most intimate and basic elements that joins us all together as members of a planetary community. This moment of transition, from darkness to light with the coming of spring, has been celebrated all over the world, in so many cultures, through countless generations of time.
The Saxon goddess Eostre will give her name to the direction “east” and the holiday “Easter”. She is a goddess of dawn, like Aurora. Just like the dawn is the time of new light, the spring is the time of new life.
The Roman new year began on the Ides of March, March 15th. The astrological year begins on the equinox when the moon moves into the first sign of the zodiac, Aries, the Ram. The god Aries is a Greek god corresponding to the Roman god Mars, who will give his name to the month of March. Between the 12th century and the year 1752, March 25th was the day the calendar year changed in England and Ireland. March 25th, 1212 was the day that came after March 24th, 1211.
It's the season of Nawruz, the Persian new year, a time of feasting and celebration at this month of re-birth.
The month of March contains holidays associated with many of our cultures’ mother goddesses: Astarte, Isis, Aphrodite, Cybele. Their re-birthing of the year shows itself in the time of blossoms, leaves on the trees, the sprouting of crops, the mating of birds and birthing of young animals. We have made it through the time of darkness; we are assured that life will, indeed, continue anew.
Eostre is the Saxon version of a Germanic goddess whose name was Ostara. Her Feast Day was held on the full moon following the spring equinox, the time when the Christian Easter season is celebrated. There is a legend, that once Ostara found a bird that was wounded, on the ground in late winter. To save its life, she transformed it into a rabbit, but the transformation was not complete. The bird took the appearance of a rabbit, but it retained the ability to lay eggs. The rabbit would decorate these eggs and leave them as gifts to Eostre. So it is that today Easter is celebrated amid the feast of fertility symbolised by bunnies and eggs.
In medieval societies in Europe, the March hare or rabbit was considered a very strong fertility symbol. This species of rabbit is nocturnal most of the year. In March, when its mating season begins, there are bunnies everywhere all day long. The female of the species is so fertile she can conceive as second litter even while still pregnant with the first: Easter eggs and rabbits, fertility and rebirth.
Attis, Adonis, Osiris and Dionysus: these are gods of the year who, in their own cultures, were believed to be the son born of a god and a mortal woman. They were believed to die each year at the harvest and be reborn again with the coming of spring.
Easter is the setting for the Christian celebration of the death and rebirth of Jesus. In Catholic tradition the Easter vigil service, the night preceding Easter Sunday, begins with what is called the “Service of Light”. It includes a passage saying: “We pray you, therefore, O Lord that this candle, consecrated in honor of your name, may continue endlessly to scatter the darkness of this night. May it be received as a sweet fragrance and mingle with the lights of heaven. May the morning star find its flame burning”.
Around the world, through countless generations, as part of a global culture, we have celebrated rebirth at the time of the spring equinox, when life comes again after darkness.
The spring equinox is a reminder that it's time to celebrate and plant seeds, metaphorically and physically, for what we want to bring to blossom in the upcoming season. It's a time to honor all the things we've achieved since the winter solstice. It’s time now to bloom, and breathe, create and procreate, and to reap the sweetness of what we've manifested as we're brought further into the light. Flowers start to bloom. Baby animals are born. It's a time to plant the seeds whose growth will symbolize life beginning anew. Is it time to make that change you've been thinking about all through the winter?
The symbol of the egg has in many cultures been part of the symbol for this potential of rebirth. Druids would bury eggs in fields in the spring to invite abundance to the land.
Colouring eggs, as symbols of new life, has long been part of the celebration. There are many ways to use natural substances to colour eggs. A single onion skin boiled with eggs will give a soft orange colour. A handful of onion skills will yield a dark rust colour. A half teaspoon of turmeric will give a sunny yellow colour. Beet juice and vinegar turn make them pink.
Seeds are, like eggs, symbols of this potential to be reborn again. In ancient Italy, in the spring, women planted gardens of Adonis. They filled urns with grain seeds kept in the dark and watered every two days. The custom is still followed in Sicily. Women plant seeds of grains, lentils, fennel, lettuce or flowers in baskets and pots. When they sprout, the stocks are tied with red ribbons and the gardens are placed on graves. They symbolize the triumph over death.
It ties us with our ancestors of generations past to notice that we celebrate the triumph of life over death in many ways, and we always have. It can also help us to notice that light does, indeed, return after darkness. It is the nature of the flow of life on this planet that follows the pathway of the sun. After night comes the dawn. After winter, there is spring. From death, comes re-birth as light returns to the world.
Although there is a specific moment, when the sun is at the equator, when we cross that line from darkness into light – and while many people who are sensitive to the vibe of things can feel that shift - spring is a season. You can choose your own time, and your own way, to celebrate. Maybe it’s easier on a weekend: this weekend or next. It can feed us very deeply to connect with the rhythms of the cycles of the earth, and the rhythms of the cycle of the generations, by joining in that celebration.
Perhaps you can plan to spend time outside in nature: watch a sunrise, or a sunset, walk in the park or take a hike. Search and actively seek out signs of spring coming into the natural world. Observe all the new life beginning to sprout around you. Plant something, if you can. For me, this is the weekend when I will begin to plant the seeds - inside the house under grow lights – for the annuals that I will transplant out in the garden later in the season when the soil has warmed. Are there seeds – of any kind - that you would like to plant this weekend or next? Plant a seed – of any kind – that will begin to grow. If it feels closer to hand, perhaps you can bring some flowers into the house or otherwise into your world.
It can be a time for feasting and paying attention to foods that honor the spring: eggs, or spring greens and sprouts, local bread or wine. If you're able, consider making a bonfire to celebrate the return of the sun. At the time of the spring equinox itself, I take my winter wreath off the front door and replace it with a spring wreath, to symbolically mark the change in the cycle of the year: it is time for the seeds in our lives to root, for buds to form and bulbs to blossom!
Are there ways that you wish to actively or symbolically do a final letting go of what needs to be left behind from the winter's rest? As we come out of that winter cocoon, what are the seeds that gathered inside of yourself through the winter that you will summon out of that darkness, having held them underground and get ready to plant in your life? If you can, consider beginning something new in your life. Perhaps you would like to add a fresh element to yourself care routine. For me, it's a time when my body begins to ask for freshly squeezed juices again, a time when it longs for fresh greens raw again…the time for kale in soup has passed.
Listen to yourself, and you will know how you need.
To celebrate, to connect with the cycle of the seasons, and the cyclical movement of the spheres, is to connect to our planet: all who live on her – and with her together - and all who ever have in the times that have come before. It is to connect to the cycle of the seasons of our lives, and prepare for new beginnings to sprout.
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A Man, My Son
I see increasingly in some of my male colleagues and students the sense that, if one is born male (and perhaps especially white, and heterosexual, and male, if one is born into a position which many Western cultures would historically have associated with privilege), somehow one must walk about feeling badly and apologizing for it, and never quite feeling comfortable in one's own skin.
We are in a time of cultural change, as traditional gender roles become increasingly a thing of memory. There is sufficient turmoil to create space for a rewriting of so many of our culture’s stories. It is an interesting occasion – perhaps especially on international Women’s Day - to think of women and womanhood and men and masculinity.
What is it to be strong, and capable, and competent, and compassionate and masculine at the very same time? It is, perhaps, very similar to what it is to be strong, and capable, and competent, and compassionate and a person at the very same time. Men and women – and those in the space in-between – we are people. We are all persons: we don’t need to be enemies.
It is an error to confuse aggression with strength, and therefore fail to own the depth and subtlety of possibilities of one's own inherent strengths for fear they may be confused with aggression.
There is a meeting that I chair about once or twice a month. I hold the boundaries in that room - a somewhat intense meeting environment with many waves of undertones – so much more effectively than many men that I have seen do it, because I am a woman. Because I am a woman, I both must, and can, be much more direct, more commanding, and more straightforward. It is a tremendously useful way to lead in that context, where the strength and clarity of the boundaries are creating both safety and space. People are relaxing, and speaking more freely, and it is rather astonishing the amount that it is now being accomplished in such a small amount of time.
I have often reflected this past year that a man could never do that: the room would never permit it. Anything that I will do will be softened, because I am a woman, and therefore my strength can be received as strength. It will earn respect. No one is going to confuse that with aggression. It's coming from me.
If a man were to be direct, and straightforward, and commanding like that, that strength would be confused with aggression. The man would be attacked for it. It would not be permitted.
So much conversation has happened this past year about gender roles. I feel there's a great deal yet to be discovered in relation to the inherent strengths that come from the breadth, and variety, and texture of each of our experiences of personhood.
I don’t want to be an “equal” to a man in that room, in the sense of being “the same”. What I want is to apply the many strengths that come to me from my womanhood.
In the case of my first of two male guest speakers I had in class this week, it is someone, who through the course of the past year, has worked remarkably well in the midst of many social storms. He has shown an impressive ability to not be blown over by the winds that come and go in the course of our days. It seemed appropriate to acknowledge – or at least not to ignore - that as I introduced him as a guest speaker in the class, and so I introduced him using a poem I have known since childhood.
For me, the poem is a definition of integrity: can we stand in the winds and not be blown over by them?
It is refreshing that what is, for me, a definition of “integrity” was, for the poet, a definition of manhood.
So, let me offer you this well-known poem, a piece of advice from a father written to his son, in 1895, by the Nobel Prize laureate Rudyard Kipling. It's one of very few poems that I knew by heart when I was ten.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when others doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
For me, when I was ten, it was a description of integrity. Can you stand in the winds and not be blown over by them? Can you know that you are stronger than your fear? Can you dare to be stronger than your doubt? Can you be stronger than your impatience? Your exhaustion? Can you be what you are, knowing there is nothing to prove and no territory to defend?
For Kipling, in 1895, it was a definition of manhood: to be strong, and yet humble, brave and forgiving, gentle and kind.
So much has happened in the 125 years between Kipling and now: two great wars and the many others which followed, and the shifts of things, and change of things, as we as persons - in so many ways - are stepping out of culturally contrived boxes, socially contrived descriptions of ways that we are to snip, and trim, and cut, and tailor our perceptions of ourselves, confining ourselves to someone else's ideas of a womanhood, or manhood, or gender roles in a space in-between. Old ideas in so many ways are gone.
Listen to my undergraduate students, and they will look back to 50 years ago when couples began to first experiment: what it might be like if there were social permission to divorce, and women had the possibility of divorce – often, possibility of safety - because they were able to generate independent income?
It may be useful to look further back in our process of moving forward in our perceptions and thinking about men and manhood, about women and womanhood. We've tried to let go of a great deal, and in so many ways, I would say, we are floundering. We seem to know, more or less, what we don’t want. We are perhaps not quite ready to know what we do want or how to get it.
How can we find ourselves in a place where we can be at peace with ourselves instead of being at war with each other? Historically, there are signs of the predator-prey relationship as we've thought about masculinity and womanhood. In recent times, there are also signs of a predator-prey relationship when we think about womanhood in relation to men.
And so we shift, and change, and dance the dance of trying to figure it out: what does integrity look like?
I have reflected, and taught, and researched, and worked with this for some 25 years now in the context of ancient Indian thinking. Let me offer you this. That which is powerful, which is genuinely strong, is that which is life-giving, life-supporting, and life-sustaining. If it is about control, dominance, territoriality - if it is somehow seeking to diminish life in some way - then it is based in fear. It is an expression of weakness. It merits my compassion, not my complacency. There is no need to confuse such fear-based aggression with strength. Genuine strength: it is a kind of victory over war, the wars we have inside of ourselves and between each other, as we dance the experiment of a redefining of womanhood and masculinity, and the space in-between.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when others doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;….
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
For me, when I was ten, that was a description of integrity and therefore a description of personal strength. For Kipling, it was a description of manhood, and therefore a description of a genuine strength, because it is life-giving, life-supporting, life-maintaining, humble and wise.
As we dance the dance of redefining, and figuring out, what will become the description of manhood and womanhood in our contemporary time, it is possible to learn to dance together.
I asked my second male in-class guest this week: what is a genuine masculinity? What is it to be strong, and capable, and compassionate, and a man all at the very same time? We decided: it’s a lot like what it is to be strong, compassionate, and capable person, all at the very same time.
We don't need to confuse kindness with weakness or aggression with strength.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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Breathe Through Your Heels
“Now, take this huge tree here, son. If someone were to hack it at the bottom, its living sap would flow. Likewise, if someone were to hack it in the middle, its living sap would flow; and if someone were to hack it at the top, its living sap would flow. Pervaded by the living essence…, this tree stands here ceaselessly drinking water and flourishing… The finest essence here – that constitutes the self of this whole world; that is the truth; that is the self…). And that’s how you are….” (Chandogya-Upanishad 6.11.1-3, c. 500 BCE).
Today, we reflect on how to “breathe through the heals”.
Perhaps my favourite tree passage is from “The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine”, dated approximately 2000 BCE. It is the earliest known reference to the Chinese practice of “standing like a tree”, “standing still without changing”, a form of chi kung practice. The meridians, or internal energy pathways of the body identified by traditional Chinese medicine, are here compared to the branches and limbs of a tree which is the means by which humans connect – and are connected by – the heavens and the earth. The vital essence, or chi, is said to flow through the body as sap flows through a tree. The passage reads:
“I have heard that in ancient times there were the so-called Spiritual Beings:
They stood between Heaven and Earth, connecting the Universe;
They understood and were able to control both Yin and Yang, the two fundamental principles of nature;
They inhaled the vital essence of life;
They remained unmoving in their spirit;
Their muscles and flesh were as one –
This is the Tao, the Way you are looking for.”
One of the key themes of my research in the oldest Sanskrit text of the Indian subcontinent is “rasa”, or “sapfulness”. It names the vibrant and vital “juiciness”, the essence of life itself, which is the whole of which we are a part. You taste it when you encounter “juicy” people, ones who know how to feel the heartbeat of the earth, the pulsing of the heavens, and somehow move in rhythm in that space in between. This ability to feel the pulse of the earth beneath the feet, and move in the flow with it, is called – in the writings of the Taoist master Chuang Tzu – the ability “to breathe through the heals”.
The true human, the authentic human, breathes through the heals.
Says Chuang Tzu:
“….How do we know that what we call the Heavenly (in us) is not the Human? and that what we call the Human is not the Heavenly? There must be the True (hu)man (the “authentic” human), and then there is the True knowledge. What is meant by 'the True (Hu)Man?'
The True (humans).. of old did not reject (the views of) the few; they did not seek to accomplish (their ends) like heroes (before others); they did not lay plans to attain those ends. Being such, though they might make mistakes, they had no occasion for repentance; though they might succeed, they had no self-complacency. Being such, they could ascend the loftiest heights without fear; they could pass through water without being made wet by it; they could go into fire without being burnt; so it was that by their knowledge they ascended to and reached the Tao.
The True (humans) of old did not dream when they slept, had no anxiety when they awoke, and did not care that their food should be pleasant. Their breathing came deep and silently. The breathing of the true (humans) comes (even) from (their) heels, while (humans) generally breathe (only) from their throats. When (humans) are defeated in argument, their words come from their gullets as if they were vomiting. Where lusts and desires are deep, the springs of the Heavenly are shallow.
The True (authentic humans) of old knew nothing of the love of life or of the hatred of death. Entrance into life occasioned them no joy; the exit from it awakened no resistance. Composedly they went and came. They did not forget what their beginning had been, and they did not inquire into what their end would be. They accepted (their life) and rejoiced in it; they forgot (all fear of death), and returned (to their state before life). Thus there was in them what is called the want of any mind to resist the Tao…. Such were they who are called the True (authentic humans).” (from “The Writings of Chuang Tzu, Book 6: “The Great and Most Honoured Master”, translation by Stephen R. McIntyre)
The truly human breathe through their heels.
If you can where you are, take off your socks and put your feet on the ground. If you can be outside, put your feet on the ground outside. If you can be outside beside trees, stand outside beside the trees. If you are driving, or in a bathtub, or otherwise cannot put your feet on the ground, it doesn't really matter, because you know what it feels like to feel your feet on the ground.
Feel your feet on the ground. Bring your attention to the feeling of your feet on the earth. Feel that connection with the earth.
Can you breathe from the place of that feeling? Can you feel the strength, the vigour, the vital sap of the earth come up into you?
These days, I am teaching a class about the body. Part of what I am inviting the students to consider is to ask: what is the difference between your body and the earth? The carbon in your body, the carbon in the earth: what is the difference? The water in your body, the water in the earth: what is the difference? The body and the earth: how could we ever have imagined there might be a difference? The body and the earth are one.
Can you feel the earth breathe? Can you feel the pulse and the rhythm of that breath, that heartbeat, like the flow of the sap, like the pulse and the rhythm of the tide? Can you feel the strength of the earth come up through you as you breathe through your heels?
The strength of the earth and the strength inside of you: what is the difference? You are stronger than your fear. Feel the connection between the feet and the earth, and breathe.
Feel that connection and no matter where you are - with the business client, in the job interview, in the difficult conversation at the difficult meeting – pause and feel the strength of the Earth pulled up through your feet, through your heels. Wherever you are, observe that you can no more be pushed around than the tree that digs deep with its heels and drinks from deep inside the earth.
What is the difference between the body and the earth? Oh, this is the great and glorious thing of the human experience!
For, can you breathe through the heels and then observe: what is the difference between your breath and the sky? What is the difference between your breath and the wind? The breath inside of you, the space outside of you: what is the difference?
That is the human experience. Like the tree, we stand with the earth. We reach up into space, and we breathe through our heels the life that connects the two the way the sap flows up through a tree.
We know the practical, the concrete, the physical, the embodied. We know the vision, the potential, the dream, the possibility, the perspective of the eagle’s view high around us, and we stand in that space in-between, joining heaven and earth, and breathing it together, making our dreams, and our visions, and our possibilities possible.
Space, breath - embodied - makes dreams come true.
Breathe with the heels.
Can you feel that current that flows through your whole being from Earth to Heaven? Inhale and exhale. Can you breathe with that current, feeling the rhythm and the pulse of that vital sap, that essence of existence?
That you are.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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We Celebrate Valentine’s Day
“The minute I heard my first love story – I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere – they’re in each other all along.” (Rumi) The Hindu god of love is named Kama. My favorite story of Kama is told by the classical Sanskrit poet Kalidasa in the text known as the Kumarasambhava. Once upon a time, there was a demon named Taraka. Taraka had been promised that he could only be killed by a child of Shiva. The god Shiva is the great practitioner of yoga! He wears cremation ashes, is emaciated and wanders in cremation grounds. So the demon decided that surely he will live forever because no one would ever become the wife of Shiva, and therefore Shiva will never have a child, but there was a goddess named Parvati who, in a past life, had already been a wife of Shiva. She took birth as child of the mountains: her father was Himavat, the Himalayas. She was very beautiful, and, from an early age, she loved the god Shiva. She recited his name, and rejoiced in his presence, and there were special markings on her body that foretold that she would become the wife of the great Yogi, the god Shiva. Parvati, assisted by other gods - including Kama, the god of love - set out to try and seduce Shiva, to lure him into marriage. She tries with her beauty, her radiance, her sensuality, but Shiva only becomes angry that his meditation has been disturbed. So Parvati begins to seduce him by her own practice as a yogini. She becomes as strong a practitioner as he, and she wins him through the heat of her own spiritual practice. Shiva, who wears the moon in his hair, says: “From this moment, O Parvati, I am your slave, gained by the heat of your spiritual practice, O woman of healing beauty”, and all the weariness of her effort left her in that instance, for out of exhaustion, once desire is satisfied, a new strength arises.” They were married, and the poet Kalidasa, in Chapter 6 verse 91, tells us: “With the day and the night the same to him, Shiva spent his time making love, and he passed twenty-five years as if it were a single night, and his thirst for the pleasure of loving never became any less in him, as the fire that burns below the ocean is never satisfied by the rolling waters.” Kama, the Hindu god of love, shoots with an arrow and a bow like Cupid, the winged matchmaker well-known to those in the West who recognise Valentine's Day. Cupid is inspired by the Roman god of love, desire, and erotic love, attraction and affection. He is the son of Venus, the Goddess of Love, and Mars, the god of war. His Greek counterpart is Eros, and the one who is shot by Cupid's arrow is filled with uncontrollable erotic desire. Cupid, they say, has wings, because lovers are flighty and likely to change their minds. His symbols are the arrow and torch, because love wounds and inflames the heart. Cupid carries two kinds of arrows. One has a sharp golden point and the other with a blunt tip of lead. A person wounded with the golden arrow is filled with uncontrollable desire, but the one struck with lead desires only to flee. In both ancient and later art, Cupid is often shown riding a dolphin, perhaps portraying how swiftly love moves in its wild ride. The modern mid-February festival of love and romance is, like Imbolc, inspired in part by the Roman festival called Lupercalia. It was a fertility festival celebrating the coming of spring. The mid-February fertility festival becomes Christianized in the 5th century by Pope Galaceus who declared February 14 to be Valentine's Day, the day of St. Valentine. There is more than one St. Valentine canonized by the church. One of these St. Valentines was a defiant Roman priest who lived in the third century under the Roman Emperor Claudius the second. Claudius was an ambitious ruler, and his armies required vast armies of men to abandon their families for long periods of time. It meant that there was a military that was often downhearted and homesick. So determined was Claudius to strengthen his army by stripping it of love that he banned marriage altogether. There was, we are told, a priest named Father Valentine who thought the ban was unjust, and he defied the ban by continuing to marry young lovers in secret. The Emperor eventually found out about the priest's actions, and arrested him and sentenced him to death. It is believed that young couples that he had secretly married visited him in his cell, passing him flowers and notes through the bars as symbols of their gratitude and appreciation. The condemned Father Valentine fell in love with the jailer’s daughter, and, on February 14th, the day he was executed, he passed the young woman a note which was signed “from your Valentine”. So, it is said, the tradition was born. It's in the 1300’s, under the influence of Chaucer who fostered the idea of courtly love, that this holiday in the spring – at the beginning of the bird’s mating season - becomes clearly associated with romance. By the 1400’s, the first Valentine's Day greeting cards had appeared, and by the 1600’s people in Great Britain had begun the tradition of exchanging Valentine's Day letters and cards. Valentine's Day cards begin to be mass produced in the 1840’s. Today, one billion cards are exchanged on Valentine's Day along with, I'm told, some 220 million red roses. In the spring, when life begins to return to the world, our attention moves to the celebration of love, with cards, and flowers, and chocolates, and the sweetness of things: this flow of the sweetness of life itself that we know, and we feel, and perhaps - at times like these - we remember even better how to see. “If you press me to say why I love him, I can say no more than because he is he, and I am I”, Michel de Montaigne. “You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and, just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.” St. Francis de Salas“Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.” Washington Irving
“There is no remedy for love but to love more.” Thoreau “You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back.” Barbara De Angeles. “Those who love deeply never grow old. They may die of old age, but they die young.” Sir Arthur Pinero Love is a verb, a behavior, an action: to love, honor and cherish. It's part of what is implied by the Hindu term “bhakti”. The word is commonly used to name the loving relationship between the human and a god such as Krishna. Bhakti. The word is derived from BHAJ- which means “to participate”. “To love, honor and cherish”: it is to participate, to engage fully in life itself by bearing witness, by showing up, engaging fully, and participating in the life of another and the life of ourselves. The cards, the chocolates, the flowers - at the time of the old English mating season of birds: the fertility festival that is Valentine’s Day - at the beginning of the beginning of spring - is a celebration of the sweetness of things, the sweetness of being alive, the sweetness of life itself. We discover this sweetness – represented by the chocolates, the flowers and the cards - when we connect and participate in our experience of being simultaneously both separate and one. To love, honor, and cherish: it is showing up with patience, good humor and the strength and resilience that comes from the seeds of that basic meditation posture with its strong back and open heart, a heart open to receive whatever it is that comes and then to work with it. In bearing witness, we participate and then draw out this sweetness, that inner taste of things we call love. For a long time now, I have been a proponent of the “birth week” A birth-day is just too much pressure. Something goes wrong, something messes up, and somehow there is a loss that - even if we wait a whole other year – we will never again be able to set it right. The solution is very simple: welcome the birth week! It gives time to set things right in the moment, to try and help what we wish, and what is, to begin to be able to match. So I offer this suggestion, that - in the same way we can celebrate a birth week - we also celebrate Valentine's Week, or at least Valentine's weekend. Let’s consider celebrating Valentine's Week: to love, honor, and cherish, to participate and show up, to share cards and letters and chocolate as we move towards Spring and remember that sweetness of being alive. If you are inspired and if you wish, consider choosing what it is that you can do to offer this gift of sweetness for yourself. Your relationship with yourself is your longest term relationship. How can you honor, cherish and celebrate that relationship with yourself this Valentine's week. Then if you are inspired, if you wish, choose someone in your life that you very actively appreciate, and choose some way this Valentine's Week that you can acknowledge and celebrate the sweetness of the presence that person brings to your life. Oh and then - if it registers on your vibe-o-meter, if you're inspired and if you feel it - consider choosing someone that you would like to invite to participate in your life in a deeper, dynamic and more engaged way. Celebrate that sweetness by leaping and asking for a date. It can be intimate, romantic or otherwise; it can be with someone that has four feet if you wish. Invite that person on a date this Valentine's week. Remember, as you celebrate love, that life itself is worthy of honor, dignity and respect. You are alive. Therefore, you are also worthy of honor, dignity and respect. To show up – to honor and cherish ,and participate in the flow of life itself - is to taste that inner sweetness we call love.Says George Edward Moore: “The hours I spend with you, I look upon as a sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Others, it is said, have seen angels, but I have seen you, and you are enough”.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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The Space In-Between in Which We All Live
The house is freshly cleaned. It was deep cleaning that happened this past weekend. The fridge and closets and cupboards – all the storage spaces – were sorted. What needs to be let go, re-purposed and released? What has a place in my world? Putting things in place, one after the other: it creates structure. Because of this structure, there is space. It is a space in-between in which we all live. Thank you for joining us as we reflect on limits, and limitlessness, and the space in-between in which we all live. What gives us space? It is because of the walls of the room, the ceiling and the floor, that we have a space that we call a “room”. The walls make it a room. There is the sky and the earth, the top and the bottom: we live sandwiched in that space in-between. It is beautiful, pragmatic logic which was much appreciated in the ancient Indian worldview. We all live in that space in-between the sky and the earth. We all live in that space in-between our birth and our death. We are mortal. Because we are born, we will die. In this world, where time is round, because we die we will be re-born. It happens all the time. We die to what was in order to create the space in which to welcome what is to come. It is why we do deep cleaning in the spring: we let go in order to be able to receive with an open hand…in that space in-between our birth and our death. It’s like that space between cause and effect, between action and re-action, between the seed and the fruit. Because of our limits, we live to grow beyond them. In the ancient Indian world, Yama was the god of the dead. His name means “to constrain”. He is “constraint”, or limit, personified. Death is the ultimate limit. Perhaps that’s why we call them “deadlines”. God of the dead, Yama is king of the ancestors. He gives us our life on loan: he will take it back again. We possess our life; we do not own it. We embody it for a time; in the end, we must let go of it. So he offers us a life that has meaning: now matters because it will never come again; today matters because one day I will die. It is the structure of things – boundaries and limits – that gives us lives that have room to grow in, just as surely as we have a room because of its walls. Do our walls hold us in, hold us up, or hold us back? How we work with what appears to be our walls creates the shape of lives in that space in-between. Much of the beauty of the natural world is revealed to us by means of its structure: the discipline of timing as the sun comes up and goes down again incrementally increasing length of day or length of night. The veins that form the structure in the leaves, the veins that permit the blood flow through my body and yours: it is the disciplined structure of things that creates the space through which our life flows. It is a respecting of structure and limits that gives us room to move: the discipline of time, the discipline of working with money…because we know how to respect limits, we know how to give ourselves space, the freedom to have room to move. Because there are boundaries in relationship, there can be closeness. Are the longest lasting relationships those that best know how to give each other space so there is room to grow as individuals and also room to grow together? We are born, we live, and we die. Live as if we were going to live forever – as if our actions had no consequences – and somehow we become less alive….as if nothing mattered. Our days they say are counted like so many beads on a prayer string. The sun comes up; the sun goes down: one bead is counted after the other. Ancient India had no word for continuous time. What was understood was a series of moments – like a series of heartbeats. What is to say that one heartbeat will follow the next: nothing at all.Do you know someone – or perhaps it is yourself – who once received a fatal medical diagnosis? Who once had a doctor come to them and say: I am so sorry but this could kill you? Maybe it was cancer. Maybe it was something else. That person who was told that she would die: did she somehow become more alive afterwards? Often it happens only when life shows us mortality very clearly that somehow we become more alive. We see more clearly what is important and what is not. We choose to do what matters. We let go of what does not. All those things that we wish to do someday, somehow we make room for them now. We live because one day we will all die. It is our limits that give us our life and our death. Can we distinguish between the limits that are real and the limits that are not? What are the limits that serve us like the walls that hold up my room and to give me space in which to live? What are the limits that do not serve us, that somehow hold us back or keep us contained, so that we are squeezed and confined, and it becomes not room to live but rather confinement in which we slowly die.
Sometimes limits are real, like the space in-between our birth and our death. Sometimes limits are imposed upon us in ways that appear but are not really real at all. It is one of the old definitions of enlightenment: the wise can distinguish between appearance and reality, between the true and the false.
Often we get stronger because we fight against limits and eventually strong enough to let them go. Who defines the limits of that space in between in which I am living? Am I acting because of my perception of what is possible for me, or am I confining myself to someone else's perception of what is possible for me? My concept of me is a reflection of me. Their concept of me is a reflection of them. Our limits give us our life and our death: believe in limits that are not really real, and it becomes a means not to live but instead to die.
The structure of things: it’s what gives us the room, to explore, to discover, to live, and to grow. We are limited, and limitless simultaneously. If it is our death that makes this moment have meaning because it is limited, how we choose to respond and to rise up in this space in-between can be beyond measure. Finite and infinite, limited and limitless: it is a space in-between in which we all live.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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A Reflection of You
Do you try to squeeze yourself into a box that someone – or something - else has shaped for you? Does it feel artificial, contrived, and far too small? Today we reflect, and observe, that their concept of you is a reflection of them. Your concept of you is a reflection of you.
You don't need to buy-in to limits set by someone else’s story. We are each the hero of our own story.
What are the limits that you have set for yourself that you believe to be true?
Very often, it seems to me, our limits become limits when we believe them to be true. We bang up against constraints all the time in the course of our days. Somehow, the banging hits harder, and hurts more, if we believe those constraints to be solid.
If the shape of the world is carved by the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we are told by others, who is it that carves the shape of you? Who is it that carves the shape of your world?
Somehow, as winter is turning to spring, in this crack of the changing of the seasons, I feel I am seeing many struggles of this kind unfold around me, as people seem to hold on tight, and to hold onto tightly by others…resisting change.
Is someone trying to squeeze you into their box, the small box that is their concept of you? The story line they tell themselves about themselves, are you acting out the role they have given you in their story? Are you being shaped and carved by someone else’s limits for you? This is an invitation that, often, one can choose to decline.
Their concept of you is a reflection of them. Your concept of you is a reflection of you.
Have you seen that happening in your life and the life of people around you? Someone has an idea of you, a concept of you: iIs there a sense that you must be small, squeezed into their limits, by what they say or do, or by what they don’t say or don’t do, or by the veil of silence as they ignore?
Do you find that you have handed over the sovereignty and authority over your own life to someone else’s picture or concept of you? Did you somehow take their concept of you as if it were your own?
“Who are you to think you could do that? Women can’t do that. Men aren't like that. People of African descent don’t do that. You can't do that.” Sometimes people are frightened, and weak, and they seek to puff themselves up by seeing other people as being small.
Don’t believe it. Their concept of you is a reflection of them. Your concept of you is a reflection of you.
How they think of you, and see you, or don’t see you – how they try to wrap plastic around you to hold you into place, it says a great deal about them. It says absolutely nothing about you, unless you make a mistake….and believe it. It has nothing to do with you unless you believe it to be true. It is your concept of yourself that matters.
Do you have the confidence that you need to retain – to own your own authority, your own right and responsibility - to shape your own self? Are you the author of your own story? Are you the hero in your own story? Is there someone, or something, that you need to edit out of your own storyline?
Such stories are only true if we believe them to be.
The story you tell yourself about you isn’t really real either. It is always also subject to change, an illusion like a reflection of ourselves that we might see in the water.
A concept is just a concept. It is an idea like any idea. It is not really real. So, the boxes we build for ourselves – that we squeeze ourselves into to be shut down or taped in – aren’t really real either.
We don’t need to believe in the limits that we set for ourselves any more than we need to believe in the limits that others might seek to set for us. We can step out of our smallness and into the vastness of our potential.
Your concept of you is a reflection of you. Their concept of you is a reflection of them.
Your potential is measured by its limitlessness, not by its limits.
We can enjoy the freedom that comes from living outside of anyone’s box.
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The Beginning of the Beginning of Spring
I am told that the North American celebration of Groundhog Day was established in Pennsylvania, with the help of a newspaper story, in 1887. It is said to be an adaptation of a German tradition, where it was a Badger, I am told, who poked its head out of the ground to check to see if it's time yet to come out of a long winter's nap.
I began to feel it last weekend, the instinct that it’s time for deep cleaning on the inside, and deep cleaning on the outside. It's accompanied by a need to increase the greens in my day: more greens in the stir fry, more greens in the soup, and double the greens in my favourite Indian-style lentil dish. This weekend, I will order my seeds for the garden, and plant some microgreens to grow under the grow lights.
We will celebrate Imbolc - the midway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox - this Sunday, February 3rd at 11:31 pm AST. We will have officially have crossed the line, the beginning of the end of the winter that is the beginning of the beginning of spring.
The German tradition of the badger was part of the old celebration of Candlemas, a Christian term given to an old celebration of the return of the sun and the season of spring. This time of year was known as Lupercalia to the Romans, Sul-Minerva to the ancient Brits, and Imbolc – Brigid’s day – for the ancient Celts. There are Neolithic megalithic stone structures which mark the light of the rising sun on this day: the astrological midpoint between the equal night and equal day in the arriving season of spring, and – in the north – the deepest, coldest, darkest days of the year. It is one of the cross-quarter days between the four major points in the wheel of the year.
Imbolc: I am told that the word means “in the belly”. It marked the beginning of lambing season in Old Celtic culture, and it comes with the sense that somehow everything is pregnant, with this sense of possibility and expectancy. Yet it’s only just visible, if visible at all, like the gentle curve of a just showing pregnancy. It is a promise of renewal, of hidden potential, and a quickening.
It is this sense of quickening that most speaks to me, the time of the quickening of the year. The sap of the trees - and somehow the sap of me - pulls in in the midwinter season. We hold the seeds underground - and we heal, and we nurture, and we rest, and we dream - but now the days are getting longer.
It's like the pulse of the earth has begun to quicken, and my sap begins to flow again a little bit more vividly. Here, in eastern Canada, before too long it will be time to tap the maple trees so that we can make maple syrup, because the sap has begun to flow again at this time of the beginning of the beginning of spring.
Sometimes this word “Imbolc” is said to derive from an old Irish word for “milk”. The lambs and cattle are pregnant with the spring, and lambing season means that the ewes are lactating. It's possible again to have new milk, so special cheeses and the churning of butter was part of the celebration of Imbolc, as if now it was possible to let go of what we were holding back. It is time to just let things flow again. The days get longer, the light gets brighter, and it brings with it the hope and potential of being born freshly with the rebirth of the year.
Imbolc is associated with the Celtic goddess Bridget who will enter into Christian tradition as Saint Bridget. The Celtic goddess in her maiden form of the sun: it is said that she spread her green cloak across the land releasing it from the grip of winter. So light, and heat, illumination, blazing bonfires, hearth fires, candles and food symbolizing the power of the sun are part of the celebration.
As we cross the line out of the grip of winter and into the hope of spring, it's a time for ritually burning off and releasing the old year: a shedding of skin, and a letting go of what is gone. It is time for making space in the inside, and space on the outside, for nourishing the new.
It is the time of quickening, to wake up the dormant seeds that have lain inside of us in wait for their time to come, and as the sun gets stronger, and the days get longer, somehow we are also called to awaken to being alive in a fresh and new way. A time for the birth of new possibilities, new ideas, and new thoughts as we are reborn from the seeds of our past. With the turning of the wheel of the year, somehow we, ourselves, also reborn in a new way.
The earth is quickening, and our transformation also accelerates. We stoke our fires to burn off the old year, and invite the new and fresh potential of the life-giving strength that comes with the return of the sun.
My mind began to feel it last weekend. There was a sense of “why hasn't this happened yet?” and “why hasn't that happened yet?”. This seed of possibility that I know is just lying there, why isn’t it sprouting?
Like the year, we are all somehow pregnant with the potential of what our lives will show themselves to be for us, in this time of rebirthing, as we poke our heads out of the ground, and look about, checking to see if we see our shadows or if we see the sun.
Is it time to wake up yet? Is it time to go back to healing, nourishing, resting ,and the growing that can happen under wraps underground? The beginning of the beginning of spring: we have crossed the line in that space in-between.
It can be deeply nourishing to notice this, and to make space to help our lives to come into harmony with the great cycles of the nature of which we are apart. It can be soothing, and harmonizing, nurturing and strengthening, to somehow more deeply feel home as together we follow the pathway of the sun. It helps to connect us with the cycles of the earth, and to remember the cycles of the ancestors who have shared with us in this experience of following the pathway of the sun.
So, if you would like to give pause and celebrate, you can look up online to discover when is the astrological midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox where you are now, or the midpoint between the summer solstice and the fall equinox if you are south of the equator.
Personally, I like to witness it. It's like being in conversation with the flow of things, and if you can feel your heartbeat and feel the blood pulsing through your veins, it's quite possible that you'll feel it when we cross the line and begin the beginning of spring.
It is the tradition of Candlemas to light all the candles. Whether you do it at the moment of change itself, or at some other time this weekend - and even if it's only for a brief time - light all the candles. Turn the lights on in all the rooms. If you're feeling it, build a big fire in the hearth, if you have one, or a bonfire on the beach, if you're there. The return of the sun is celebrated with fire and light.
In some cultures pancakes - golden and round - are symbols of the sun and form part of the feasting quality of the celebration of Imbolc or Candlemas. Spring cleaning certainly is also part of this time. I think this weekend I'm going to make sure it's a clean and fresh fridge, and discover what I can either burn through, or let go of on that list of undone things.
Can we eliminate from our lives the things that weight us down or hold us back - old clothes and old dreams - and make space, inside and out, for new beginnings.
If you're thinking of the feast, it would often include warming spices. If you'd like, perhaps you can mull some cider or wine; enjoy spicy foods like curries ,or soups with onions and leeks. The potential of seeds is part of it. Sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds could be included as part of the feast, and by tradition there would be cakes with fruit and nuts, for nuts, of course, are seeds. If someone in your world enjoys dairy, in the time of lambing season and fresh milk, by tradition there would be butter and cheese: I'm sure the grandmothers would be just fine if it's almond milk or cashew cheese.
To live in a world where time is round is to know how to pass from one season to the next, to harvest in the time of the harvest, and to prepare for the planting of seeds.
I am told that ancient alchemists described the climactic day of an experiment - when base metals were being transmuted into gold - as being a day of projection. This is that time in the year.
In my neck of the woods, the spring equinox – the quarter day of equal night and equal day - will come March 20th at 6:58 in the evening, in the north in Atlantic Standard Time. We have from now until then to choose, to foster and to nourish, the seeds that we will plant.
It's a time of personal transformation when we are, in a sense, pregnant with ourselves, a period of projection when the dreaming of dreams that happened through the winter begins to take form.
For me, this is perhaps the most meaningful part of the celebration of Imbolc. There might be cardamom in the coffee, or Indian style ginger tea, perhaps some kind of a loaf or cake with fruit, and spices, and nuts. Perhaps it will be a weekend to enjoy camembert or brie, or some other kind of special and festive cheese, and a conscious enjoyment of butter or ghee. Yet, as I light the candles and reflect on a clean fresh house - and the beginning of the beginning of spring - it is most deeply a time of projection, of setting intentions, of the making of wishes…for this is the season when wishes come true.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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“To cover all the earth with sheets of leather.
Where could such amounts of leather be found?
But simply wrap some leather around your feet
and it is as if the whole earth had been covered!
Likewise we can never take
and turn aside the outer course of things,
but only seize and discipline the mind itself
and what is there remaining to be curbed? “
Today, we reflect on old Buddhist wisdom: remain like a log.
Yes, perhaps the man is behaving like an idiot, and what he said is exaggeration, if not an all-out lie. Perhaps he is behaving like a weak-willed and cowardly, disloyal cheat. So will I publicly point out the obvious evidence to conclude the man is behaving like an idiot? Or will I decide to remain like a log?
She asks: “does this make me look fat?”. She asks you to listen, when you want to offer advice. What to do? Remain like a log.
What is the greater wisdom? What is the greater act of strength?
Often, we know how to act because we know when and how to refrain from acting, not because we are afraid to act – because we somehow repress what we are unable to say or to do – but rather because we are wise and strong enough not to act.
Do you have the steady strength of mind to remain like a log?
The advice is that of the eighth century Indian Buddhist monk Shantideva. He is credited as author of the Bodhisattvacharyavatara, “The Way of the Bodhisattva”.
Shantideva was born a prince in a kingdom of present day Gujarat in India. Moved by the Buddha's teachings, and inspired by the bodhisattva of wisdom Manjushri, he renounced his royal life and become a monk at the famous Nalanda Buddhist university, located in the state of Bihar near sites where the Buddha taught.
Shantideva was believed to be lazy. His fellow monks thought he was good for nothing but eating, sleeping and shitting. So, they decided to try to shame him into leaving the university. Every week at Nalanda, a public teaching was given, usually by a senior monk. The monks decided to ask Shantideva to give the teaching. He denied several requests, but one day – to their surprise – he agreed, and, at the appointed time, he sat in the teaching seat and asked those who were gathered: would they like to hear a well-known teaching or to hear something new? They asked to hear something new, and so Shantideva began to teach what has become among the most influential texts in Mahayana Buddhist tradition.
I was asked to answer the questions: how to work with guilt, anger and aggression? One way is to have sufficient self-awareness and mental strength to prevent the next thing we will feel badly about from happening: know when and how to remain like a log.
Yes, perhaps the man is behaving like an idiot, both rude and ridiculous.
What to do?
As offered in the translation by the Padmakara Translation Group, Shantideva says:
“When the urge arises in the mind
to feelings of desire or wrathful hate,
do not act! Be silent, do not speak!
And like a log you should remain.
When the mind is wild with mockery
and filled with pride and haughty arrogance,
and when you want to show the hidden faults of others,
to bring up old dissensions or to act deceitfully,
And when you want to fish for praise,
or criticize and spoil another's name,
or use harsh language, sparring for a fight,
it's then that like a log you should remain.
And when you want to do another down,
and cultivate advantage for yourself,
and when the wish to gossip comes to you
it’s then like a log you should remain.
Impatience, indolence, faint-heartedness
and likewise prideful speech and insolence,
attachment to your side - when these arise,
it is then that like a log you should remain.
Examine thus yourself from every side.
Note harmful thoughts and every futile striving.
Thus it is that heroes in the spiritual path
Apply the remedies to keep a steady mind.
With perfect and unyielding faith,
with steadfastness, respect, and courtesy,
with modesty and conscientiousness,
work calmly for the happiness of others.
Thus with a free and untrammeled mind,
put on an ever-smiling countenance.
Rid yourself of scowling, wrathful frowns.
And be a true and honest friend to all.”
The man is behaving like an idiot. Will I tell him this? Will I remain like a log…which, strictly speaking, is probably the best way to show him he is behaving like an idiot…because he will see it in the contrast.
He is rude. Will I also be rude? He is aggressive. Will I also be aggressive? She is disrespectful. Will I also be disrespectful? She is demeaning. Will I also be demeaning? Do I know how to remain like a log?
Can I choose when to act, and when not to act, what to say and how to say it? Not repressing, nor keeping silent, because I have been silenced, but do I have the strength and steadiness of mind to choose?
Action and reaction are two ends of a same stick. If he jabs me, must I jab him back with that stick?
Do we have the steadiness of mind to let go and relax. Can we be still and silent, not because we are weak, but because we are strong?
If I were to cover the whole world in leather, where could that much leather be found? But wrap leather around my feet, and it is as if the whole earth is covered.
Try to manage all of the outside things - the hurts and the shamings, the pride, and the pettiness, the bitterness - it is as if we were to try to cover the whole earth in leather.
Learn how to be calm and steady of mind – practice the mental discipline of training the mind to be able to be still - it will be as if we covered the whole earth in leather, because we will have wrapped leather around our own feet.
“To keep a guard again and yet again
upon the state of actions of our thoughts and deeds -.
This and only this defines
the nature and the sense of mental awareness.
But all this must be acted on in truth,
for what is to be gained by mouthing syllables?
What invalid was ever helped,
by merely reading in the doctor's treatises?”
Yes, demonstrably the man is behaving like an idiot. Do I need to do the same?
Do I have the patience, mental strength, kindness and disciplined awareness of my actions and thoughts to make choices that I can live with, without regret?
Know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away and when to run. Know when and how to remain like a log.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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The Precious Human Birth….
On Working with Guilt
"This human birth is precious. Our opportunity to awaken.
The body is impermanent and time of death is uncertain.
The cause and effect of karma shapes the course of our lives.
Life has inevitable difficulties. No one can control it all.
This life we must know as the tiny splash of a raindrop,
a thing of beauty that disappears even as it comes into being.
Therefore I recall my inspiration and aspiration (to engage the spiritual path) and resolve to make use of every day and night in order to realize it."
I have been told that, when the Dalai Lama first began to speak to western students, someone in an audience asked a question that he didn't understand. So he asked the translator to explain the question, and the question was asked, and repeated and again clarified.
The translator was explaining to the Dalai Lama what guilt is. I have been told the Dalai Lama expressed disbelief: “Do you mean to tell me that I am speaking to a room full of people who somehow have the idea that they are basically and fundamentally unworthy and bad?”.
Who would think such a thing? Guilt was not known in his home culture.
Traditional Tibetan culture knows the idea of regret: to do something, to feel badly about it, and then to seek to make it right. Regret is the third step in a complete karmic act. A complete karmic act includes: intention, the action itself, and the presence or absence of regret.
To feel badly about something one has done, and then to work to make it right again: this is regret.
To do something that one feels badly about, and to take this as evidence one is basically and fundamentally bad and unworthy, so that the weight of this sucks and crushes life out of us - heavy, sticky, dragging us down, suffocating us as if we were trapped in some deep cavern, unable to be free of it enough to work to set things right again, to let go and move on: how does this serve us?
Ancient Indian, like Tibetan, culture holds that life itself is fundamentally good. As humans we are alive - some days more than others – but we are alive.
Life itself is descent, worthy and fundamentally good – in a way so very far beyond any kind of a distinction between good or bad – and therefore so are we…because we are alive.
We are basically descent, worthy, kind, wise, resourceful, strong and fundamentally good, like life itself. There’s not much we can do about that.
There may be behavior that we regret, that we will learn from and seek to correct. The being itself is good because life itself is good.
There may be a systematic and repeat pattern of behavior that causes harm or that we regret. That behavior is unfortunate. The being is good, able to learn, to change and to grow.
I have been asked to answer the question how to work with guilt, the big stuff that weighs us down and suffocates, and the small stuff that eats you, that you think about in the night, and that – if we are not careful - you may think about on your deathbed.
How to work with guilt?
Let us begin by exploring the traditional Buddhist idea of the precious human birth.
"This human birth is precious. Our opportunity to awaken.
The body is impermanent and time of death is uncertain.
The cause and effect of karma shapes the course of our lives.
Life has inevitable difficulties. No one can control it all.
This life we must know as the tiny splash of a raindrop,
a thing of beauty that disappears even as it comes into being.
Therefore I recall my inspiration and aspiration (to engage the spiritual path) and resolve to make use of every day and night in order to realize it."
It is a rendering into English of a well-known passage by a 14th century Tibetan Buddhist master named Tsongkhapa.
The human birth is precious because it is our opportunity to awaken. We are, most fortunately, born with the human birth. This means we are just confused enough to be able to learn, and to move forward in our gradual process of spiritual maturation.
This is the gift. It's a Goldilocks view of the human experience. We are just confused enough – it’s just right - to be able to see through that confusion, to learn and adjust, to let go and move on to the next learning.
In the traditional Buddhist view, there are six realms, understood as both internal and external states of the mind. There is a hell realm, where there is such intense suffering it becomes nearly impossible to see anything other than suffering.
There is a hungry ghost realm. The hungry ghost has a very big belly and a very thin neck. What it is we are starving for, we reach out for it, and it disappears even as it comes into our hand. We can never be fed, so it is a life of craving, of deep starvation, and it becomes difficult to move forward.
The animal realm is said to be a realm where the being does not have enough self- awareness for there to be strong spiritual maturation or growth. This is not to say that animals are less than humans. Certainly Sarah-the-Wonder-Dog - the golden retriever I once lived with - had a very clear understanding of habitual patterns of the mind as it related to walks and cookies. In my biased opinion that comes through the lens of love, she was a remarkable being who chose to be in the body of an astonishingly beautiful dog in order to be of benefit to others. The tradition would understand that – as remarkable as she was when she came into that body - it was difficult for her to spiritually evolve within the context of an animal birth because there is not sufficient self-awareness to be able to deeply learn and to grow.
In the jealous god realm, people are wrapped up quite strongly in pride; they think they are gods, but they're not. They are constantly struggling to be what they're not, competing and measuring, and not able to be what they are because they are so focused on what they are not. The god realm is considered the realm of greatest happiness, one could say, but I'm told that, in the god realm life, lasts for a seemingly infinite period of time, and the time delay between the cause of an action and the effect of an action is so unbelievably long that it becomes basically impossible to learn anything.
In the space in-between the animal realm and the jealous gods lies the human realm, precious because it is the state that best permits our spiritual growth. Just confused enough, we are able to make our mistakes, and then to see them, to work to make things right, to learn, let go and move on to our next learning.
By its very nature, among the richest opportunities to learn and to grow are those opportunities that come from having made the mistakes that we most deeply regret.
The stages of a complete karmic act: the intention to act, the action itself, and the presence or absence of regret. To this can be added a fourth step: the person or situation that is being acted upon.
The tradition does not have a fifth step which is to say that one bears the weight of the guilt of one's mistakes and becomes immobilized and suffocated by it.
The purpose of our lives it is to live. By virtue of the fact that we are born a human, we must necessarily act. So we engage in an endless series of causes and effects, and we thus engage in an endless series of opportunities to grow, and to learn, from our mistakes and from the suffering that we have experienced or somehow imposed on others.
There is a beauty to life that we are missing if we somehow have the sense that we must be “perfect”, or behave “perfectly” - all the time - in order to be “good enough”. Life itself is good enough. We come along for that ride. That ride is the journey of deep spiritual learning and growth. Our growth requires our mistakes.
Life itself, of which we are a part, has a beauty beyond measure and its own inherent perfection. It is not that we must be perfect, or our behavior must be perfect, in order to be worthy of honor, respect and love, and our own forgiveness.
We are alive, and life itself somehow - in its perfection - unfolds in a way which permits us to taste with a ripe directness the effect of our actions, the intention of our actions, and the action itself.
Cause and effect are both ends of a same stick. What good could come from beating ourselves with that stick?
If we taste the effect of our cause and find it bitter, then we taste the bitterness, and this permits us to make different choices, and to begin to behave in a way which will make our lives, and those that surround us, sweeter.
We engage cause and effect simultaneously. We pick up both ends of a same stick.
The human birth is precious because it is an opportunity to awaken, to spiritually evolve, to learn and to grow. We honor life itself in part by engaging this opportunity, by permitting ourselves to learn and then also to grow.
Letting go of a weight of guilt when we are able is part of what permits us to move on, and the letting go of guilt can be itself a very valuable lesson to learn. Life is good. We engage a full range of human experiences. We learn from it all.
The human birth is traditionally considered precious also because it is rare.
How rare is it to have this human opportunity to learn, and to grow, to evolve and to move on?
It is said that it would be as if to take a pin and to place it in a large field. You then you go up into an airplane, high about the clouds. You reach out the window of the airplane holding a single green pea. You drop the single green pea, and the single green pea goes out from your hand, from the window of the airplane. It falls to the ground. It falls on the needle that you placed in the ground, and it stays there.
What are the odds that this could happen? It is essentially unimaginable.
These are the odds, they say, that we would find ourselves in a human body. It would have been much more statistically likely to be a mosquito, an amoeba or an ant.
As humans, we are just confused enough to be able to learn.
Guilt is a way of refusing this very core quality of being alive. In this way, it is a shutting down and closing off of life itself. That's what makes it so heavy and suffocating.
It is somehow failing to appreciate that the miracle of the human experience of being alive is that we are able to act. We will necessarily engage cause and effect simultaneously. The intention, the action, the effect of these actions: these are parts of a whole. If we did not intend to cause harm, or if we regret having caused harm, then we've already begun to slowly and gently dismember - or take apart - this harm that we have done.
If the guilt is heavy and hard, consider actively feeling and expressing regret.
I'm so sorry I did this.
It can be expressed internally. Perhaps you would like to journal or write it down. It may, or may no, be possible or appropriate to say it out loud to another. Consider saying it aloud to yourself. If there has been this suffering, then the feeling of regret is part of how we open to the possibility of letting go. Because we have opened to the possibility of letting go, we begin to open again to an engaging of life itself.
We are able to learn, and having learned, we are able make different choices in times to come. The human birth is precious. We are just confused enough to be able to learn, to grow, to evolve, to shift and change. It requires the learning, and the growing, and then the ability to let go of that which we regret in order to open to the possibility of moving on.
It’s not about what we do. It’s not about what we did. It’s about who we are….and then what we do about it.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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Until the Water Runs Clear
and the Right Action Arises by Itself
Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water runs clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?
I'm Adela, and this is Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. Together we will deepen our connection with our ourselves, strengthen our relations with others, and re-think together how we connect with our world.
If yelling back when someone yells at you was going to work, it would have worked by now. Thank you for joining us as we explore the potential of patience.
“The ancient masters were profound and subtle. Their wisdom was unfathomable. There is no way to describe it. All we can describe is their appearance.
They were careful, as someone crossing an iced-over a stream. Alert as a warrior in enemy territory. Courteous as a guest. Fluid as melting ice. Shapeable as a block of wood. Receptive as a valley. Clear as a glass of water.
Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action rises by itself?
The master doesn't seek fulfillment. Not seeking, not expecting, she is present and can welcome all things.”
It is Verse 15 of the Tao Te Ching, one of the foundational texts of the Chinese wisdom tradition known as Taoism. Its writing is accredited to the master Lao-Tzu who lived in the axial age of human philosophy, around 500 BCE; he and was a contemporary with Gautama Buddha – founder of Buddhist tradition - and Pythagoras, among other ancient Greek philosophers.
This afternoon someone asked me, “May I come and talk to you? I need you to help me figure out if I should do this or should I do that? It's a big decision. There are so many variables to consider. I am hesitant and confused…I don't know what to do."
If we don't know what to do, if the mind is in a turmoil - there are so many choices and so many possibilities and big consequences to consider – among the options is patience. Have the patience to wait, until your mud settles and the water runs clear; remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself.
In Buddhist tradition patience is considered to be an antidote to aggression.
Sometimes the waters that get stirred - and the mud that is churned happens in a way that is heated - and we express aggression to others or ourselves - or others express and show aggression to us.
Buddhist psychology tells us that patience is an antidote to aggression.
I sometimes have felt that I have learned about patience by having so much experience of impatience. Of the various ways that it's possible to express aggression in relation to the inside world, or in relation to the outside world, impatience is probably the one I am most familiar with: wanting things to be other than they are. The situation in my inside world, or the situation in my outside world, should somehow be different. There must somehow be something wrong. This should be finished already! How could this not have happened yet! This is happening now! How could this possibly be happening now! He did this in the past. She did this in the past. They said in the past. How could they have done that! The past should have been different. The past should not have been like that.
There is just something wrong.
The instinct to push way is one very basic understanding of aggression: I do not want him or her, or this or that. This should be different! That should be different! I want my world to be other than it is. I do not want to be with my experience as it is. There should be a different now.
The antidote to the form of aggression that is impatience is to be patient. Can we be patient with ourselves, with other people, our situation, our lives?
If nothing else has the ease of being choiceless. Some things are so much easier to do because we must. Experience now. We can wish now, or the past, or the future to be different. Push away and wish it to be different if we want to, but wishing it different does not change the taste of now. Now tastes of now.
To taste the taste of now does imply trust. Can we trust that now is enough? Now has everything we need. It – like us – has resilience, wisdom, insight and strength. If we just breathe, and be with it, it is OK. It will show us what we need to do. The answers are all there, behind the surface and beyond the drama. The more we can just breathe and be present with now, the more we develop the taste for it, and the better we are able to recognize it when we are there.
Just breathe: let go and relax. Can we be patient, until your mud settles and the water runs clear, until the mind stops churning, and we stop punching and kicking and fighting the choiceless ever-presence of now.
Just breathe: let go and relax. Be patient; the waters will run clear, and what we need to say or do will come to us, will show itself to us. Chase after it too hard, and we can chase it away.
Do we have the patience to wait, until our mud settles, and the mind runs clear, and the right action arises by itself.
The wisdom traditions of China, or India, or Tibet have a strong appreciation for wisdom. This includes the wisdom of common sense.
It's very good to have the patience to wait until the mud settles from a place of basic safety. If what we want to be different in our current situation is something that is taking away from our experience of basic safety, please do what is needed to be safe. The mud settles so the waters can run clear only if we are basically safe. Fear – like doubt – stirs the waters.
If it is a question of working with aggression, with our own or that of others, direct aggression in its variety of forms, passive or manipulative aggression in its variety of forms, aggression that is pre-meditated, that is unintentional, that is imposed because we can, that is acted out because we cannot stop ourselves….
First, please be safe. If we are the ones acting out, press pause. Then, consider applying patience. It is old medicine.
Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles, and the water is clear; can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?
If yelling back, when someone tells at you, was going to work, it would have worked by now. Responding to aggression with aggression will increase aggression: it is based in fear; it must feed on fear; it will generate more fear and tighten the trap for everyone.
If someone is pushing away a now – a person, a situation, a behaviour, a thing – that they don’t want, sometimes what they most want is for someone to push back, to engage in the conflict. If someone yells back, we can become distracted by that yelling – entertained by that drama – and be protected from tasting the taste of now.
Aggression burns like a fire. If someone pushes away, and meets someone who will push back, then we have fuel for that fire. Often when the person yells – in the infinite ways we have of yelling – what they most want is someone to yell with and then someone to yell back. It is such strong protection – in its drama and distraction – from the taste of now. The trouble is that now is all there is; it is the only thing that is real. We can live life only in the now that is every breath.
Be patient. Be present. Hold a steady mind with one’s self. Be generous enough to be patient with one’s self, the other person and the entire scene, and the mud settles. The water runs clear.
We can trust now. Now is enough. Reach into it directly enough, deeply enough, and it is kind and wise and strong, sufficient, absent of absence: now contains what we need. Be patient. Remain unmoving – offer space to ourselves, the other person and the situation as a whole – and the right action will arise by itself.
“The ancient masters were profound and subtle. Their wisdom was unfathomable. There is no way to describe it. All we can describe is their appearance.
They were careful, as someone crossing an iced over a stream. Alert as a warrior in enemy territory. Courteous as a guest. Fluid as melting ice. Shapeable as a block of wood. Receptive as a valley. Clear as a glass of water.
Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action rises by itself?
The master doesn't seek fulfillment. Not seeking, not expecting, she is present and can welcome all things.”
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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Weeding is the Way
to Get Weeding Done
Hello everyone! Happy new year!
At the beginning of the new solar year, many people think back to where we have been, and reflect on where we are going. We dream dreams. We make plans. We plant seeds. Today we explore: weeding is the way to get weeding done.
I'm Adela, and this is Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. Together we will deepen our connection with our ourselves, strengthen our relations with others, and re-think together how we connect with our world.
Thank you for joining us as we explore: weeding is the way to get weeding done.
The new solar year is a time for new beginnings: the dreaming of dreams and the planting of seeds. It is the opportunity for a fresh start. We look back where we have been. We think about the momentum that we are establishing and the direction we are headed, and often we will resolve to make changes that we feel will be of benefit. In this way, it is a time for a clean and fresh start. We think about what to accept in our lives and what to reject.
I have been asked to speak about how to let go, how to forgive, how to work with guilt or aggression, and we will have conversations like this.
For now, as a next step, let us explore the possibility that - at its most basic level - we resolve, we decide, what to accept and what to reject. We open in order to let go, and in so doing we receive a fresh start.
It is a pleasure for me that we have a gap between the beginning of the new solar year - associated in many people's experience with the changing of the calendar year on January 1st - and the beginning of the new lunar year which some people call Chinese New Year. It is known in Tibetan tradition as Losar. It is as though we get to have a fresh start twice. The new solar year we begin formally at the time of the winter solstice associated with the calendar change of January 1st. It is followed some weeks later by the new lunar year. This year Losar will be celebrated February 5th.
It is a time to reflect and begin to dream what it is we wish to let go what it is we wish to take with us.
In some traditional cultures, the beginning of the year is symbolically marked by the fresh start that comes from a good cleaning of our outside personal space: home, office, car. We let go of the dirt. We enjoy the fresh start. In the same way, it is a time to clean the inside world: a letting go of the dirt and receiving a fresh start.
It can feel big, and hard, and complicated. There are things that can stick to us deeply and edges that cut at us, and yet - at its most simple - weeding is the way to get weeding done.
The expression was a used in a conversation I had this past summer with the monk who is the gardener at the Buddhist monastery in Cape Breton where I am considered family. I had gotten behind in the weeding in my own garden. I was bemoaning the weeds especially that were growing in the gravel driveway, and I was reflecting on how to get rid of these weeds, the ones in the gravel driveway, but there were also many other weeds to choose from. I take care of rather large gardens. There can be any number of weeds. So I was wondering about this tool or that tool, trying to visualize how best to accomplish this seemingly enormous task, worrying and feeling bad because it was not done yet, and the monk who is the abbey gardener looked at me with some pondering and observed: weeding is the way to get weeding done.
Jogging is the way to get jogging done. Preparing healthy food and bringing it for lunch is the way to eat more healthy food. Putting greens in a smoothie or in a salad bowl is the way to eat more greens. Going to the gym is the way to get to the gym. Calling the girl is the way to call the girl. Having the difficult conversation is the way to have the difficult conversation.
In the wishing and the wanting of things to be different ,in the dreaming of dreams, and in the struggle as we stir our inner muck, it is possible for the roots of our weeds to get a bit stuck. It is possible to be caught up in the wishing, or planning, or worrying, or regretting. The thinking that surrounds it can be quite complex. Often, the doing is very simple.
Doing it is the way to get it done.
It can feel so heavy to carry around the weight of the thinking about the wish, the regret, the guilt, the worry. Many things can take much more time and energy to think about than they actually take to accomplish. The list of undone things, the conversations we wish we had but have not yet, the conversations we have had that went badly: so much happens in the mind that can take so much room in our lives. Making it right is the way to make it right again. Doing it is the way to get it done. Starting it is the way to get started.
We pull one weed at a time.
In Tibetan monastic tradition, there is a practice of how to receive a fresh start which dates back to the lifetime of the Buddha himself in 500 B.C. It is called Sojong. It is a ceremony that takes place at the full and new Moon, which is to say two times every month. It is a ceremonial fresh start.
Is there some kind of ceremony that you would like to do for yourself to mark your new beginning? To mark your letting go? Will you write the list of things you wish to let go and offer it somehow? Maybe you will throw one stone in the river for each of the things you wish to let go? Will you bury grow bulbs in a container indoors as a planting of what you wish to plant in your life?
The Buddhist ceremony called Sojong is the time twice a month to reflect on how we have connected to our inside world and how we have connected to our outside world. What is it that we regret? What is it that we need to set right?
Then, we set things right. The day before the sojong ceremony is the time to have the difficult conversations, to accomplish undone things that are weighing us down and would prevent us from being able to move forward. It is a ritual time to let go of what is holding us back and create the space for a fresh start.
A nun or monk will show up at the sojong ceremony with a freshly shaved head, a clean set of robes, and a freshly cleaned room. Then, there is a ceremony of accepting the fresh start and renewing the intention of the direction that we are setting as we move forward in our lives.
We let go of what needs to be let go in order to receive the space that permits the fresh start.
In this traditional Tibetan context, it happens in relation to the renewal of moon cycles, twice a month, but the beginning of a new solar year and the beginning of the new lunar year in early February, and that glorious space in-between is another time like that. We pause to reflect: what we need to do let go? What undone thing must be released or accomplished? What do we need to set right? What are the hard conversations we need to have? Then we do them in order to create the space for new things to arise in the new time to come.
At its most basic, weeding is the way to get weeding done. Letting go is the way to let go.
I can offer that, if there are things that I need to let go, sometimes, it is not so much that I let go but that I cannot hang on any more.
Other times, it is that I want to let go, but that I am somehow so much attached to it that it is like the weed in the gravel driveway. I can pull at the top, but I will not succeed in pulling out the root.
When this happens, sometimes it's useful for me to think not that I am letting go, which can be quite “me” focused. Sometimes it is helpful to think rather that that which I am releasing, I offer. This pain, this frustration, this difficult experience, this heaviness that is somehow holding me back, I offer it. If there is any good that would come from this experience, may that be for the benefit of all beings. It has a quality of offering this experience of life to life itself. In this way, if the gesture becomes one of connecting to a greater experience of the essence of life itself, it becomes about the connection. The connection helps to release what cuts us off or holds us back.
Yet, often, it begins with a decision. We can struggle, and waffle, and a wish, or feel the weight of the guilt, the frustration, the betrayal. Sometimes things run their own course in a way that is a very organic, and they cannot be made to go faster even if we may wish it to be so ,but other times, though, the wallowing can itself become a kind of trap, and the gateway out of that trap is the decision, the resolve.
I can visualize weeding. I can look for better tools. I can wish there was this or that different. I can feel pain, and annoyance, at the weeds that are growing in the driveway and on the land. Think about it and struggle with it as long as I may wish, in the end: weeding is the way to get weeding done.
We decide, to some degree, what to accept and what to reject in our lives.
Often such decisions happen at the coming of a new year. The changing of the calendar gives us all a fresh start. What will we let go in order to create room for something new to arise in this time of new beginning?
The way to let to go is to let go. The way to plant seeds is to plant seeds.
The way to get it done is to do it.
May the journey in this new year bring you joy.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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The Heart is a Muscle:
It Expands and Contracts
The average resting heart rate is somewhere between 60 and 100 beats per minute.
So, if we imagine an average of 80 beats per minute, your heart will beat 4,800 times per hour. Today it will beat 115,200 times. In the course of a year, the heart will beat 42,048,000 times, and, if you live to be 80 years old, your heart will have beaten 3,363,840,000 times.
The heart is a muscle: it expands and contracts.
I'm Adela, and this is Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. Together we will deepen our connection with our ourselves, strengthen our relations with others, and re-think together how we connect with our world.
Thank you for joining us as we explore the heart as a muscle: it expands and contracts
The heart is a muscle. It opens and closes: it expands; it contracts.
115,200 times today you will open and close the heart. This is where life comes from. It is the exercise of opening and closing.
How many times will we open today? How many times will we close? Will we feel that we move through the day from this space created by the opening? Will we feel that we move through the day from the place of the wall: to harden the arteries…to harden in one's life. Will we move from a place that is hard? Will we move from a place that is flexible?
Open and close. Open and close. Life comes from this space that is created between the openings and closings of the heart.
What makes us open? What makes us close?
Some of you are familiar with the ancient Indian creation story of the creation of the world from an egg. There was once upon a time, in the time before time, a golden egg. It floated on an ocean of waters that existed in this time before time. It moved. It opened. The top became the sky. The bottom became the earth and the space in-between became the atmospheric realm in which we all live.
Life is in the space in-between in this old Indian world. This ocean of the time before time is non-different from the oceans on the earth, or the ocean that is the sky. Of course the sky is an ocean! If the sky were not an ocean, it would not be blue! It is non-different from the ocean that is the atmosphere, the space in between. If the atmosphere were not an ocean, where would rain come from? And there is an ocean of the human heart. The heart is an ocean. Life streams through that space in between.
It is said that the space in-between the Earth and the sky is propped apart. It is propped apart by the sun. It is not the rays of the sun that prop the earth and sky apart like eyes held open by toothpicks. It is rather that the sun travels through the sky – following the pathway of the sun - moving between the heavens and the earth. It is this cyclical process of the movement along the pathway of the sun that props the earth and sky apart. It's like a racetrack: the cyclical oval of a marathon running race track or a motor car race track.
The movement of the sun through the sky: it is said to be to made possible by the Asvins. They are twin gods, horses, who pull the sun in a chariot in its pathway through the sky, propping apart the heavens and the earth to create that space in-between in which we live.
We live because of the space in-between the contractions of the heart, opening and closing. We open and there is a space for the ocean of the heart that its rivers may flow and give us life.
In the old Indian world, the ocean of the human heart is also understood as the place of origin for the hymns and songs of praise that are given as offerings: the offering streams from the heart. These songs of praise, going from the heart of the human, stream to the ocean of the heart of the gods. There is the essence of these songs of praise which says, “Please receive what it is that I have to give. Please allow me to receive what I need to be able to continue to give.” We live in this space in between, a space propped open by the cycle of giving and receiving.
This shape of the old Indian world is the world view that is the place of beginning for Hindu and Buddhist and Jain religious traditions, the religions that will grow from the Indian subcontinent.
It is therefore the basis of the Buddhist, Hindu and Jain understanding of the importance of hospitality and generosity. In the Buddhist view, the giver, the receiver and the gift are one, different expressions of a same flow of life.
The ocean of the heart of the human, the ocean of the heart of the gods, the ocean that is the sky, and on the earth, and in the space in-between, the ocean that existed in the time before time: all things flow from this ocean of life and are, in essence, non-different from this ocean that is life itself, as the wave is non-different from the sea.
The rivers of life flow through the ocean of the heart because of its expanding and contracting. The heart is a muscle. What makes it expand and contract is the movement of a muscle. It takes effort. Often it is not conscious effort. Often it comes into our awareness only if, somehow, the rhythm of the openings and the closings is disturbed.
What makes us open? What makes us close? What props us open so the heart can remain open to be able to move from that place where the giver, the receiver and the gift are one? What holds us closed or cut off, separate from a river of life?
I have been asked to speak of forgiveness, and of guilt, and of how to let go. There is so much that is part of the process of the opening. There is so much of the part of the process of opening up again: closing – for as long as we are alive – is only that which permits us to open up again…next time…stronger. The heart is a muscle.
Let us begin by observing that it is the exercise of opening and closing which makes the heart resilient and strong.
We live because of the life essence that moves through our bodies in a way very similar to how the essence of life - that is depicted by water - moves through our world. In our world, this life essence was – in old India - understood to move, to be pumped, by this act of offering at the ritual place of offering - where there would be the act of giving and receiving - as the life essence moves from the ocean of the heart of the humans, to the ocean of the heart of the gods, and from the heart of the gods through this space in between that it might be received again by humans, in order that it could flow again to the gods. The giver, receiver and the gift are one, different and yet a same expression of the flow of life itself.
We give and receive with an open hand. The flow of the giving and receiving is the pump that moves this river of life which is symbolized by the pathway of this sun that flows between the heavens and the earth. It is the flow of giving and receiving which props apart the heavens and the earth in order that we have the space to live, in that space in-between, as opposed to being cut off or closed.
In alternate versions of this creation story, it is the great god Indra who has as his a weapon the thunderbolt that will divide a primordial mountain: the top becomes the sky, the bottom becomes the earth, and this space in-between is that space in which we live.
In other versions of the story that primordial mountain is symbolized by a demon whose name is Vritra. It means “to be enclosed”. The act of the hero is to create the space in which we live and to overcome an instinct for enclosure.
Our life is cut off if we feel closed off or entrapped, if there is hardening of the arteries, closing off of arteries that become congested when there is not enough space in-between.
Before exploring in other conversations how we open or how we close, let us first observe that life is the act of opening and then overcoming the act of closing: it depends on a space created between these two.
We give and receive with an open hand. Offering and receiving are like the openings and closings. Both require the space – and vulnerability – of the open hand. Offering and receiving: it is a muscle that pumps the essence of life itself through the greater world and through our internal worlds.
There are so many ways that we open our heart, and there are so many ways that that openness can be cut off, but life itself comes not from one or the other. It is the openings and closings, and the openings up again that create the space in-between, just like the space in my room is created by the presence of its opposing walls.
It is not that the heart is only always open, although they would understand that there is an essence of that ocean of the heart which existed in the time before time, the time before openings and closings, an essence of the heart which can never be closed.
It is the holy of holies inside the human heart, like the holy of holies in the most sacred spaces in our world: inside the cathedrals of medieval Europe as it is inside the sacred structures of old Egypt, as I expect it is also inside the structures of the Mayans, and as I know it is also inside the structures of the temples of India.
There is the sweetness of a space of the human heart - which is like the ocean of the time before time - which cannot be closed, but the exercise of the human experience is to find that place which is not closeable by means of the exercising of that muscle that opens and closes an average of 80 times a minute, 4,800 times per hour, 115,200 times per day, 42,048,000 times per year, and - if we live to be 80 years old - it would be 3,363,840,000 times in this human life.
We live because of a space in-between expansion and contraction which moves an essence of life itself. We learn to live in the space that cannot be closed by living through the stream that is pumped by expanding and contracting. Living is the exercise of engaging in the openings and the closings.
The heart is a muscle: it expands and contracts.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2018, Adela Sandness
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