Where there is prayer, there is much of the Spirit; where there is much of the Spirit, there will be ever-increasing prayer. - Andrew Murray All I know is when I pray, coincidences happen; and when I don't pray they don't happen. - Dan Hayes -photo from Karin Henseler @ Pixabay.com Accepting the Power of Prayer Many readers of this blog, know me and my story. I tend to avoid religious themes and references to God ever since I distanced…
No Mud, No Lotus
Without suffering, there’s no happiness.
So we shouldn’t discriminate against the mud.
We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world with a lot of tenderness.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Above photo taken by Denyse at Meadowlark Botanical Gardens, July 2022
Inhale, MMMMMMMM. I practice bumble bee breath in tune with the army of leaf blowers who are clearing the common area where I live. I woke up depressed and out of sorts because of a number of things going on in my life. When the leaf blowers start too early their annoying high pitched hum makes things worse. Then a funny thing happened… As I sipped my first cup of coffee, barely awake, I inhaled and started humming to the pitch of the leaf blowers. Just like I teach in my I AM™ Yoga Nidra classes, the humming transports me away from my irritated thinking. For the past two months, I’ve been doing a daily Yoga Nidra practice. This is the first time it showed up unannounced with my morning coffee.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover I had not lived.
–Henry David Thoreau
Above photo credit Erin Arvella –
Yoga at Sunset on the Summit above the Continental Divide #Feathered Pipe Ranch
I hear my father’s voice when I see the above quote by Henry David Thoreau. Somewhere in the background, I hear the bold sound track of The Pines of Rome. In the mid 1960s, my Dad took a sabbatical from teaching high school. He was awarded a John Hay Fellowship to study in a Masters program at Harvard. Our family of 5 ventured from home in a used Country Squire station wagon, filled with the belongings that would serve us for the year. On one very long day, we drove from our modest suburban Philadelphia home to Massachusetts to live in a 2 bedroom apartment in Cambridge.
“If we dare to dream, we must dare to wake up. When we come to rub our eyes wide open and face up to realness, we can clear our vision and curb a whirlwind of bewilderment that might break our mind apart, once fantasy wrangles with reality and our awareness denies the true colors of facts. (“Behind the frosted glass”)”
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