Category Archives: mind – body

Soaking It Up

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Since the first seeds dove into the soil the end of February, the weather has been rather dramatic.  There are strong, sunny days when heat seems to rise off the dark soil, and I imagine the seeds waking up warm and cozy, opening themselves to the nutrition of the dirt and the affirming warmth of the sunshine.  There are lots of chilly, wet, very cloudy days, when I imagine the seeds soak up the wet, even soggy, nourishment floating around them, loosening the hard seed covers, encouraging the seed’s stretching and growing–like those little sponges that start out as colorful pills but become great animals for bath times.

The little seeds–and me!–don’t get to choose which are sunny days and which are cold, rainy days.  They’ve got to just keep doing their thing, growing and stretching and taking in what they’re offered, using all the resources of the moment to help them grow.

How are you using the resources you’re being offered this very moment to help you grow?

ending busy-ness

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Here’s the secret: just don’t do it.

(easier said than done? sure.)

In January, I made a decision with myself: I’m not describing myself as busy anymore.

Everyone’s busy.  Everyone’s got too much on their plates.  Many people have many more things on their plates than me.  When asked how you are, what you’re up to, or what’s new, how descriptive is “busy” anyway?

It’s been a challenge to think about how else to respond when the question comes, but it’s forced me to be more consistently reflective about how my days and weeks look.  When I can’t come up with an answer, or when the answer seems to cover much less than the time I use in a day, I’m reminded to reevaluate how I’m using my time.  What am I doing all day?  Sometimes I can’t think of an answer because I’ve spent all day responding to emails, or visiting shut-in or hospitalized parishioners–I forget how much time each of these activities can consume (though one is much more rewarding than the other–the one that includes face-to-face time).

This regular invitation to evaluate my life both helps me to be more aware of time, and allows the other person’s question to be something truly meaningful–more than just a formality two people undergo when they meet.

So, if you’re “busy,” what’s below the surface?  If you couldn’t use the word, what would you say instead?  What are YOU up to these days?

Healing Breath

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In practicing mindfulness and yoga, the breath is our anchor–when our minds try to tiptoe away toward distraction, we smile and gently remind our brains that our lungs are taking over for the present.

In our lives, we try to let the Holy Spirit take over.  We focus on God’s presence, God’s love surrounding us–just like the air we breathe–and we accept and let go of the other things that swirl up around us, tempting us away from the breath, distracting us from God.

Part of the breath’s power in yoga is how, during challenging poses, we imagine that as the breath and the heat it creates is being sent throughout our bodies–especially to those places that are in need of some loosening or some clearing out, allowing a deeper twist or a more complete bend.

The Holy Spirit is the Breath of Life that comes into our bodies, eager to brush out the stinky, dark bits inside us that are holding us back (or maybe that we’re holding on to).  God’s breath is the loosening, healing, heating agent of our souls.

Today, walking with my dog, I was practicing some deep breathing, and as I sometimes do, I was forcing the breath out, contracting my stomach to really squeeze out all the air–mostly because I love the energizing rush of air that rushes into my lungs afterward.  It occurred to me all at once that perhaps, just like our literal breath (and just like so many figurative, spiritual applications as I’ve found and shared above), the Holy Spirit is most ready to come in and fill us up with God’s presence and power when we’ve gotten the emptiest.

As Thomas Keating puts it, “The Gospel teaches that Christ is present in the storm, not just in emerging from the storm.”

Maranatha!

Being Present – On Which to Chew

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“The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them for eternity.  He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present.  For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”

– The Screwtape Letters

Screwtape goes on to talk about the various pros and cons of trapping a given “patient” in either the Past, or the Future; the Past, while distracting, is of limited use, he says, because there isn’t much unknown–it’s been experienced, it can draw one off a good path, but it doesn’t take them much of anywhere else.  The Future, however, is very fruitful for despair’s handmaids, as tempters may suggest all sorts of fearful, disastrous, unknown, untested events, possibilities, and thoughts, all of which come at an alarming speed, producing a scurrying mind with little connection to reality.

Mindfulness, a practice I suspect our dear mystical brothers and sisters knew well, is fantastically useful in combating the mind’s susceptibility to darting around anywhere except This Moment.  Reality, which can sometimes burn us with its brightness, might make us want to run behind the dark shadow of the Past, or to find tasty unreality in the Future, but it is only in living in the bright reality of the present moment that its healing heat can transform us (in this Church season of Epiphany, the bright truth of God’s love shines hot on humanity through the person of Jesus Christ).

More by me on The Screwtape Letters: here & here.

Smiling at Difficulties

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Another skill I’ve learned from yoga:

smiling when what you want to do is growl, or frown, or scream.

This week, as the Amsa community continues to live into and unpack the ramifications of dear leaders moving to a new community, I’m noticing even more the ways that starting to practice yoga there has helped me to respond with more generosity to people, events, and  moments in my life.

When I read an email that stung, my knee-jerk response was to smile.  Smiling, which you may know, brings on good feelings, lowers tension, and takes less energy than frowning.

During our “warm” yoga sessions, as we hold ourselves and breathe in chair pose (a wall-less squat) for the third or fourth time, Kim always tells us to smile.  Smiling helps us to release the tension we may be holding our bodies during the challenging position.  In life, smiling helps us to release the tension we may be holding our bodies during a challenging moment (or interacting with a challenging person!).