Select pieces written over the past few years. Click here to see the Newsletter Archive.
Mindfulness meditation practices can offer us a way to pause, breathe and momentarily step back from our problems. This is often exactly what’s needed to get the “creative juices” flowing and allow new, unseen solutions to come forward. A window may appear where there was once only a wall.
There it was. There was still a part of me that was surreptitiously using meditation to bypass what I didn’t want to face in myself; masking it with ‘improvement’ without ever accepting it, let alone loving it.
Fittingly, we start this year at CEC exploring concentration. Concentration blooms in these conditions of energized commitment. While our resolve is still strong, we’ll practice the discipline of starting, again and again, to notice the present moment. Dedication to this practice illuminates a great gift of concentration: that we have a choice in what we pay attention to. And that our minds can get freer when we exercise that choice.
I think then: this freedom is better. Freedom from freedom. Freedom from myself, freedom from the dizziness of a million choices. Parenting is very clarifying. I know my job: keep Eden and Sarah alive. There’s only one thing to do and it is not about me.
As someone who was born into Christianity but raised in a vehemently anti-religious household I thought, “What do I know about devotion?” Then when I turned to the internet for a little research and found mostly the words of preachers, I got scared. “Oh god” (can I even say that???), I am in very uncomfortable territory. How can I make peace with this word, that for me and probably many others, had such religious baggage?