meditation
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A Path Into Yoga: Part One
The ego-mind lives in fear of so much that cannot be avoided or controlled: change, failure, loss, weakness, judgment, shame, pain, and death. My ego-mind, for instance, does not want you to know that I have a son who I was never there for, because my life was a mess, and I was a mess. Continue reading
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Basho’s Traveling Companion
On the jade-colored plate, yellow fruit. Between the window and folding screen, a bed, some clothing. In the stillness of the forest, water flowing. On the mountainside, plum blossoms. In the rain and mud, wild horses. From a bowl in the hermit’s shelter, steam rising. In the iron stove, embers glowing. At the edge of Continue reading
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Big Sur
A whale spouted by and I dreamt of the story my life could tell. I remembered many loved and lost, I received the world, had a conversation with the cosmos. A whale spouted by, the vastness deepened. I sat, hands in lap, left over right, palms up, thumbs touching. A whale spouted by, I smelled Continue reading
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Whirlwind: How The Heart Is Wiser Than The Mind
There are times when our thoughts sweep us away. We get caught up in the whirlwind of the mind’s magnetic pull, and something needs to happen to reel us back to the moment we’re actually in and what is happening there. It could be something small: we have forgotten the bread in the oven, or Continue reading
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A Passage On Writing From Natalie Goldberg
Excerpt from “Thunder and Lightning” by Natalie Goldberg: “I never escaped being a monk! The morning gruel, the frost on the bell, bare feet on frigid floors, all have been mine. Except that my meditation position has been a bent body hovering over a notebook with only my right hand moving across a blank page for Continue reading
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Making Use of Heat
Originally posted on C.M. Rivers: Then you come to that place of burning through the atmospheric fabric of consciousness. You learn how to make use of the intensity of heat, and you use it to burn through thoughts and emotions, fears and desires, to purify and transform. Because you are not your thoughts, emotions. … Continue reading
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Siddhartha Considers Emotion
“He pondered this feeling which completely filled him as he slowly made his way. He pondered deeply, sinking down into the depths of this feeling, as through deep water, until he reached the point where the causes lie. For to know the causes – so it seemed to him – that is what thinking is. Continue reading
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Light My Way
May my heart light my way. May it come into a place not unlike the narrow line that exists between water and fire, a pocket of stillness where both forces are within reach. Then I could learn their ways, how to call on them, how to let them enter me, how to recognize which one Continue reading
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Let Me Become
Let me become a master of listening, a student of surrender. May a strong and blossoming tree grow from the root of all my fears, a tree with the innate knowledge of how to bend with the wind. I have much to learn from the ferryman who spends his life taking people across the river, Continue reading
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Dream Catcher
A dream of bamboo groves and flickering candles. A dream of sitting in meditation, of the alchemy of bees bringing about the reality of honey, of the heart lifting, of a tormented heart and eyes grown world-weary. A dream of desire stirring below the navel, of a starry sky like a great milk-swelled breast, of Continue reading
C.M. Rivers 