And with the day I had, it was a good thing I started the day with practice and reminders.
I am having my bedroom painted over the holiday break. Yesterday, I took all of the pictures off of the walls, moved most of the other furniture into other rooms, and rolled up the rugs in the hallways. The room is in the middle of the plastering and sanding stage and is filled with the painter’s tools, and so, the door is shut.
Becky only has two places she likes to be for most of the day: on the bed in the bedroom and on the sofa in the living room. When I meditate in the morning and then write in my journal, I sit in the living room. I used to try to sit in the yoga studio, but after her sister passed away, Becky howled until I sat in the living room with her. Becky now will fetch me to the living room if I do not go to meditate right after I have fed her. This morning, she woke me up early because the bed was not in the right place, and she was not happy that the bedroom door was closed. When I went to sit after feeding her, she stomped back and forth, instead of coming to sit with me. When at first I did not pay attention to her, she got more agitated. I finally got up to check on her. She raced up the stairs to be outside the shut bedroom door. I picked her up and brought her back to the living room to sit with me. I pet her until she relaxed. Once she had been shown that her morning sitting place was still there, I was able to sit in meditation without disturbance for 25 minutes.
Our own minds are like that. If there has been a disturbance in our routine that ripples our mind waves, whether it is celebration or upset, small or large, it can feel very challenging to meditate. If our thoughts continue to be in a whirl while we are sitting, we need to just bring our thoughts back to the mind space of meditation over and over again, just as I had to remind Becky our sitting place was still undisturbed even though her daytime sleep spot was disrupted. The more we practice, the easier it becomes to shift to an inner place of peace and light. The less often we allow changes in routine to disrupt our practice, the stronger we become in the face of challenges.
Last weekend, I went with a friend to see The Steins Collect at the Metropolitan Museum. I made a special effort to see the exhibit because of the incredible impact on art and culture that the Steins had by virtue of their collecting. Many of the paintings in the exhibit were familiar; I’d seen them before either at the Met for those from its own collection, at other museums, or in books. Some, which have ended up in other private collections or in the collections of museums that I have not visited, were completely new to me.
Among the paintings in the exhibit is Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse (which, as you can see from the link, the MOMA website currently indicates as “not on view”). I’ve seen the painting many times before at MOMA. The shift of location and context shook up my perceptions of the painting, and I indicated that to my friend. Another woman who was looking at the painting too engaged in the conversation. “It seems wrong here,” she said. “It’s a different view,” I replied. “It is disconcerting, but seeing it in different light, context, and company is enabling me to see new things in the painting and to find a more enhanced appreciation.”
I have been thinking this week, and talking about it in my classes, how a change of context can bring us new vision. How often, when things just keep going in a set pattern, do they collect dust and cobwebs (literally or figuratively)? I asked my therapeutic students whether they had preconceived notions about various challenges of embodiment, especially the chonic ones. Do you see them as part of your identity, something that causes you pain instead of giving you the joy of movement? What if you embraced being ever more conscious of alignment instead of being conscious of pain and limitation (and learning better and sooner when you cannot get out of injury without outside help)?
What of it? What of the change of perspective? After all, things get rearranged for us and the dissolution can be gradual or violent or something of both and be something of greater or lesser magnitude. Times of flux and dissoluti9on are the perpect time for questioning, for new vision, for discovering new ways to experience what had become too familiar, for seeing how one might wish to shift one’s own perspective for the good, to know and take responsibility for one’s own place and piece of this relationship to whatever it is that is shifting, dispersing, or dissolving., to seek to become unbound from the habitual binds of whatever invisible clothing we might be wearing.
Far better to do the right thing from a selfish or petty intention than a destructive, wasteful, or cruel thing with the best of intentions.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
