A Friendly Reminder
For health and ease in this embodiment, remember to massage your feet every day. Perhaps followed by some time with your legs up the wall.

For health and ease in this embodiment, remember to massage your feet every day. Perhaps followed by some time with your legs up the wall.

What does it mean to be free? To feel free? To honor other people’s freedom while embracing our own?

A friend wrote an email to me this morning that in a recent office move, the plaster ganesha he’s had on his wall broke. Not to worry, though, he had been given another one to sit on his computer. Ganesha, though sometimes hailed as the remover of obstacles, does not so much remove them as help us navigate through life so that the inevitable challenges and hurdles will feel less like insurmountable obstacles and more like opportunities to move in new directions.
It seemed almost everywhere I turned in India, I bumped into another image of Ganesha. He’s a powerful one. I did not attempt to photograph them all, and these are not all the photographs. One of them is not ganesha–sometimes an elephant is just an elephant, even in a sculpture devoted to the gods.
If you are enjoying one of these images in particular, click on it so that you get to it at the largest size and then right-click to make it your wallpaper or background. Enjoy!
During one of our sessions, one of my fellow students asked whether she was really seeking a life of renunciation because she sometimes really craved sitting quietly for meditation. For her, having first experienced meditation as an adult who has a rich and comfortable life, even the shortest time sitting with eyes closed looking only within felt like it might be a denial of the outer world.
The practices Paul Muller-Ortega is teaching, and as he makes absolutely clear, are very much for the householder and are not the rarified path of a renunciate. Sitting in silence is a blissful and steady; it is going towards the inner world and not going away from the outer world.
We do not have to renounce our lives to sit regularly in silence. We can frankly delight in the sweetness of inner light and stillness and honor our desire to do so (a true renunciate would have to renounce even that desire). Meditation as part of the daily life of a householder, is a bedrock of support so that we can be ever more fully engaged in our lives, no matter how noisy they can get sometimes.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Where in your body might you be carrying your fear? Your rage? Your grief?
Are you able to pause and soften and give some love and support to those places?
Be safe out there. And be loud when you can.