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I have had a more stressful than usual couple of weeks at the office. While I was walking into the office, I was thinking about how the more deadlines I needed to meet and the more difficult interchanges I had to bring to the most optimal resolution, the harder it was also to have energy to give to those who are in far greater need, though I seek ways to be of service.
When I saw the oversized half moon dwarfed by the cherry blossoms, it helped put things in perspective. Nothing I do immediately impacts life or death. A hard week does not mean much in my life as a whole, my tribulations are only so much play in the midst of the outrageous ground of all human being, human being is only one small part of life on this planet in this galaxy in this universe, and who knows how vast is the realm of consciousness. I smiled at the moon and the blossoms and thought of their beauty throughout the day.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Last Night I Slept At My Parents House (and akrama)
I slept last night in the room that I slept in as a child. My mother now uses the room to store some of the vestiges of her old antiquing business. The carpet, wallpaper, and curtains from the 1960’s are gone, but the bed is the same one in which I had slept. The picture on the wall is a kit for making a stuffed animal that my Grandma Rose had bought me (probably when I was about 8) at the Brooklyn Museum of Art that my mother decided would be better as framed art than a sewing project for me.
The neighborhood looks different–it is far more developed as is everywhere near a big city–but the bones are the same.
It is a challenge not to feel the weight of my history and ancestry when I return. Taking the time to meditate when I woke helped me stay fully in my adult self.
When we meditate, we ideally dissolve our individual consciousness into the luminous spaciouness of universal consciousness. In that space, where we are temporarily not experiencing ourselves as an individual, we are also not experiencing our individual self in the sequence (krama) of time. The luminous spaciousness of meditative consciousness is sequenceless (akrama) and, as universal consciousness, is the place in which the sequences of being in time and space arise.
What I experienced this morning when I meditated was that I did not have to be flooded with the emotions of my, to try to graciously describe, emotionally challenging childhood. In the space of meditation I could bring to my day an acceptance of all of my life and be where I am at present, coming to a place of recognition that although I lived all of my history, it neither defines me nor binds me from expanding into a space of growing love and light.
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Om Namo Bhagavate
“Because the one I love lives inside of you, I lean as close to you as I can…” Shantala (aka Heather and Benjy Wertheimer who bring joy, beauty, and wisdom wherever they go).
Sauca (Another Perspective)
My friend and Willow Street colleague Natalie Miller taught a lovely class on Monday night, using sauca as her theme. She said that she had recently read a book that described the yamas as things we do to be better persons, but that the niyamas were precepts for our spiritual practice to lead us better on the path. In that sense, she suggested, sauca is about clarity or purity of intention.
What I love about contemplating and practicing with these concepts is that they are so pregnant with meaning; they have so much to offer wherever we are in our life and on our individual path of spirit exploration. The more we contemplate and visit and practice and discuss, the more we will discover both about the meaning of the concept and about ourselves.





