Category Archives: Practice

Wishcasting Wednesday

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from Jamie’s post

How do you wish to grow?

I’m sorry if I sound like a broken record, but it seems like every Wednesday Jamie asks a different wishcasting question, but my answer is always some version of the same thing…

I wish to grow:

Equanimity. Mental calmness, emotional stability, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation or under stress; a calm, positive emotional balance in the face of both good fortune and bad. Having an equally open attitude to all sentient beings, free of attachment, anger, and apathy. I can be judgmental, critical, and unforgiving. For example, today there was an older, stinky, potentially homeless man working out at my gym, and my animal self was getting so irritated with him, with the situation. My higher self whispered that I shouldn’t judge, knew nothing about his circumstances, and that it really wasn’t that much of a hardship for me to accept his presence, that maybe I was irritating him. I wish to respond with my higher self, to practice equanimity, forgiveness, non-judgment, to grow my heart.

Health. I wish to manifest health through rest and exercise and good food in appropriate amounts, but also through sanity, self-love and self-care. I want people to feel the energy of wellness radiating from me, to feel healthier themselves just by being near me.

Creative arts practice. This wish includes a wide range of art: music, painting, photography, lettering, acting, collaging, quilting, sewing. I wish to learn to play the ukulele, take singing lessons, be in a play, create paintings, make art using collage and lettering, start a tshirt shop, create and perform.

Spiritual practice. I wish to deepen my meditation and yoga practices, with the intention of one day training to instruct and teach, to share those important practices with others who might benefit as I have. To continue to go further with my writing, showing up honest, open and raw, and communicating the truth, using right speech. And dog, to continue to learn how to be a better companion, a more effective caretaker.

Confidence and bravery. To grow my confidence, in part in the way that Susan Piver suggests: “Confidence is the willingness to be as ridiculous, luminous, intelligent, and kind as you really are, without embarrassment.” And also, knowing my own power, being certain of my basic goodness, my “enoughness,” and thus being brave and willing to face reality, just as it is, and to work with it.

Financial stability. This is solid now, but from that base, I’d like to continue to grow, to streamline and clarify my practices, spending and saving, to have a clear sense of the full situation, of my debt, insurance, retirement, to simplify but also invite abundance and joy.

Web design skills. This is another practical area I’d like to grow, my skills as a designer and coder, my ability to design graphics and construct layouts and code structures. There’s a lot this would enable me to do, it would foster an independence, a freedom that I long for.

Home making. I wish to continue to refine and rehabilitate the space and structure where I live, declutter and clean it, repair it, landscape and beautify. Last week’s wishcasting was all about this process, this growth.

Love. There can never be enough, and it is the answer to every question, so I wish to grow this until it fills the whole universe.

Y is for Yoga

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image by lululemon athletica

I am embarrassed to say it happened again. I didn’t know what word I was going to use today, even though yoga is one of my four primary, regular, spiritual practices. I started brainstorming a list: yawn, yesterday, yes. I got as far as opening my dictionary to “y” and as soon as I saw that first page of words, I thought “yogi” and immediately after came the next thought: yoga. D’oh!

So again, I suppose it’s that thing about fish and water, it’s such a part of your world, your life, your environment that it becomes oddly invisible.

Yoga grounds me in my body, centers me there. As in other practices, the act of doing it regularly teaches me a lot about myself. I learn how I spend too much time comparing myself to others, judging and evaluating, and I realize that the practice, the experience isn’t about competition at all, with anyone. It’s about the reality of what is happening on my own mat, about cultivating compassion.

Some days, I move fluidly, am flexible and strong, can balance in tree for a full five minutes, can hover in crow or hold a headstand with confidence. Other days, I come to the mat shaky and raw, irritable, stiff and weak, one side works but the other needs extra understanding and gentleness.

image by lululemon athletica

And other times, I can trust my body, but my mind is a mess, a wreck, a wild animal. It won’t stay with me on the mat. It keeps wanting to rush off or draw me in to long conversations or even arguments. I stay with it, stay on the mat, and hope it will settle, be still. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t and instead spends the whole practice in another room, another moment, another universe.

For me, yoga is meditation in movement. I expand the breath focus of sitting meditation to include my whole body, moving my awareness as my body moves from pose to pose. It expands the practice of training my mind (as in sitting meditation) to training my body and mind to be in the same space at the same time, moving together.

I’ve been struggling a bit with my yoga practice lately, feel a bit stuck and bored, but more importantly I have been struggling with my body. As it ages, I have entered a new phase of being that is utterly confusing. I haven’t quite learned how to care for my 44 year old body. It’s needs are so starkly different. It feels fatigue in a way I have never experienced. I work to be gentle with my Happy Buddha belly, trying to see it’s roundness as lucky, rather than stubborn and ugly. I try to be compassionate towards this body’s need for rest. I really want to understand what it needs from me, I want to not just love it, but to care for it in a way that allows it to thrive.

I contemplate impermanence, cultivate gratitude for the chance to get older, a chance so many others will never have. I also remember that this “old” body will be the “young” one I remember later, maybe even mourn, and that my sense of age is relative.

image by lululemon athletica

And I practice, strong in warrior pose one day, needing to rest in child’s pose the next, accepting whatever my current reality might be, and when I am done, I dedicate the merit of my practice, offering it so that suffering might be dispelled.

Namaste, kind and gentle reader. The divine nature within me perceives and adores the divine nature within you. I honor the place in you in which the entire universe dwells. I honor the place in you which is of love, light, peace and joy. When you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, we are one.