1. Truth: I woke up this morning and thought today was tomorrow. I was absolutely sure it was Wednesday. I didn’t want to go to yoga, contemplated staying in bed, sleeping in instead. I rallied, like I always do, and it wasn’t until I was standing in the kitchen making myself a half cup of coffee that I realized it was Tuesday. It wasn’t a yoga morning but rather my turn to walk the dogs. Daylight Savings Time, this time around meaning the loss of a whole hour, takes me at least a week to recover from.
2. Truth: Cultivating awareness is so important. I have been noticing lately how much damage we do by not being able to even see ourselves. We act out, our decisions clouded by confusion, complaining and blaming, being irritated and aggressive, generating so much suffering. We are so caught up in our story about what’s going on, we don’t even know what’s really happening.
3. Truth: There is joy, comfort in the smallest of things. A pop song on the radio with silly lyrics that makes you want to move, sharing food with someone, blue sky, a moment of quiet, the sweetness of a raspberry, the tartness of a lemon, the first purple crocus of the year, a dog sigh, the love note left on the counter. It’s right there, all you have to do is look, open yourself to it, allow it to touch you.
One wish: That even in the depths of our suffering, in moments of confusion and bewilderment, we can return to awareness, we can see and experience what is really going on, and we can connect with basic goodness.
12. On Knowing Our Own Minds from Dani Shapiro. “Our most creative thoughts and ideas spring from a ritualized dream time. In the absence of this dream time we become mechanized, robotic, detached from our inner lives.” Word.
Sometimes when we practice dharma we think that we need to show some sort of external or physical sign of it. We pay a lot of attention to the rituals and these actions of our body and speech. This is practicing dharma when we’re focusing outside. But instead what we need to do is turn our attention inwards. We need to see whether what we’re doing is functioning as an antidote to the afflictions or not. We need to see whether we are taming our mind or not. We need to see whether our mind is improving, getting kinder, or not. If we don’t look at it in this way then there’s no benefit to doing these actions – we think that we are trying to do the dharma, but actually we are just making a show with our body and speech. We are putting on appearances, and that’s all we really take an interest in. And the moment that happens, this becomes spiritual materialism.
