The gap between whats cooking and nourishing in our formal practice and the practice in the rest of our multi-hued lives presents a challenge that for some has a strong dissonance between their aspiration and their actions. Do you sense a pregnant possibility in your routines for awakening and soulful engagement? Sometimes the dissatisfaction the inner critic proclaims about our spiritual practice is singing, indirectly and unskillfully, to this possibility. It is true that we can be resourceful in practicing the ordinary round and maybe we too quickly undersell the possibilities.
I want to appreciate the opportunity to let devotion to our practice spark resourcefulness with how we carry forth through the regularities of our day.
The city commute can be an embodiment of seeing through the kaleidoscope of surfaces into the common heart of all beings and things. Catch the mind in its touch and go naming, categorizing and easy deciding who is who and what is what without actual open engagement with the fleshy person or dynamic time. Remember the tenderness beneath all persona. Beneath all persona. Feel from your silent depth and resonate with the same silent depth with everything and everyone around you.
The morning walk can be an opportunity to challenge the habitual, conditioned fear of the other, to gently disrupt and reroute the same path walked out of an auto-pilot navigation. That same person who we avoid out of protecting our convenience may bless us out of our indifference, an ordinary exchange of unguarding smiles remembering us back into belonging.
One of my joys is falling into unities of the everyday. Merging into cat’s purr by leaning in, purr becoming whole cosmos. A couch slouch space embrace, further unfolding relaxation by opening my eyes and awareness wide, softly welcoming the roominess of the room. Inner work on the toilet. Yup. It used to be magazines and now its our phones. Don't bring them in and instead feel back into last nights dream image. Or unbind the brain and breath and let busy mind relax back into its silky ground.
Daily formal practices of soul and spirit are a saturation in heightened closeness, an extended curiosity and surrender. This saturation has an afterglow, a warm availability for the whole day to be permeable with the mysteries. The mysteries- basically everything when in tune to the limit of what we know and open to all we don’t. This isn’t a flat world we need to escape into our practices. It is the mysteries waiting.
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