Hello Friends.

Still working on getting started closer to the set time of 8:30, alas, I had a doctor's appointment today, and if you are from the US, you know well how difficult it is to get into a doctor's office and get more than three minutes of attention, so I took full advantage. So, we did what we could with the time I had today. Let me know:

How do you accommodate yourself? Do you extend this to ‘others’?

It is an important exploration of where we have adopted individualism as a way of being. To see how we think treating ourselves with disdain would ever teach us to treat anybody with true kindness. This is important work for building our compassion capacity.

All In Love,

Michael

Hello Friends.

Today took a lot of effort to arrive. Seeming more and more each week. And this is exactly why I keep the practice of showing up. Not because I am a glutton for punishment, but rather it is because I understand that discomfort is not a punishment; it is a voice. It is a voice of my insecurity, my fear, my pain, my anxiety, and so many more expressions of what it is to be uncomfortable. Often, the voice is a scream, but it always begins as a whisper. When we cannot hear it, it will insist upon being heard.

So there we are, all jacked up on resentments and regrets, with very little capacity for understanding or compassion. Discomfort can lead itself to A LOT of misunderstandings, OR it can hold open a doorway to greater understanding. It truly is our choice, but choice is a matter not of options but of resources.

Choice is a matter not of options but of resources.

So we prac tice, because practice is how we expand our resources. So, thank you for sitting with your discomforts, and allowing me to sit with mine. Together, we can find our way into hearing that subtle voice when it is subtle, and being forgiving when it screams.

Today’s dive into Appalachian Elegy by bell hooks:

Appalachian Elegy 25. bell hooks soil rich with lime grass beyond green turning toward blue hills of plenty all but gone bent under the weight all human greed we speak then tell of a god of miracles who moves mountains yet manmade steel ravishes this earth all for coal deep and black a destiny of burning heat covering flesh in ash

PLEASE COMMENT AND SHARE.

This is NOT an isolation practice of individualism. Healing is a practice of connection and togetherness. Your energy going into leaving a brief comment or sharing this practice with loved ones and enemies alike is energy coming back to me. This helps us to sustain our sharing of this practice. Your participation helps to sustain my offering. Thank you.

All In Love,

Michael

Hello, friends.

I am returning to a more regular schedule of sharing this practice, and hope to be on a fully functioning daily schedule of 8:30 AM PST, Monday through Friday, next week. This return from a break, wherein I was intentionally closing inward and not sharing publicly or with many people at all, has been wonderful as well as uncomfortable.

Discomfort is not failure.

We are often uncomfortable because we are finding new ways of feeling and responding, ways with which we are unfamiliar. This is good! This opens us to receive and to give in a way that we have not yet in our relationships, and this is a deepening, not a marker of a lessening. Explore that discomfort, and find the new shape of your growth.

Today, we practice kindness. Poet and Cellist Daniel Austin Sperry shares his reading of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, Kindness. Click his name to go to his website.

Kindness Naomi Shihab Nye Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend. From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Thanks for being here today.

All In Love,

Michael