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

A beginning indicates an end. We must love even this. The practice of intimacy with our breath is one of constant receiving and releasing. This is vital in how we move into and through our lives, moment by moment. And a life is only moments; this one and the next and the next.

Hello Friends. Today we return to our morning sit practice, albeit a little later than hoped. I was excited to get to the sit today, and had no idea how many updates everything would need! So, we did what was needed, what was asked, and here we are. We are not so different in some ways from all of this technology. I, too, require updating to my practice if I wish to move in a way that does not encourage getting stuck.

So we shift. We shift our bodies for a more helpful posture. We shift our minds for a more helpful position. We shift our focus to meet the needs that we are well practiced as ignoring, which has contributed to a great deficit in our body. We are updating; and we are always practicing.

Appalachian Elgey 24. bell hooks clouds dressed in gray for mourning for grief held white for adoration dark for sorrow come soon an eternity simply hidden where all sun and glory reigns even so in this now there is just a promise of shadows relentless

All In Love,

Michael

Hari Om

Today, we shift from contemplative thought to working in some active practice of breathwork. Bringing the work we are doing to open ourselves to the teaching of Love Everybody begins in the body. It is from this place that we grasp onto narratives that may inform our resistance to loving ourselves, which, of course, justifies our belief that we cannot possibly love everybody. To untie those knots, we need to be able to be with the stories that block us and to work through them.

Many of those stories contain shame and guilt around our bodies. This is a massive barrier to the joy of the body. To be in a body is an opportunity for joy! We must open ourselves to joy if we wish to engage fully with love.

So we breathe. And we breathe. And we breathe. Today we work with two pranayama practices, breathing practices from the Vedic traditions. Kapalabhati and Brhamari Pranayam.

This is a good short video from Bharti Yoga on the most fundemental aspects of Kapalbhati and Bhramari Pranayam. This video only shows the technique, and does not go into the rich history and inherent connections of this and other pranayama practices to the cultures which developed them, and I highly encourage anyone interested in this practice to begin to study and learn about these practices and their roots in communal health.

Enjoy these practices!

Our poem today is from William Carlos Williams, and for me, it personifies the personal that having a body can offer.

Danse Russe William Carlos Williams If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,— if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: “I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!” If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,— Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

To dance with your joy is genius, indeed, Mr. Williams.

We also spend another moment with bell hooks Appalachian Elegy 23.

Appalachian Elegy 23 bell hooks bring Buddha to rest home in Kentucky hills that outside each window a light may shine not a guilt teaching tradition be balanced know loving kindness end suffering rejoice in the oneness of life then let go carry nothing on your back travel empty as you climb steep mountain paths

Read it and read it and read it aloud. Thank you bell hooks. thank you thank you thank you.

All In Love,

Michael

Generate Generosity Here

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Hari Om

Sometimes we find ourselves feeling the quick comeuppance of old feelings, emotions, and wounds emerging. Usually, this is not as surprising in it’s reality as it feels in the moment because these things are often slowly building up over time. Often, it is a result of bypassing feelings and uncomfortable situations under the guise of thinking that is what it is to ‘let it go’. Letting it go is not a bypass. We must first acknowledge the feeling, sit with it for a moment, and accommodate what is being given to us, and release our attachment to continuing to think the thoughts that hold us to the feeling. This is far different from bypassing.

Luckily for us, the old things will always come back. Always. And when they do, we have another chance to step into the place of presence with a slew of new tools we have been practicing in our daily mindfulness work! Use them.

Go to the breath.

Go to the body.

Ask the feelings questions of curiosity not defensive dismissiveness.

Listen to what you hear.

Act accordingly.

This is how we understand that understanding itself is a name of love. It is what love requires of me most in the moments I feel misunderstood.

Today we sit with bell hooks Appalachian Elegy 23, once again. We are going to work with this poem for the rest of the week, I believe.

Appalachian Elegy 23 bell hooks bring Buddha to rest home in Kentucky hills that outside each window a light may shine not a guilt teaching tradition be balanced know loving kindness end suffering rejoice in the oneness of life then let go carry nothing on your back travel empty as you climb steep mountain paths

Find the teaching today that you were not present for yesterday.

All In Love,

Michael

Generate Generosity Here

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Hari Om

Some days, the breath is the central focus; some days, it is what brings us to our central focus. Today, the breath is at the forefront of the practice. This helps us to get our conscious awareness directly to the center of our body, and from this place, we are centered. It has a physical space within our body. Moving our awareness out of our head and into our body is the essence of mindful practice. The thing to remember here: THIS IS A PRACTICE. It requires a bit of doing, no matter how elementary you feel the work may be. Take the time to take a few breaths, being truly present, and you will see the shift in each moment of your awareness. See if you can find three breaths in succession without wandering into a thought. It is simple, but not easy.

ON NEARUDA'S DEATH Allen Ginsberg Some breath breathes out Adonais & Canto General Some breath breathes out Bombs and dog barks Some breath breathes silent over green snow mountains Some breath breathes not at all 25 Sept 1973

The breath is what connects us to one another. Thank you Allen Ginsberg. OM.

We revisit bell hooks profound work, Appalachian Elegy, specifically number 23.

Appalachian Elegy 23. bell hooks bring Buddha to rest home in Kentucky hills that outside each window a light may shine not a guilt teaching tradition be balanced know loving kindness end suffering rejoice in the oneness of life then let go carry nothing on your back travel empty as you climb steep mountain paths

I am really enjoying revisiting this poem each day this week. There is a lot offered within.

All In Love,

Michael

Generate Generosity Here

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.