What is is.
What isn’t ain’t.

6 words to sum up mindfulness, the practice, Buddhism, the Work, etc. etc. In reality, you can sum it up in the first 2 words, but its nice to put on the qualifiers.

It’s a fine thing to love Jesus, but until you love the monster, the terrorist, the child molester, until you can meet your worst enemy without defense or justification, your reverence for him isn’t real.

- Byron Katie

Image by midlander1231 via Flickr

My Father has always been a sigher, but like so many other things in my life as I reach my mid-40s, I find I am in many ways adopting his habits. Sighing is one of them and its scary how much I do it. In order to reduce the amount of sighing I do, because of the severe levels of annoyance it causes for those with whom I work and love, I am working on seeing the sigh and expanding upon it as a meditation. To me the big sigh whether relief or out of exasperation is really a way for us to center ourselves. The old adage of take a breath is related to our natural inclination to meditate and observe our thoughts, that we’ve spent so many centuries annihilating.

So, sigh I will and I will sigh with vigor and consciousness in order to observe my need for meditation in that moment. That sigh is a call for mindfulness and to see it is to be mindful. What a relief… sigh.

Image via Wikipedia

Dance with spirit and the body will follow.
Mia Michaels

Rarely have I danced without mind in my life. When I say I can’t dance, it’s because I’ve not succeeded at dancing mindlessly. The few times I’ve danced

without mind was in private without anyone to see. Of course it’s much easier to be mindful when we are all alone separated from others perceptions or rather our perception of their perception of us.

Ultimately though even perceptions are meaningless. All of our current “reality” is based upon false perceptions. Perceiving is the root of all of our suffering and evil. Observe and understand that your perceptions are unreal. Your current existence is one of compounding hollow perceptions. See each of them and follow each to the next below that one and so on. Question and devour each until your foundation built on perceptions collapses and implodes into itself.

What’s left?