Pema Chodron, a favorite author of mine, wrote “When Things Fall Apart.” I picked this book up in the 1990’s and loved her simplicity and wisdom; it was a profound time of change and tension in the world. Gee, similar to how it is now! I discovered her timeless words to comfort and help us heal ourselves, and to be present just to each moment as it unfolds.
She writes, “In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal — quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is. If our experience is that sometimes we have some kind of perspective, and sometimes we have none, then that’s our experience. If sometimes we can approach what scares us, and sometimes we absolutely can’t, then that’s our experience. This very moment is our perfect teacher, and it’s always with us….. Awareness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.”
As a meditation teacher and healer, I have practiced grounding, or being connected to earth, for 40 years now. It has saved me countless times! Just having the ability to stop, let go and just experience or be with what was happening was such a miracle. Grounding gives me the space to be present to whatever is unfolding right in front of me, often from a place of neutrality, compassion and awareness. Neutrality doesn’t mean I’m not feeling anything, but it’s more like I’m not judging the situation as good or bad, right or wrong.
Neutrality often lets me walk around all sides of an issue from this point of awareness; I have drawn this moment to me to learn from. Do I see it as a gift or am I in resistance to it? Chodron offers us this jewel, “When we resist change, it’s called suffering.” Ah, so true. Namaeste. ❦
Mary Bell Nyman is the Director of Psychic Horizons Center in Boulder, CO and originally wrote this for the June/July 2017 Newsletter. If you repost this message, or any portion thereof, please give credit to Rev. Mary Bell Nyman, www.psychichorizonscenter.org..
