#stillness — Public Fediverse posts

Returning is part of practice.

After summer, many things begin again. Work, school, meetings, routines, calendars, commitments.

A Quaker meeting also has its rhythm.

People return to silence. To listening. To one another. To the ordinary act of showing up, even when life feels unfinished.

What is something you are returning to this season?

#Quakers #Community #Stillness #FriendsOnTheFediverse

Returning is part of practice.

After summer, many things begin again. Work, school, meetings, routines, calendars, commitments.

A Quaker meeting also has its rhythm.

People return to silence. To listening. To one another. To the ordinary act of showing up, even when life feels unfinished.

What is something you are returning to this season?

#Quakers #Community #Stillness #FriendsOnTheFediverse

Returning is part of practice.

After summer, many things begin again. Work, school, meetings, routines, calendars, commitments.

A Quaker meeting also has its rhythm.

People return to silence. To listening. To one another. To the ordinary act of showing up, even when life feels unfinished.

What is something you are returning to this season?

#Quakers #Community #Stillness #FriendsOnTheFediverse

I WALKED PAST THE FLAMIN’
OBVIOUS FOR 65 YEARS 💎

There was a period when I left almost all my associations behind. Not dramatically. I simply couldn't do very much else. So I became extraordinarily concerned with myself.

My breathing. My food. My body. My sleep. What time I went to bed. What time I woke. When I ate. When I didn't eat. How I moved. What I allowed into my head. And my meditation.

I BECAME, BY ANY ORDINARY DEFINITION, RATHER SELF-OBSESSED.

And perhaps I was.

I didn't know anything about discipline. I certainly didn't think of myself as disciplined. Obsession was something I understood, so perhaps I simply turned the obsession towards the only thing I could actually do anything about.

MY OWN LIFE.

I had a very simple understanding:

I will do everything I can for myself with devotion.

GOD CAN DO THE REST.

So I worked on the breath. I worked on the body. I worked on how I ate, slept, and lived. I gradually removed things that seemed to interfere. "The blocks to the awareness of love's presence." (ACIM)

And somewhere inside all that apparent self-obsession, something else began multiplying.

PEACE.

I didn't notice it arriving. There wasn't a revelation. There was just progressively less argument with everything.

Looking back, perhaps the most important thing was that I stopped asking my body to accommodate the life I thought I should be living.

I began accommodating the body.

If it needs rest, I rest. If it needs breath, I breathe. If something disturbs it, I pay attention.

There's nothing particularly mystical about it.

The extraordinary thing is how simple it eventually became. So simple, in fact, that I managed to walk straight past it for about 65 years.

@3goodthings
@DigitalCoup
@meditation
@economics_that_works

#Breathwork #Meditation #Peace #Stillness #SelfCare #SelfKnowledge #Discipline #Devotion #ACIM #ACourseInMiracles #Spirituality #InnerPeace

ETERNAL LIFE IS KIND 💎

This morning I woke up surprisingly peaceful. My breath was free. My mind was free. My heart was free. There was #clutter around the edges, but none of it seemed able to get at me.

Then someone from a Star Trek group on Mastodon sent me a message that felt like a threat. So I unfollowed the #group and blocked him. No argument. No defence.

I DON’T DO THREATS ANYMORE.

Then the morning wandered somewhere completely different.

I looked out at Lenah Valley. Sunny, about 11 or 12 degrees, the #mountain right behind us. I imagined #Hobart seventy years from now. The mountain will probably still be there, but the city may be almost unrecognisable. An AI city, perhaps. Not because AI suddenly arrives with trumpets. It is already changing things quietly underneath everything.

Then #Nepal came into the morning. That enormous wall of water, rock and ice coming down the mountain. And again, I thought about death. Everybody dies somehow, somewhere, sometime. That sounds cold until the fear drops out of it. Then it is simply true.

From there, for reasons only mornings understand, I thought about #DollyParton and #TimCurry. I saw Tim in the original #RockyHorror Show in London. I never saw Dolly live. But I loved her kindness.

And that took me to a nurse who cared for me as a little boy. I can still see her starched white uniform and the #watch pinned upside down on her chest so she could look down and read it.

She gave me kindness when I needed it, about sixty-five years ago. She is probably long dead.

But the kindness isn’t.

IT IS STILL HERE.

It travelled into relationships, things I have written and things I have said. Perhaps into people I will never know. #Kindness does not necessarily die with the person who gave it. It gets passed along.

Later, LindaCu boosted something I had written about breathwork. I used to struggle terribly with patience and #acceptance. Then I found breathwork and stopped battling myself quite so much. I learned to breathe my way out of the #monkey mind and back into something quieter.

By then, I realised I had spent the morning moving through peace, irritation, Hobart, AI, Nepal, death, Tim Curry, Dolly Parton, an old nurse, breathwork and Mastodon.

Quite a morning.

And none of it needed fixing.

@3goodthings
@DigitalCoup
@meditation
@economics_that_works

#Peace #Kindness #Breathwork #Acceptance #Stillness #Hobart #Tasmania #AI #Death #Mortality #Mastodon #Fediverse #StarTrek #RockyHorror #DollyParton #TimCurry #Nepal #Humanity #Memory #Life

Pace

Often I find myself stuck
between the slow
and the fast,
fitting into neither,
stumbling,
never finding
a comfortable
pace.

I am impatient 
with those ahead of me, 
whose slow progress 
impedes my attempts 
to reach my destination.

I am angry at those 
pushing me from behind, 
so concerned with 
reaching their goal 
that I am just another 
obstacle in their way.

I must remember 
that at times I have 
been both.

It is the engine within, 
not the speed of those 
I encounter on the road, 
that drives me to anger 
and impatience.

O Divine Driver,
 Grant that I might have a
 more compassionate
 awareness on this
 journey.

August 2, 2015

A COURSE IN MIRACLES 💎

Today’s Lesson 202:

“I am not a body. I am free.
For I am still as God created me.”

And the reviewed idea is:

“I will be still an instant and go home.”

For today, I’d keep it very simple: nothing to reach for, nothing to manufacture. Just let the body sit, breathe, and be included in stillness. “Home” is not somewhere else. It is the instant in which you stop insisting that you are elsewhere.

#fasting #acim #acourseinmiracles #newthought #eckharttolle #buddhism #breathwork #connection #healing #pridemonth #Karma #TrueNature #Awakening #Meditation #Lesson #Mindfulness #Spirituality #intermittentfasting #nonduality #reality #life #quantum #kitchen #cooking #AI #stillness #instant

THIS #MONASTERY HAS #NETFLIX 💎

My life has become much simpler.

I live with #Peter and the pups.

There are fires to light, meals to eat, rooms to clean, bills to pay, bodies to care for, and all the ordinary things that come and go.

Three times a day, I stop and practise.

I sit down.

I breathe.

I return to the body and to stillness.

More and more, the rest of my life takes its place around that.

Not practice as preparation for something else.

Practice as the whole of a life.

I sometimes think of myself as a #monk living in the world.

I have no robe, no formal vows, and no monastery.

This one has Netflix, two small white dogs, and a man called Peter who thinks A Course in Miracles is woo-woo.

But the direction is clear.

I am no longer looking for another teacher, system, country, experience, or improved version of myself.

I spent much of my life searching.

I travelled, followed teachers, joined communities, read #books and looked for something that might finally explain me to myself.

Now the search has become unnecessary.

A Course in Miracles says that I did not create myself.

If I did not create myself, I am not responsible for creation.

I do not have to force #reality to behave according to my ideas or make the universe look the way I thought it should.

I can stop trying to manage what I did not make.

That is an enormous relief.

“I need do nothing” no longer sounds passive.

It sounds sane.

It does not mean lying around while the roof collapses.

It means I do not have to manufacture reality, defend an identity, or improve what God created.

I can live the life in front of me.

I can breathe, love Peter, rub the #pups’ backs, keep the fire going, and write what is true.

Perhaps that is what overcoming the world means.

Not defeating it or escaping it.

Simply no longer asking it to provide what it cannot give.

The world can still be funny, beautiful, irritating, tender, and absurd.

But it is no longer home.

Practice is home now.

Breath is home.

#Stillness is #home

And this ordinary #life is enough.

#YouTube #video #Self #religion #language #imagination #experience #Hinduism #fasting #acim #acourseinmiracles #newthought #eckharttolle #buddhism #breathwork #connection #healing #pridemonth #Karma #TrueNature #Awakening #Meditation #Mindfulness #Spirituality #intermittentfasting #nonduality #reality #life #quantum #kitchen #cooking #AI

I HAD FOUND SNACKS 🍪

For years, I meant to meditate.

I read about it. I studied A Course in Miracles for years, yet somehow never got around to meditating on the Workbook.

Sometimes I decided to begin by sitting on the floor in the most uncomfortable position possible, because isn’t that what meditators do?

Then I did not.

Meditation remained scheduled for some calm, disciplined version of me arriving much later.

Meanwhile, my indulgent lifestyle suggested enlightenment had not found my address.

I ate too much, carried too much weight, and felt I had missed something spiritually important.

Other people seemed to have found stillness.

I had found snacks.

I imagined meditation required discipline, a straight back, comfortable knees, cushions, and possibly a small bell.

I had none of these.

Especially the knees.

I thought dedicated people had taken the hard road while I was distracted by biscuits.

The ridiculous part is that I had already found the doorway.

As a young man in an Indian ashram, I discovered breathwork. Its practitioners were quieter, their bodies settled, their inner commotion no longer leaking everywhere.

Then, with impressive spiritual efficiency, I waited fifty years before doing anything about it.

Then I started breathwork.

Almost immediately, I understood.

Meditation was what happened when I sat, breathed consciously, and stayed there.

The breath slowed. The body settled. The mind became quiet without force.

I did not have to fight thoughts, empty my mind, become better, or even call it meditation.

I only had to breathe and notice.

Stillness happened.

No heavenly choir. Just the end of the inner argument.

The body breathing. The mind no longer supervising the universe.

Nothing to achieve or prove.

The great spiritual undertaking I had postponed for most of my life was sitting in a chair and breathing.

This still makes me laugh.

I laugh at the man forever planning to begin, but mostly at the sheer success of it.

The stillness is here. It was always here.

It demanded no mountain, monastery, or spiritual impressiveness.

It did not even object to my previous career in snacks.

I had spent years thinking I had missed meditation.

I had not missed it. I had simply made it far more complicated than it was.

There is no hard road to meditation.

There is only the next breath.

Fortunately, I was already doing that.

#Meditation #Breathwork #Stillness #fasting #acim #acourseinmiracles #newthought #eckharttolle #buddhism #breathwork #connection #healing #pridemonth #Karma #TrueNature #Awakening #Meditation #Mindfulness #Spirituality #intermittentfasting #nonduality #reality #life #quantum #kitchen #cooking #AI