Dearest Readers,
As I write this I am watching a little green lizard climb up a nearby tree. I have been seeing a lot of these creatures skittling around the ashram and they fill me with pleasure. We can learn stillness from the lizard.
Ah, stillness. Something so lovely and excruciating all at once. When the body becomes still the mind wakes up. The mind gets busy thinking. That’s why you’ll hear so many people say, “I can’t meditate.” We think to meditate means to have a quiet mind.
Meditation, in fact, will reveal the activity of the mind thus giving us the opportunity to practice letting it all go. When I arrived on the ashram a few days ago I was pretty stimulated from 10 days of constant activity. Sitting still in silence gave my mind the time to think about everything that had happened. How to let go and be here now?
Practice. It’s the only answer. Keep at it. Like people who say, ” I can’t do yoga because I’m not flexible” we need to be reminded that yoga promotes flexibility. The more I give myself over to sitting still the louder the mind will get but with time and willingness I will get better at simply Being.
The lizard is my guru!
Inspiring Message of the Day: The nature of the mind is to think. When I understand this I can give myself a break for having an over-active melon. Meditation is a practice which teaches me to Be instead of to think. I will give myself the gift of this practice today.
Love this! What a thing to behold. Thanks for the story and musings, L.
C.
I met a frog once. The frog was still too, like your lizard, while exotic insects hovered & buzzed all around it. Perhaps, in its stillness, it was thinking about what leap to take next, in which direction to go, how high & how far… I won’t ever know, b/c it never moved to suggest the thoughts that may have preceeded that motion. If that frog had been a person, the ‘monkey on its back’ may well have frozen it in fear of those possibilities.
Froggie-friend didn’t have a monkey on her back, however, she had her baby on her back. Her baby frog, hunched up high – as though the two bodies were one.
A radical shift in perspective might suggest that lack of motion was not fear to leap forward, but a stillness that deepens a different kind of forward motion; that of self-awareness in love.
Have a great time, c.
l.