Monthly Archives: January 2016

May I be well, loving and peaceful.
May I be at ease in my body,
feeling the ground solidly beneath my feet
and the sky above my head.

May I be a conduit for earth, sky and universal energy
as a bead on a string between heaven and earth.
As I open my heart to that energy,
may I receive others with sympathy and understanding.
May I move toward others freely and with openness,
and toward the suffering of others
with peaceful and attentive confidence.

May I continually cultivate the ground of peace
for myself and others through my practice,
mindful and dedicated to this work and this path.
May I know that my peace and the world’s peace are not separate.
May all beings, everywhere on this planet, be well, happy and peaceful.

I adapted this from the Metta Prayer by Maylie Scott, which was adapted from the Metta Sutta. I hope they don’t mind 🙂 

“Composting” is a practical method for the Buddhist concept of non-attachment! Give the earth your stresses, your sadness, your ooky stuff. She is the great composter, she wants those energies that will do you harm. She will take them and transform them into fresh, clean energies. Ancient people knew how to do this. We modern day humans seem to only know how to hold things in–we are holding in stale, non-healthy energies and it is doing our bodies and souls harm. And it’s doing the earth harm as well by not getting that energy nourishment from us! It’s one of those ways we have gotten out of balance with the earth.  I just recently learned this from Celia (see links) and it has been a really good practice for me. I can be a pretty sensitive person and I may experience discomfort in an encounter, or not feel I said the right words, or was misunderstood or took comments personally. All that, all those sticky, uncomfortable gut feelings can just be lovingly handed over to the earth. Yay! This letting go even helps me get to sleep if my brain or my body is resisting. I visualize sending out those repetitive thoughts and feelings right into the earth.

Re sleep, with new information from a blog post by Harvard Health on January 28, 2016, getting to sleep without medication is even more critical now that we know some possible ill effects of sleep inducers. The study discussed by the blog implicated anticholinergic drugs (Tylenol etc PM, Unisom, Benadryl, etc.) in possible mental decline in older patients. So, certainly the more natural ways we can get to sleep the better!

So, what you do is when you notice you are stressing about something is you consciously, joyously and generously push it out down into the earth. Beyond everyday stresses, Mother Earth will hold your sadness, your grief, your

worry, your pain. I think I have known this in some hidden crevice of my mind/heart as I used to go out into the desert and lie down when I didn’t know what else to do with the pain and heart stress of living–I’d let her hold me and my worries and I would feel relief–those emotions just melted away. Little did I know I was composting, and giving as I was taking.

As always, when we give her those energies, we thank her for transforming them for us. Thank you, thank you, thank you Pachamama, Mother Earth!

This was a Celia story (my Tucson teacher)–we were talking about how the concept of qi(chi) is universal from an energy perspective. Celia’s teachers are of the ancient Incan religion, Q’ero shaman. The story goes that some people were working and studying with the Q’ero shaman and were intrigued with their references to “rivers of light” within the body. The Shaman were asked where these rivers resided in our bodies. Communication and tools were a bit dodgy, so someone produced some lipstick and asked them to draw on the body where those rivers existed. They drew the exact lines of the meridians that are used in Chinese medicine. Wisdom of the ancients!

I love the term “rivers of light”. These rivers of light are our qi, our places of energy movement. And when those rivers get clogged or dammed or stagnant or otherwise impeded, things start to go wrong. Stagnation affects not only that particular river, but the whole tapestry of life that depends on that river.

Qigong practices, or any life giving, energy moving, stress reducing practices you do, can help to keep those rivers of light free and clear. Commit to keeping those rivers healthy and flowing each and every day.