Poems for Mindfulness

Resistance and Surrender

One thing about the new year is that the beginning of 2017 combined with the darkness of the season just naturally invites inner reflection.

I sometimes wonder about how much we miss because we are in the habit of saying “no”. No thats not the way I do it, No, I don’t like it that way, No, I don’t care for that or her or him or them….etc

It can be refreshing to pause for a moment when “No” arises and check it out, not with any expectation of change but just with curiosity. How does “No” feel in the body, notice especially the jaw, the belly, the shoulders, the forehead. Maybe there is tension in the brain. It can be helpful to be aware of how different states of mind feel in the body. Simply gathering information to be able to see and then to choose.

We can use “No” to keep the status quo in place or we can use “No” to give ourselves a sense of safety or boundries. Those boundries can turn into walls and those walls not only keep others out but keep us locked within.

I offer this poem for your reflection…..

The Healing Time

Finally on my way to yes
I bumped into
All the places
Where I said no
To my life
All the untended wounds
The red and purple scars
Those hieroglyphs of pain
Carved into my skin, my bones
Those coded messages
That send me down

The wrong street

Again and again
Where I find them
The old wounds
The old misdirections
And I lift them
One by one
Chose to my heart
And I say holy
Holy
-Peshawar Bertler-

“Thanks Robert Frost” by David Ray

“Thanks Robert Frost” by David Ray
from: Music of Time: Selected and New Poems

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

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An interesting reflection on this poem can be found here:

ON BEING

“Eagle Poem” by Joy Harjo

“Eagle Poem” by Joy Harjo
from “In Mad Love and War”

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

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“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952
from “Words Under the Words: Selected Poems”

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

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“For a New Beginning” by John O’Donohue

“For a New Beginning” by John O’Donohue
in a book entitled To Bless the Space Between Us

In out of the way places of the heart
Where your thoughts never think to wander
This beginning has been quietly forming
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire
Feeling the emptiness grow inside you
Noticing how you willed yourself on
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

“Kirpal Venanji” by Hindu Monk

Break your heart no longer. Each time you judge yourself, you break your heart. You stop feeding on the love that is the wellspring of your vitality. But now the time has come, your time to live, to celebrate and then see the goodness that you are. There is no evil, no wrong in you or in any other. There is only the thought of it, and the thought has no substance.

You are dear, divine and very, very pure. Let no one, no thing, no idea or ideal obstruct you. If one comes even in the name of truth, forgive the thought for its unknowing. Do not fight it, just let it go and breathe the goodness that you are.

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“With that Moon Language” by Hafiz

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them, “love me”
of course you do not do this out loud,
otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

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“Change” – James Dillet Freeman

James Dillet Freeman

Unity minister, author, and poet

I have resisted change with all my will …
Cried out to life, “Pass by life and leave me still.”
But I have found as I have trudged time’s track
That all my wishing will not hold life back.
I cannot bid the merest moment “stay.”
So finding I have no power to change
I have changed my self. And this is strange.
But I have found when I let change come,
The very change that I was fleeing from
Has often held the good I had prayed for,
And I was not the less for change, but more.
Once I accepted life and was not loathe to change
I found change was the seed of growth.

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