Hello Friend.

Today, we move into our practice as a way to open us up to the discomforts we carry. We will find that the growth of our capacity for love may come with some great feelings of being stretched. This opens us to receive all of the suppressed emotions that we have buried for years, decades, or even longer. As we approach this protective wall of shame, we will be well rehearsed at dissociating from the experience, and this may be our impetus at the beginning of the practice. When you can find your ability to sustain the practice, and be with the breath for a long enough period, you will see how you can be there with your pain, and not be in pain.

You can cultivate the practice of loving kindness towards your own experiences. In fact, there may be no other way to cultivate loving kindness at all.

Then, of course, bell hooks comes along to shine light on our footpath.

Appalachin Elegy 35. bell hooks winds of fate take the air push it past the known in this world of nature no one can undo mystery abounds harsh cold burns skin fire waits raging tempests sweep us carry us toward destiny recorded written down past present future change comes

change comes. Yes, it does bell hooks. Yes it certainly does.

All In Love,

Michael

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Hello Friends.

Today, I took some extra time for the sit. My attention has been tugged and pulled in so many directions lately that it took some time to sift through the thought pile to get to something that was connected deeper to the gut feeling that I am having. Would you believe I found it in a children’s song?

As kids, we would sing the sorrowful tale of the old lady who swallowed a fly. Perhaps she’ll die, we sang. So, she swallowed a spider (the one that wriggled and jiggled inside her) to catch the fly. Then a bird for the spider. A cat for the bird. And on and on, and who knows what she is having to swallow these forty-some years later.

I don’t have to imagine too much, though, because I now understand this woesome tale better. It was a misunderstanding. A simple mishap of telephone. It was not a fly she swallowed, but a lie. A small lie at first. But then she needed bigger and bigger lies to cover for them. She is me. And you.

We do this often. One small bit of information that we know may not be true, but some part of our identity desperately needs it to be true, so we swallow it. Then we just snowball into an avalanche of separation and loneliness. Sounds alarmist, I imagine; therefore, I believe you to say? Well, that is the point of children’s tales. To offer guidance, and usually away from something.

So we now are where we are, and simply by way of course. We steered our attention towards separateness, and we found it. Let’s steer back.

bell hooks is a great driving instructor in these matters.

Appalachian Elegy 34. bell hooks fierce winter cold mind whispers a lost landscape telling stories of how it was then seated near fire drinking homemade spirits sake and brandy wine spirits bring contentment for a time carry us closer to the sacred moving through bitterness our yearning to hold on to moments of ecstasy where we imagine we hear clearly destiny calling

Thanks for being here, in this place, right now.

All In Love,

Michael

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Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Hello Friends.

Our practice is not only a practice of healing from, it is also a practice of becoming. To be in the moment, in each moment, is to become a possibility. So as we offer our attnetion into our own bodies, and we release the past and ungrasp from a future that is impossible, we can be in the realness of this moment. One after another afte rnaother after another. Our days are made of moments, and our life is made of days. We are a series of these moments, and our awareness saves us from the sorrows of missing them.

All In Love,

Michael

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Hello Friend.

Thank you for taking a moment in your day to invite stillness and silence into your consciousness. It is a gift that we can offer the world once we can find it for ourselves. It would appear that this is a gift that is very much needed in this world today.

To find this gift, we must offer vulnerability to receive belonging, and belonging to create the closeness we need to touch into our deepest feelings. So we breathe deeply, and we bring our awareness there with the breath.

All In Love,

Michael

Please join the conversation. Your vulnerability invites mine.

Hello Friends.

Thank you to the students of KCA for joining us on Monday mornings as part of a curriculum of learning wholeness practices for health. You are most welcome.

Today, our practice meets an understanding of the multitude of who we are. We are larger in any moment than we could imagine, and small enough to be with all of it at once in just one breath. The contradictions are glorious and make us who we are. Learning to embrace ourselves fully is learning to embrace the world.

Keeping your practice simple allows you to grasp the complexities of it. Simple is not always easy, and complex is not always complicated. Layers upon layers simply means we can move through our levels of understanding from up close to farther away with our own attention. This is beneficial when we are beginning to feel overwhelm during our practice, or anytime during our day or night.

All In Love,

Michael

Hello friends.

How do you carry your upset? Your anger? Your disappointment? As we begin to practice re-associating with our bodies, you may find the answer is “not as well as I thought”. As we encounter these feelings that are yoked to our sense of embarrassment and shame, we touch into some brutal truths about our own defense mechanisms. We have more than one of us running this game. It seems there are times when we call out the commander of defense to take control when we are faced with emotional pain. The Commander has all sorts of tricks to avoid the reality of feeling the upset for what it is…upset. We create injustices, slights, affronts, and offenses from our own preferences for not wanting to be uncomfortable. We battle the world!

I could have said things like, ‘I think there’s something happening in the world.

Everybody seems to be upset.’

Well...

Oftentimes when you think everybody seems to be upset, it’s because it’s you who’s upset.

And, what is also true: we are allowed to be upset, and we don’t have to blame anyone for our discomfort. We can be okay with not being okay.

This is the practice.

All In Love,

Michael

Hello, friends.

Thank you for your attention today. My thoughts this morning seemed to keep returning to what it is to be home. To feel at home. Having been a person without a house many times in my life, and sometimes having a house that was unsafe to be in for many different reasons, I have learned firsthand that to be at home has little to do with addresses and much more with where I can feel safe, rested, and cared for. When we have difficulty finding these ways of being in our own bodies, it can be quite challenging to want to keep a practice of embodying our present moment.

So, we practice. And we keep practicing. And we shift and we ebb and we flow and we practice. Breathing in, Breathing out.

Then we are met with the synchronous nature of being here and now. There we find our friends who meet us “in the space between what is right and what is wrong”. Today, we find bell hooks in that place.

Appalachian Elegy 32. bell hooks walking the long way home walking ever so slow talking to be wholly in this world of wonder standing still waiting standing in the center of a long and winding dirt road leading uphill to a small house surrounded by lilacs black-eyed susans roses and honeysuckle vines a bench at the bottom that bodies may rest before they climb

Be wholly in this world of wonder, friends. Be still and wait.

All In Love,

Michael

Hello, friends.

In a world seemingly built for separation, it would track that our minds are also well practiced at division. It could also be the other way around. Either way, a practice of interruption is key. We must practice interrupting our own thoughts and words that perpetuate the notion of unbelonging if we hope to feel a sense of belonging in ourselves. This is where the method of compassion presence with whatever we may be carrying, whatever may arise from within, is so critical.

Often, though, we can become mired in the muck of shaming from a new place. If we practice only accepting kindness and acceptance, but continue to reject our own rejection of what causes harm, we are no closer to connection than we were before.

We must open ourselves to being more than we think. Our heart is far larger than our mind.

Thich Nhat Hanh is a wonderful teacher of practices that bring us into harmony within and without. He does this not by trying to be “better than” anyone else, but by not allowing himself to be swept entirely away from his center by anything he thinks or feels. Recognizing thoughts and feelings as aspects of our experience, but not the experiencer. We must remember our nature, which is in this body, a temporary thing. This is true for every person you meet. We are all born with needs we cannot meet alone, and each of us lives our lives trying to meet those needs. It is through learning that we can only meet our needs together that we will find a pathway to peace and harmony.

Thank you all for being here today. Please remember to follow, like and share these practices. If you wold like to become a financial support of this offering, there is a Venmo link at the bottom of this post.

All In Love,

Michael

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