Practice as saving grace
After being sedentary for days of driving from Halifax to Toronto, my body was aching to be in motion. Yesterday I walked over to our shipping room and posted a couple of orders. The day was gorgeous and I started walking. Feeling driven like Forrest Gump I walked and walked along Bloor Street from Lansdowne to Yorkville and could have kept going.
The sun brings everyone out and the streets were crowded with every imaginable social culture, age, size, and state of being from the down and out to the up-and-coming. It is always fascinating to look into the faces of people. People with 80% of their bodies covered with tattoos to the botoxed in Prada shoes.
After being on the ocean and in a much slower pace of life, this walk was like witnessing human masses on crack. The diverse vibrancy kept me very present for sure.
The one commonality I sensed of most was their suffering. I can feel it on more faces than not, in varying degrees. In a culture where we believe that the answers are in the world around us, its very easy to get stuck in the struggle.
I tried to imagine the stories that defined these lives. We may not have choices over our experiences but we do have choice in how we filter them. What is it that makes us wear the label of the victim, judge, critic and heckler? What story made us anxious, depressed, insecure, insufficient, angry or resentful? What steals our sense of freedom from our lives? The freedom to not only be ok but be great and grateful, to be flexible and open to whatever arises. To reap the benefits of living love and kindness unconditionally, both inwardly and outwardly. No story is worth surrendering the peace that is accessible to all of us by sheer birth.
The bad news is that it’s our thinking that forms our experiences. The good news is that it’s our thinking that forms our experiences and they’re transformable. As Thay says “We all have within us the seed of all things. Which ones we water is up to us.” If we no longer feed the negative ones, they will die.
We live in a world that pays more attention to the negative than the positive. Is adrenalin more powerful that dopamine? I don’t know but I do know that if we practice creating experiences that will start to lay new mental formations, we will release the old stuck negative thinking.
Walking on the living earth with all of creation for the brief moment that we are here is a gift too good to miss. When you see pain and struggles in the world around you, including the mirror, imagine these faces at the age of three and send loving kindness.
May you be happy, may you be free from suffering and the root causes of suffering, may you be well.
Practice can change everything.
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with love, a lotus and a smile, happy Sunday,
Gisele
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