Blue Sky

Go outside during a break from work, even if you are in the middle of a city. If you can't go outside, just stand at a window and look into the sky. Find a patch of blue. Look deep into the blue distance of the sky until you gaze beyond the vanishing point, beyond any focus. You are gazing at infinity. As your eyes un-focus and relax, seeing no-thing yet intensely alive with awareness, many muscles in your face relax spontaneously.

Exhale, following the breath out through your eyes into the depths of blue space. Inhale that depth. After a few breaths, close your eyes and experience the same depth,  the same vastness, inside.

Become aware of your whole body in this boundless blue sky. Infuse your body with space. The blue sky fills every cell, every atom. This is not imagination. This is how it really is. The infinite sky, the boundless vacuum, is in fact what matter is made of.

Hold Your Own Hand

We hold someone else's hand when we are in love, or when we care for them in their hour of sorrow. But do we ever hold our own hand this way?

We wring our hands in anxiety. Or we clap our hands for someone else. But do we hold our hand?

For just a minute, stop what you're doing and look deeply at your hand. Gaze into its architecture, its worn crevices, its ancient lines. Breathe in the work, the pain, the giving your hand has offered. Breathe this hand all the way into your heart. Be grateful for your hand.

Become aware of the cells in your hand, the molecules of DNA containing your mother and father, your ancestors, and all who have worked so hard to grant you this body. Hold them all in your hand. Breathe in their wisdom. Breathe out compassion.

Now very gently, place this hand in your other hand. Close your eyes and feel the warmth, the texture of one hand in the other. As you would hold the hand of your own child, pour pure love from one hand to the other. If thoughts of resistance appear in your mind, just observe them and accept them with the same pure love.

In the West when we pray, we put our hands together. In the meditation posture of the East, we lay one hand gently in the other. Why not make this very joining of our hands a meditation?

Now touch someone else this way. Then go back to work with your ancient, wise, beautiful hands.

Hands at Work

What are your hands doing this very moment? Washing a dish, typing at a keyboard, hammering a nail, throwing a frisbie? Are you aware of the energy in your hands while you work?

In body-work, we often learn grounding through our feet, but seldom learn grounding through our hands. All the nourishment we absorb from earth, sun and stars reconnects with the cosmos through the work of our hands. Through our hands we complete the circuit of receiving and offering.

Your whole body celebrates through your hands. The energy of the earth dances through your fingers - painting, writing, healing, caressing, planting seeds, shoveling dirt. If we don't complete the gesture of our incarnation in our fingertips, our body is stillborn.

Give awareness to your hand right now! Notice that you don't really have a hand: you have a complex inter-woven dance of wrist bones, knuckles, finger joints and finger tips. You hand is a whole community of destinations and beginnings.

We turn our working hands into praying hands simply by being aware of them. Pause for a moment at work or play to become aware of your hands. Don't look at them, just sense the energy flowing around and through each bone, joint, tendon, fiber. Take a gentle breath in. As you let it go out, allow your attention to sink down your arms to your fingertips.

Spend a few breaths gently connecting your heart to your hands. Many people only experience this sacred connection when the have a heart attack. Don't wait until then! Breathe from heart to hands right now. Inhaling, awareness flows from the palm up the arm into your heart. Breathing out, awareness flows back down the arm, right out into the air through the fingertips.

Now gently return to your work, keeping some awareness in the hands. Several times a day, right in the midst of your daily tasks, rest awareness in the hands.

When the Mind Wanders

"Be a wanderer," Jesus says in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.

Sometimes people complain, "I can't meditate because my mind wanders." If your meditation doesn't work, you must have turned it into a job!

Stop working during meditation. The sign of life is the wave. All energy manifests in waves of rest and activity. When we work, we are active, then we rest. And when we rest, we restore energy by not-working. That is the Sabbath, and God's Sabbath rest is as sacred as God's work.

Meditation is not work but play! You mind wanders because it follows its innate tendency to play. In Sanskrit texts this playfulness is divine: it is called lilla. The scriptures of India tell us that God's deepest motive for creating the universe was simply lilla, to play.

Instead of trying to stop the mind and control it, just ride the waves of wandering. Let the very tendency of the mind to wander refresh you. And let your very non-resistance of wandering be your only object of meditation. Regard nothing your mind does, nowhere it goes, as a distraction.

What we mean when we say that our mind has wandered is that we have lost awareness. Awareness of what? We only wander in relation to some place else. If there is nowhere else to be but where we are, then wandering is a dance, and we are always dancing at the center of the universe.

So the next time you meditate, let your mind wander in all directions at once, expanding like a blossom to the edges of the universe. Just watch. How wonderful! When you are awake, a wander is a wonder.

The Greatest Yoga Teacher on Earth

Unconscious breathing is just an organic process to sustain biological life. Likewise, disembodied awareness is just empty space. But put breath and awareness together, and a miracle happens. Healing wisdom is born. Now you have conscious breath, which is filled with divine creative energy. Ancident traditions honor that energy with terms such as prana, chi, ruach elohim, or holy spirit.

Awareness touching Breath is the kiss of Christ and Mary Magdalene, the embrace of Shiva and Shakti. As this living Breath bathes sensation in the body, Christ is born. Christ is the offspring of Breathe and Awareness as a fully embodied human being. That holy child is you.

The science of Yoga is simply this love affair between Breath and Awareness in a human body. Let your own sacred body teach you Yoga. Let your flesh teach you to breathe: for your own breath is the supreme Yoga asana.

Forget technique. Forget correct Yoga posture. Just luxuriate in the movement of this incomparable breath, the miracle that can't be resisted, because it is happening now.

Let your inhalation open the smallest segment of your spine. Let your exhalation send currents of light into your joints and muscles. What we're talking about here has no fancy Sanskrit name: it is simply a good old-fashioned stretch.

With attention in the body-of-breath, experience every micro-movement of your stretch. You can practice this stretch in the quiet of the morning even when you are still lying in bed. Or you can do it standing. You can certainly use it as a break in your business day or study.

Reach your arms over your head. Stretch one leg at a time, pointing the toes of each foot. Breathe in again and stretch your torso, your spine. Keep stretching as you breathe, but don't hold a position. Keep some subtle movement happening in the body, like a great tree gently swaying. With each breath, lengthen a segment of your spine, gently opening a little more space between the vertebrae. Do this even in your neck, by drawing the chin slowly down toward your chest.

Observe your body from the tip of your toes to the crown of your head: use the stretch to open up and breathe through tense stuck places. Let the Breath itself do the opening, ever so gently. Your Breath is the mover, your awareness is the giver of life. Let Breath massage and open up the body's space, let Awareness pour healing energy into that space. Awaken all the numb stuck places.

One slow luxurious stretch, enjoyed without comparing yourself to any other body, could be the best Yoga class you ever attend, guided by the best Yoga teacher on earth.

Elemental Healing

Healing Mandala by St. Hildegard of Bingen, 12th C. 

To heal ourselves is to heal the world. The elements of our body are already holy. Our bodies are full of sacred medicine. The deepest healing practice is not to administer medicine, but to remove blocks from healing channels that are already there. The amazing truth is, awareness itself can remove these blocks. Awareness dissolves obstructions.

Shamanism is the activation of the human body as the link between earth and stars, awakening the body's elemental powers by simply anointing bones, blood, tears and breath with the sparkling awareness I Am.

 Elemental Healing Meditation

Water is healing, I am made of Water.
I drink fresh and deep and slow,
speaking to the Water,

Thank you, Water, I love You.

Air is healing, I am made of Air.
I breathe fresh and deep and slow
down through my roots,
up through the soft spot on my crown.
My breath connects the earth and stars.

Thank you, Air, I love You.

Earth is healing, I am made of Earth.
I sit on a mossy stone in the forest
feeling my weight as a blessing, a sacred path.
I surrender to gravity, the Mother's hug.

Thank you, Earth, I love You.

Fire is healing, I am made of Fire.
I stand in the morning sun and close my eyes.
I see sunlight sparkling inside me.
I draw seven breaths of sunlight through my forehead,
in-breathing down to my heart,
out-breathing to every cell of my flesh.

Thank you, Fire, I love You.

Water, Air, Earth and Fire,
Thank You, I love You.
You are medicine, I am made of You.
Awake in my body, You heal me.

Anointing You with gratitude, I heal You.

With my gratitude, I heal the Water.
With my gratitude, I heal the Air.
With my gratitude, I heal the Earth.
With my gratitude, I heal the Stars.

Eating a Grape

You can enjoy any fresh natural food this way. Even a sip of water can be magic. Jesus did this with bread and wine.

Hold a grape in your hand and look at it carefully. If this grape were placed in a bowl with a hundred other grapes, what would you look for to recognize this one?

Now look even more deeply into the grape. It contains the rain, the clouds, the sky that watered it. It's skin and meat contain the minerals of the earth. Many trees and flowers and animals have died and returned to the loam to form the nutrients in this grape. The fire of the sun sparkles inside this grape, and protons from ancient stars. This grape contains all the elements: earth, water, fire, sky. This grape is full of death and rebirth.

Humanity fills this grape. Many hands have labored to till and water its soil, prune its vine, and bring it to harvest: hands of laborers, packers, shippers, grocery clerks. The juice of this grape runs with human toil and tears. Somehow the tender sweetness of this grape has been preserved for you across a continent of commerce. To notice all this in a grape is prayer, grace unspoken.

Lift the grape up to your nostrils and smell it. Gently roll it in your fingers next to your ear and see if it has a sound. Now hold this grape in your palm and breathe a breath of gratitude. Put the grape in your mouth, crush it in your teeth. Taste its flavor as pure sensation without words, without the label, "grape." Chew it slowly and swallow it.

Sit quietly and observe the lingering sensations in your mouth and tongue, the bouquet fading like sunset on your tongue. Follow these flavors and sensations as they dissolve into pure Presence, into the silence of Being without desire.

In Grief

Don't try to be with the person who died. Just be with their death.

Rest in the death, the absence of your beloved.

The overwhelming gift of being with death is this: it is not only your loved one's death, it is your death too.

Death is the void. The void is infinite. The infinite is the field of possibility. From this vast negation creation is born.

On Easter morning, in the garden, Mary Magdalene reached out to touch Jesus, who was dead. He said, "Do not cling to me."

Do not cling to your beloved, who is dead. Instead, just rest in their absence. Rest in their death.

This may sound terrible, but it is the only way through grief, because grief is the gateway to Presence. And only in Presence, where there is no past, no future, will you meet your beloved, who is right here.

This is a mystery. I am with you.