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Posts Tagged ‘meditation’

The Grand Embrace: Resistance & Willingness
September 13 10 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. MDT
$40-$100 sliding scale, no one will be refused for lack of funds


We are learning to stretch in so many ways, many of them very uncomfortable. Living right now can feel like being in a story with an unbearable amount of tension. If it were a book, we might be tempted to read ahead to find out what happens to relieve the tension. Well, we don’t get to skip ahead. And we don’t get to stick our heads in the sand. But we do have the chance to meet our resistance to the moment— our sticky, unadulterated top-to-bottom resistance. And we have a chance to practice being available to the moment. Join dharma teacher Susie Harrington and poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer for a day of exploring resistance and willingness through meditation and writing.

There will be meditation practice instructions, guided meditations and silent sitting. Poetry practice will include periods of instruction, time to write, and time to share what we have written and discovered. This combination of silence and discovery can be a magical process that leads us deep into ourselves and into the world. No previous experience in meditation or poetry is required to participate. We expect many will be more familiar with one of these modes of exploration than the other and this will be an opportunity to build on the experiences you bring.

If you have any questions please contact Lisa Allee at 970-570-7936 or lisaalleecnm@hotmail.com (call or text preferred). 
To register, visit https://desertdharma.org/retreats.html

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Playing with Mindfulness & Poetry
October 2, 5-8 p.m. and October 3, 8-11 a.m. 
$95

It’s like recess for grownups—a chance to let your body and your mind have fun in a virtual playground. Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer will offer playful word games and mischievous prompts for writing. Psychotherapist, yoga and meditation teacher Augusta Kantra will lead light-hearted creative movement and joyful experimentation. Play is for everyone! Leave feeling more deeply connected to the part of you who knows how to enjoy being alive. To register, visit https://calmlivingstudio.com/events/playing-with-mindfulness-poetry/
 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form, a podcast on the creative process. She also co-hosts Telluride’s Talking Gourds Poetry Club and is co-founder of Secret Agents of Change. She teaches poetry for mindfulness retreats, women’s retreats, scientists, hospice and more. Her poetry has appeared in O Magazine, on A Prairie Home Companion and in Rattle.com. Her most recent collection, Hush, won the Halcyon Prize. She is often found in the kitchen baking with her teenage children. One-word mantra: Adjust.

Augusta Kantra is a psychotherapist, a mindfulness and meditation teacher, and a yoga teacher. She and her husband, David, own and operate the Center for CALM Living and CALM Living Studio in Fairhope, Alabama. As a psychotherapist, she helps her clients understand and unravel the dynamics that trip them up. As a mindfulness teacher, she facilitates on-going Yoga Assisted Self-Discovery groups incorporating meditation, movement, and insight practices. As a teacher of yoga, she leads trainings at the foundational (200hr) and advanced (500hr) levels. And each week, she live-streams her fun, inspiring, and awareness-increasing yoga classes.

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The Empty Dark

Answers don’t arrive if you’re afraid of sitting in the empty dark room of not knowing by yourself long enough for them to arrive on their own schedule. 

—Michael Thelen

Oh let me, too, be willing to sit in the empty dark

and let the darkness enter me.

Let me not pretend to know how it will be.

Let me lose my plans, though it terrifies me.

Let me not imagine any better time

to practice than now.

Let me be the bowl that sings when touched,

the bowl that is content with its own stillness.

If I want answers, let me sit with my longing.

If I want lessons, let me find them right here.

And if it is dark, let me not run from the dark,

but lean into it. And if it is light,

let me long for the light. Let it enter me.

Let me not pretend to know how it will be.

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I try to see myself

the way I see the trees

far off beyond the field—

something not at all singular

but a tiny part of a whole

that extends beyond sight,

beyond knowing.

 

It is a long time

before my thoughts

are airy as the silences

between their dark trunks,

quiet as the leaves

that are not yet there.

 

 

 

 

 

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Let yourself be danced.

            —Augusta Kantra

 

 

The poem sits down to be written.

Instead, it stares at the bay.

There’s a highway in the distance

that could take it all the way to California.

The poem doesn’t want to go to California.

It wants to be present, just here,

on the sandy bank beside the driftwood.

It wants to find its inner poem.

It wants to get out of its own way,

to obey its emerging form.

Instead, it watches the tall grass

getting danced by the wind.

It sighs. The poem wants to know

what it doesn’t know yet.

And the poem wants to be good.

Dammit. It tries to lower its standards,

then judges, compares and tries to fix itself.

It lists. It sits cross legged till its legs

fall asleep. It is a book of sorrows,

a tree of anxiety, a wave of failure.

It’s a cage of empty lines. How

did it get into this straight jacket?

The poem gives up. It stares at the bay.

Watches the grasses sway. Notices

how the wind blows its hair,

lifts its hands. The poem doesn’t know

why it’s weeping. In that moment,

the poem is danced.

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Who Am I?

 

 

I thought I wanted

a harmonium of answers,

a key of certainty,

a hymn of how to,

but silence gave me

the most beautiful gift—

one true question.

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Inner Locating

 

 

Close to the waves,

I hear only waves.

Close to the cars,

I hear cars.

Come closer,

says the silence.

Come closer,

says the heart.

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The pelican dives

into the water,

rises again. Hovers.

Dives. Rises.

Each time, the water is quick

to forget the intrusion

loses its ripples,

stills. A thought

is a kind of a pelican.

A woman is a kind

of a bay. The pelicans

will always dive.

The bay will always

return to stillness.

A woman might

learn to live this way.

 

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“Focus on your breathing,” Susie says.

“Imagine this next breath is your first.”

And for a while, it works. I feel the inhale move

from nose to throat to lungs, feel the new air travel

through my legs and arms. Then breathe it out.

I’m curious. I follow as the breath becomes my

daughter, and I wonder how her first day

of climbing went yesterday. And that was so weird

how she was in my dream last night when

I swallowed a spider. Oh yeah. Exhale. Inhale.

The breath. My chest is rising, my hands are still,

and wouldn’t it be nice to go walk in the redwoods?

How long has it been since we were there? ’97?

’98? And inhale. There it is again, the invitation

to take the first breath, and wow, feel all that air

as it rushes in and fills the body like

the balloons at Finn’s birthday party last weekend.

That was so fun, the boys in the waning sun

playing out on the lawn. I can’t believe how sweet

they were to each other and breathe. Right. Here.

Paying attention to the places where my body

meets the ground. Butt. Knees. Shins. And isn’t

it wild how the hum of the cars on the highway outside

at first sound just like a gong. Wrong. Wrong. Think breath.

Or not wrong. Just an other invitation to embrace the process,

each thought like wind, and I, I’m rowing a small canoe.

Is silence always this loud? Someone across the circle

is snoring, and from the kitchen it smells like, mmm,

Thai curry. And Susie says, “Return to the breath,”

and for another moment, I breathe in, breathe out.

And I thank you, mind, for all this practice. You’re

so good at what you do. It matters, this dance,

this chance to be present, to show up and meet

the all that is. I so want to know what is true.

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One Walking

 

 

 

midnight

learning to rhyme my thoughts

with the air

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sitting with flowers in the garden

until I am

flower in the garden

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