Artwork: Alice Neel
Good morning beautiful people,
There is a voice inside my head that tells me that i have no right to write about life, especially when i don’t have my own life “in order”.
But then, when i truly question the validity of that thought, I realise that we are all trying to make it out there (or in here), trying to hold on to things for our dear life, yet somehow the harder we try and compare ourselves to others, the more disconnected we become from what truly makes us feel “in order.”
Eckhart Tolle, spiritual teacher who wrote The Power of Now says “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your soul. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because its the one you are having.”
So basically we have a choice at any given time, to be with whatever feeling or emotion we are experiencing, giving it the room it needs to come out and staying present to what is. Or our other option involves feeling the emotion, associating it with a thought or story about the past and future and suffer even more from what we are going through. In meditation, we call the former clean pain and the latter dirty pain. The dirt, being all the stuff we think will happen when the truth is that we actually don’t know any of it. Can you relate?
On this note, i am going to invite you to take a deep breath, feeling your feet on the ground, your bottom on the chair your might be sitting on, or simply coming back to the air going through your nostrils. This is probably the best thing to do when we are stuck in dirty pain. Its not easy, but it takes practice and trust me, i am there with you. The dirt still comes to haunt me at times i expect it the least.
If you would like to know more about this practice, please feel free to email me or to attend a group session, i cannot do this work without you in the room. And lastly, if your thoughts are keeping you up at night, i have uploaded a new guided meditation for better sleep.
Wishing you a beautiful fall day,
Vanessa
