WHEN FEELING STUCK

“The same stream of life that runs through the world runs through my veins.”

~ Rabindranath Tagore

We are so achievement-oriented that we often surge right by the true value of relating to what’s before us, because we think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.

Yet, if we can outlast the urge to judge everything we encounter, a miracle starts to surround us in which painting, music, poetry, running water, flowers, wind through trees, open vistas - all touch and draw out their counterpart that lives quietly within us.

The nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called this inner terrain “inscape.” And just as no landscape can flourish without sun and water, our inscape must be irrigated and drenched with many forms of life if we are to thrive.

So, when feeling stuck or disconnected from the miracle of life, as will happen to us all, try to listen, see, feel, and just take in. Try to let the energies of life stir their counterparts within you.

In order to be whole, suspend your criticism. For life is not a matter of taste, but awakening, not a matter of finding things pleasing or disturbing, but of finding things completing, not a matter of liking or disliking, but of opening the geography of one’s soul.

~This is a meditation done to music. Close your eyes and listen to a piece of music that is new to you.

~ As you breathe evenly, allow yourself to feel your like or dislike for it, and try to let that go.

~ As you breathe, allow yourself to meet the sheer energy of the music with the sheer energy of what is new in you.

The Book of Awakening

~ Mark Nepo