A great book recently found it’s way to me, as great books sometimes do. It’s by Mark Nepo, who is a poet, and who is described as ‘an alchemist of the ordinary, who invites us to see, taste, touch, dance and feel our way into the heart of life’.
The Book of Awakening is a daybook, containing an entry for each day of the year. These entries are made up of stories from everyday life, inspirations from the great wisdom traditions, and extraordinary observations about ordinary things. Some simple practices are offered at the end of each entry, to help us make a deeper connection to the lessons offered in the writing.
This week in my classes I have been exploring the water element as it relates to the sacral chakra, and consequently my attention was drawn to this entry from August 7, which invites us to learn from the river. It’s called ‘What We Bring Along’…
A river doesn’t hold all the water that passes through it.
In our journey through time, we all struggle constantly with what to bring along and what to leave behind. It feels so hard to throw anything away, but of we don’t, we will drown underneath a weight of our own making.
The river is a good model. It doesn’t own the water that rushes by, yet it couldn’t be in a more intimate relationship to it, as the force of what moves through shapes it. It is the same with everything we love. In truth, there is no point in holding on to the deepest things that matter, for they have already shaped us.
The purpose of sentiment, then, is to release the powerful feelings that sleep in us. Sometimes books and cards and shells and dried flowers do this. But often we carry more than we need, seldom trusting that what these small treasures represent is already living within us. Often the most useful gift we can give ourselves is to lay our lives open like a river.
* Hold a memento that has meaning for you and meditate on the feeling it releases.
* Be aware of where this feeling lives in you.
* Consider how alive or not this memento is for you.
* Consider why you keep it.
Sometimes we simply forget we have the choice to let go.
Om Shanti, Lynda.