I have a Jade plant that I very much love. I purchased it around four years ago, when it was just a small plant—four inches tall, or so. Now, it’s a good fourteen inches tall and wide, quite regal! I can say, with confidence, that over the past four years this Jade plant has grown—has increased in size, at least fourfold. Stealth Growth But have I actually perceived it growing—directly—with …
Practice Notes
Practice Notes: Adornment
Noticing, in recent weeks, patterns of emotional energy that would seem to be connected to childhood experiences—accompanied by images from those earlier years. All to be welcomed, embraced with tender-spacious intimacy, allowed in their own time to transform, recognized as already liberated. Among the various themes these dreamlike scenarios (these apparitions from Elizabeth’s past) present, …
Practice Notes: Same & Different
Change is a strange thing. While worldly phenomena—including human bodies and minds—seem to be in perpetual motion—transforming, modulating, modifying, adjusting, etc. pretty much all the time—change turns out to be rather slippery to actually find. The reason for this slipperiness is that to say that a particular object has “undergone change” requires that it partake, simultaneously, of …
Practice Notes: Untouched & Deeply Felt
It’s been a month now, at least, since I first opened this Word file, and typed in the title—Practice Notes: Untouched & Deeply Felt. I expected that (as is generally the case) I’d return, within the next day or two, to complete the essay. Yet that impulse, until today, just never arrived. Somehow, for a long time, nothing else was needed. Somehow, the title in and of itself (with fewer …
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Practice Notes: Knowing, Being, Seeing
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, from The Little Prince What I’ve been feeling most curious about, as of late, is the meaning of “seeing” and “being seen”—both in relation to the human organism and in terms of our essential identity as Pure …
Practice Notes: Body Cultivation
Over the years, I’ve explored and greatly benefitted from a variety of body-cultivation traditions—the majority of which have their roots in India or China. Iyengar Yoga The first was Iyengar yoga, which I was drawn to for its therapeutic applications. I was in my early 20’s and still recovering from a serious ankle injury, which had been creating all kinds of problems, also, in my hips and …