Memento mori

Everything I see is a memento mori, a reminder of impermanence. Not just the skulls, the rotting fruit, the dead birds and bubbles of classical artwork, but also the delicate flowers, the clouds, the newly born animals, the shadows on the mountains, the light on the water. I see a reminder of impermanence in the dimpled knees of a baby as much as in the spotted and veined hands of a crone. Everything is changing, all the time. I look at my face in the mirror and I hardly seem like a solid thing. This too shall pass. This body, changing and aging all the time, will soon be gone. Life passes in the blink of an eye. Why pretend otherwise?

This is reality. I don't find it sad or depressing, but rather beautiful, right and perfect. Without death, each moment of life would not have the immeasurable value that it does. We value precious metals because they are a finite resource. So is this life.

My mind runs over these well worn tracks again and again. Am I repeating myself? Perhaps. But this is one of the most beautiful truths of my life, a message well worth sharing.


2017-05-13

mindful dreams

In my journey of healing my body, I have come to realize that past disassociation due to childhood trauma and lifelong pain has damaged my connection to my body, has interrupted my receipt of signals, disrupted essential communications. I’ve ignored the discomfort until it turns into pain, and ignored the pain until my health is in crisis.

Mindfulness is my tool to repair the connection: checking in regularly with my body throughout the day, whatever I am doing. It has become a habit, so much so that body awareness is now seeping into my dreams more and more often. I’m dreaming and suddenly I feel my body lying in my warm bed: so relaxed, so comfortable. I feel the slackness of my muscles. And in the dream, I collapse to the ground and lie there, unable to rise, as the dream continues all around me. I try to rise, again and again, but my muscles just won’t contract. So I lie there in the dirt, on the rocks, on the floor, on the stairs, wherever I was in the dreamscape when I collapsed.

It happens so often now that it has become my new tip off that I am dreaming, though usually I choose to forget, and slip back into the flow of my subconscious, rather than directing, controlling the dream. Truly, I have even less control, as now I am mainly an observer of the dream’s storyline, rather than a participant.

One day, I awoke so slowly, so languorously, and brought the awareness of my body with me the entire way up into wakefulness. The dream flowed directly into my morning body scan. Now this happens nearly every time I wake.

Lucid and semi-lucid dreams are usual for me, as is occasional sleep paralysis. The merging of the two is an experience I’ve never heard anyone else recount.

2017-01-21

April 13, 2016

Sometimes I feel so overwhelmed with the busy rush of life swirling around me. There is always so much to do. Run here, run there so you can buy this, buy that. Do, do, do! Such a frenzy to achieve the next thing, to reach the next goal. But so often it seems to me that there's nothing one can do, really. The most beautiful thing, the only thing that one can do is to simply be. It seems one person is too small to have any effect, it is impossible to really do anything. All we can do is observe the tempest around us and enjoy the stillness inside.   


2016-04-13