Parinama

  Below the outer face is the inner face that resides behind the heart.   This is the face you had before you were born, soft, open, tethered to the deeper inner self.     I will never forget the first time I looked into my daughter’s face moments after she was born.   It was the most beautiful face I had ever seen.   Such tiny eyelashes and tender lips and those deep dark liquid blue eyes that looked back with such curiosity.   She seemed to glow from within.   I was beholden and utterly smitten with that face. This is the face we all have behind our hearts soft, utterly tender, awestruck, and longing for love.   To manage in the world, we wear masks over the inner face to keep this part safe and secure. These are the masks of professionalism, competence, power, and allure.   We get into difficulty when we come to believe that we are our masks.   The price we pay for this ignorance is a disconnection from...

  Start close in, don’t take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in, the step you don’t want to take… David Whyte   Sometimes, most time, the hardest thing about reaching a goal is taking the next step, the   “close in step” towards it.     We want to leap, jump, fly up to the top of the mountain not take the first hard step up the steep slope.   We want to write a novel but are unable to take the first step to put a paragraph on a blank page. We want to push up into a backbend but can’t get in close to open the tight shoulder blades. Is it the fear of failure that stops us? The fear that our “close in step” is so very far away from where we want to be that we may never get there if we must start from where we are?     What if the next close in step takes us through a place we did not want to go?   Up close we are likely to see where we are weak, confused, and vulnerable. Taki...