Parinama

  Blessing for Friendship (John O’Donahue) May you be blessed with good friends And learn to be a good friend to yourself, Journeying to that place in your soul where There is love, warmth, and feeling. May this change you   I have felt let down in so many of relationships and friendships.   People whom I thought would be good friends ended up being cold and ungenerous.   Others whom I felt close and safe with could still hurt.   Some never seemed to hear what I shared or cared. In other cases, a searing jealousy would ripen inside of me as I hungered for what they had, and I felt I lacked.   Distances grew between myself and friends that I felt incapable of bridging.   Even so, I still longed for intimacy and constancy, like the friendships I imagined others had, that I saw in movies and read about in novels.   It seemed like this should be possible, a best friend who was always there for me as I would be for th...

  The final limb of yoga, samahdi, translated as “bliss”, is described as an integration of the self with the soul.   In samahdi, the ego disappears into to God and we become one with all of life.   According to the yoga sutras of Patanjali, we cannot make this experience of samhadi happen through our self-will and effort.   It comes to us as a grace. But through consistent practice of all the limbs of yoga, we can prepare the body/mind to receive this gift of integration, deep concentration, inner calm. In some interpretations, this dissolving of the small, egoic, separate self into the soul is how death is described.   According so many wisdom traditions, nothing of the small self makes it past the gate of death.   But the part of us that is divine, the soul, does make it through to this homecoming back to the source. The mystics of the wisdom traditions teach that we do not have to wait until death to catch a glimpse of this homeco...

  Joy takes us spontaneously when we are ready to receive it.   Holding a baby, watching a flock of bird rising up from a field, seeing snow blowing like mist off of a pine tree, we are taken with a sense of awe at the beauty of the world, our hearts filling with joy.     Fear blocks the rush of joy.   While there are many things to fear in the world, much of it comes from habitual thought patterns that triggers fear and overwhelm. Especially if you have experienced trauma, when the body/mind feels even a little apprehensive, the sympathetic (automatic) nervous system can ramp into overdrive in its attempt to protect from danger.   Even a bit of excitement where the heart races can set off a panic as it resembles the body in fear. In the trauma response, the danger feels real no matter the evidence to the contrary.     It is hard for joy to penetrate through fear.   Joy flows through open-heartedness, tenderness, an...