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While both your body and your breath exist in the present moment, quite often your mind is somewhere else. As often as you remember, you can bring your attention back to the felt-sense of your body and your breathing to establish presence. True embodied presence allows us to be aware of the mind’s wanderings into desire and aversion—the wanted and the unwanted—while more clearly discerning what requires action and what is better left undone. With presence, we may act without striving and rest without resistance. In mindful presence, Lori Furbush The Breathing
An absolute patience. Trees stand up to their knees in fog. The fog slowly flows uphill. White cobwebs, the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples. The woods from brook to where the top of the hill looks over the fog, send up not one bird. So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear. ―Denise Levertov Mindfulness is a practical tool we can use to know ourselves better and navigate life with skill and freedom of choice. The goal of mindfulness is not to reach some lofty state of bliss, relaxation, or empty mind. It is, rather, the practice of engaging with each unfolding moment in open curious presence. Meeting yourself just as you are is an act of courage. In mindful presence, Lori Furbush Mindfulness practice isn’t meant to eliminate thinking but aims rather to help us know what we’re thinking when we’re thinking it…like going into an old attic room and turning on the light. In that light we see everything—the beautiful treasures we’re grateful to have unearthed; the dusty, neglected corners that inspire us to say, “I’d better clean that up”; the unfortunate relics of the past that we thought we had gotten rid of years ago. We acknowledge them all, with an open, spacious, and loving awareness.
―Sharon Salzburg For those of us walking the path of self-reflection, it is somehow comforting to know that we are always learning, evolving, and awakening, while at the same time carrying our same old wounded self with tender loving care. Those triggers still trigger us. Those buttons still get pushed. It’s as though we are simultaneously circling outward and inward, uncovering old ways and new insights. We are not linear beings but circles rippling the surface and revealing the depths. In mindful presence, Lori Furbush Where you are going
and the place you stay come to the same thing. What you long for and what you've left behind are as useless as your name. Just one time, walk out into the field and look at that towering oak-- an acorn still beating at its heart. ―Peter Levitt Permanence is an illusion. While we may have people and experiences that linger longer in our lives, the truth is that everything comes and goes. Your thoughts, moods, successes, failures, and even your challenges eventually shift into something else. Our familiar pattern is to cling to what we want and push away what we do not want. Remembering that all experiences are fleeting may invite us to really be present for each moment of life, the pleasant and the difficult. Life itself is fleeting. And rich. You may not want to miss a moment while wishing for something else. In mindful presence, Lori Furbush The knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.
―Rainer Maria Rilke While the past can be reviewed and retold in stories and accounts, and the present can be felt with all of your senses, the future remains elusive. Truth is, we never know just how the next moment will unfold. We can make plans and take steps in a particular direction, but uncertainty is always with us. How might you become more comfortable with “living the questions”? In mindful presence, Lori Furbush Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
―Rainer Maria Rilke |
AuthorLori Furbush teaches Qigong, Yin Yoga, & Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). She weaves MINDFULNESS & RELAXATION into every moment. Archives
November 2023
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