Inrageous/Outrageous Self-Care Enchantments for September 18, 2008

Inrageous/Outrageous Self-Care Enchantments for This Week

 

You may have noticed that POW was not published last week.  I was having a wonderful personal adventure of having my life be my spiritual practice and was unable to publish POW.  For this week, I wish to speak from my heart and soul and share with you about this experience.

 

 As you know, the book for this month is Pema Chodron’s “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.”  I picked this book specifically as we are going through a difficult time with a serious health issue with my husband.  As one may imagine, I have been “broken hearted” about my husband’s diagnosis. 

 

Well, my heart is broken, literally.  I developed a small tear in an artery of my heart resulting in a heart attack.  What I find fascinating is not just the fact that my physical body responded to my empathy and compassion for my husband but that I was reading the chapter in Pema Chodron’s book about “Nonaggression and the Four Maras”.  She says that the yama mara is rooted in the fear of death and continues by saying that it is when we feel we have gotten to the “good life” that we are actually not fully alive.  Here are her words “We finally feel that we’re a good person.  We have good qualities, we’re peaceful, and we don’t get thrown off balance when arrows are shot at us.  We’re the person who knows how to turn an arrow into a flower.  We feel so good about ourselves.  We’ve finally tied up all the loose ends.  We’re happy.  We think that that’s life.”  This is where I was at a few weeks ago.

 

Pema Chodron goes on to say “…rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death.  It doesn’t have any fresh air.  There’s no room for something to come in and interrupt all that.  We are killing the moment by controlling our experience.  Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later, we’re going to have an experience we can’t control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we’re going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head, somebody’s going to spill tomato juice all over our white suit…The essence of life is that it is challenging.  Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter…..To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”

 

I have certainly been thrown out of the nest!  I share this with you not because I want or need sympathy, rather, I share this with you as a reminder of the inter connectedness of life and from the perspective of our lives as our spiritual practice.  Rather than running away from pain, hurt, fear, anger, anxiety, unworthiness, we can use these feelings to go deeper in our relationship with ourselves and use the reality of our lives as our spiritual practice.

 

So, this week, your self care enchantments if you chose to are about gently exploring both the sweet and the bitter, the good and the bad, the pain and the pleasure, the groundedness and the groundlessness.  This is a continuation of the practice of “unconditional friendship with yourself”.

 

 

Self Care Enchantments for the week:

 

1.  Explore what you believe about life and pain and pleasure?

2.  Very gently ask yourself how you “run away” from pain, fear, anxiety.  Do you use shopping therapy, food, exercise, alcohol, work for example, to take yourself out of your feelings?

3.  Honour the fall season and prepare for “the harvest” by acknowledging what you are harvesting in your life this season. 

 

“May your life be like a wildflower, growing freely in beauty and joy each day.”

 

– Native American Proverb

 

Please share about your learning and exploration with these enchantments on www.thepowblog.com in the comments section of these enchantments!

 

namaste,

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