From birth to death every living being is in a state of becoming.
Lokah Samastha Sukhino Bhavantu
May all beings in the world be happy.
Over the years I have learned many sayings and acronyms relating to fear. I have found them to be useful tools in my own life journey and have also used them with clients in my psychotherapy practice. Here are the ones that come to mind at the moment:
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.
Fear and excitement are two sides of the same coin.
We can see fear as:
False Evidence Appearing Real
Forget Everything And Run
or
Feeling Excited And Ready
Face Everything And Rise
Other important factors:
It is important to feel Fear when we are in danger. The emotion indicates that we need to take action. Fight or Flight might be necessary.
Most of our Fear however is Fear of the future. We often feel much more Fear of what might happen then we would feel if it did happen.
Fear may also mask another feeling. That usually happens because there were unacceptable and acceptable feelings in our families of origin. In my childhood home, feeling Fear was fine. Feeling anger was not. Therefore, I learned to feel Fear at times when I was actually angry. Once I saw this pattern, I realized it was important that I ask myself if I was angry anytime I felt Fear.
There is so much I could say on this topic but instead I am going to end with the video that Sreejit used at the beginning of the Dungeon Prompt that inspired this post. I find the video deeply moving. It also demonstrates many of the aspects of fear I have addressed.
During the last two months, I have been invited by two blogging sisters (SeasonedSistha2 and Tournesol Dans Un Jardin) to write ten four-word sentences about love. The form of the challenges were different, so I decided to do it my own way! Here are the sentences that came to my mind:
Love has many forms
Love through a smile
Love through a word
Love through a touch
Love through a look
Love heals painful wounds
Love leads to happiness
Love helps build communities
Love can transform evil
Love yourself, Love others
What four-word sentences about love would you like to add?
Today I was sent a quote that was attributed to Buddha. It said: “Buddha was asked, ‘What have you gained from meditation?’ He replied, ‘Nothing! But let me tell you what I have lost. Anger, Anxiety, Depression, Insecurity, Fear of Old Age and Death.” I loved the quote but decided to check it out. While it can be found all over the internet, it was listed under fake Buddha quotes.
An earlier version of the quote is found in the 1973 publication of World Buddhism, Volume 22 by the World Fellowship of Buddhists. It was not directly attributed to Buddha.
It may be stating the case too strongly to say that in meditation one seeks to gain nothing. For there is an increase in happiness and peace of mind. But when asked, “What have you gained from meditation?” the answer would be: “It is not what I have gained that is important but rather what I have diminished, namely, greed, hatred, and delusion.”
I like thinking of meditation in this way.
The empty lot behind my house is generally completely overgrown with blackberry vines. Over the years, they have damaged and even killed trees, so occasionally I clear away as many of the vines as I can. Two days ago, I hired a friend to help with the clearing. He did an amazing amount of work during the four or five hours he was there.
The lot is on a steep hill. At one point, he and I noticed that there were some yellow daffodils towards the bottom of the lot. They were beautiful and it was intriguing to see them rising out of the mass of dried blackberry vines. They looked bigger to us than they do in the picture below.
During the next hours, I couldn’t get them out of my mind. If they were this big from a distance, what would they look like if I was closer? As evening approached, I decided to plant some potato starts in one area where my friend had cleared the blackberry vines. As I did that, I kept glancing at the flowers. I wanted to see them up close.
I gingerly made my way towards them, my arms and legs getting pricked by the vines as I walked. Soon I came to a steep drop off. There were years of vines piled up there and I couldn’t see the land below them. There was no doubt in my mind that if I stepped into that mass, I would fall and be immersed in a very painful situation.
How else could I get there? I looked north and noticed an area where there were no blackberries. Maybe I could get to the flowers that way! It was at that time, the saying, “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” first came to mind.
I made it down the steep hill and as you can tell from the pictures above, I could even see the flowers, but I still couldn’t get to them. Once again, the blackberry vines were too thick.
I looked south and thought I saw an area that had fewer vines, so I made my way back to the center of the lot and surveyed the situation. There was no way for me to get to that clearer patch other than to step into the mire that had looked so unsafe to me. I knew I was too tired to be doing that so decided it was time to stop for the day.
The next morning, my mind was still on the daffodils. I walked down the hill to check the terrain again. After a night of rest, the center area didn’t seem so daunting. I could even see the ground under the vines. I decided to go back to the house, exchange my sneakers for heavy boots and pick up a tool to cut (or beat down!) the blackberry vines.
That plan worked great. I soon made my way to the small clearing on the south part of the lot. I noticed a big mushroom and an area of bamboo along the way.
I continued on, cutting the vines as needed. Before I knew it, I could see the flowers before me.
With renewed vigor I worked towards my goal. Before long I was very close!
And then I was there!
The daffodils were so beautiful
.
But…. what’s that? Something is moving in the inside of the middle daffodil! Look closely below, can you see what I saw?
I was fascinated. Watch the progression as the scene unfolded!
I thought it was a winged insect at first but when it stretched out completely, it appeared to be a spider. The top two legs were held close together most of the time, which had given the appearance of wings. Do any of you who are reading this know what kind of spider it is?
What a grand adventure I had had. I loved seeing the flowers up close, and then to have the unknown creature come out of one of them was such a bonus. I wrote a poem about my experience with the spider in Nature’s Miracle. (I also wrote about another “adventure” on this property last June in A Journey into the Jungle.)
Note: I looked up information about the phrase “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” According to Wikipedia, it was the name of a folk song that became part of the American Civil Rights movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Watching that video led me to this one. The song is “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” The slide show is so good…. and a trip down memory lane for me.
Who would have guessed that this post would have ended in this way? I sure wouldn’t have. To me, that is what living in the moment is all about!
Handful of petals
Offering to the Mother
From my heart to hers
The Haiku was written about a Bhagavati Puja I attended last night. The photographs were taken after the puja had ended.
This morning, I walked while chanting the Sri Lalita Sahasranama. This is a sacred text that I ideally would be chanting daily. As I walked, I was pulled by the desire to be focusing on the beauty around me rather than reciting the chant. I have felt that pull many times before, but it was particularly strong today.
Then the question “Isn’t focusing on the beauty of Mother Nature a spiritual practice too?” came into my mind. Of course it is; about that I had no doubt. I realized what wanted to be doing was to immerse myself in nature, taking photographs to share on my blog and in the GreenFriends newsletter I organize monthly.
For the rest of my walk, I continued my chant, but if I felt called to stop and look at something and/or take a picture, I did. Sometimes I felt literally “called” in that it seemed like a song bird or crow was calling out to me.
I felt “rewarded” for being flexible in my definition of spiritual practice by capturing several beautiful photographs.
I suspect that tomorrow morning I will be going on a nature walk!
*****
Written for Weekly Photo Challenge: Reward
A few weeks ago, I attended a retreat at Loon Lake Resort in British Columbia, Canada. The area was so beautiful.
Today was one of those days where I had “plans” but all of them changed.
It started with me waking up at 1:45 a.m. I had been dreaming about Sanskrit and about blogging, something that is happening with increasing frequency, but thankfully it is not usually that early. As I moved from a dream state into a more conscious state of mind, the idea of posting a Sanskrit declension matrix by making a Power Point slide show came to my mind. Then the idea of adding audio to it surfaced.
I have helped others with Power Point slide shows before but only by typing in the words. I had never done a real one and I certainly had never put audio to one. As I lay there sleepless, I started pondering how to do it. Around 3:00 a.m., since sleep didn’t seem to be coming, I got up.
I went back to bed for about an hour and a half at 5:00 a.m. and then spent most of the day working on this project. The slide show went together quickly and even the audio was reasonably easy to figure out. But then came getting correct pronunciation, correct timing and most time consuming of all, finding a way to put it into a format that the blog would accept. That last part took until 7:45 tonight! But with Grace and persistance, I finished it!
I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that every noun in Sanskrit may have 7 or 8 different cases. You can identify those cases by how the word ends.
Cases:
1st case is the subject
2nd case is the object
3rd case – “with” (with a fork)
4th case- “for” (for the beggar)
5th case- “from” (from the city)
6th case- possessive or “of” (boy’s; of the boy)
7th case- “in, at, on”
The slide show will present the declensions for the pronoun “aham” which means “I”. Singular, dual (2 people) and plural (i.e. three or more) forms will be presented for each of the seven cases. You will notice that some of the words are the same but have different meanings. In those instances, we have to read the word in a sentence to determine the meaning.
So with that for an introduction, here is my PowerPoint Slide Show with Audio of the declensions for the word “aham”! (In hindsight, it would have been helpful for me to put the case number and whether the word was singular, dual or plural on the slides, but even this way it gives you a good idea what the process is like!) I hope you enjoy it.
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