2012.06.24 _ 75

Standing meditation in the morning. Allow body to straighten on the in-breath, allow it to relax on the out-breath. Allow some extra attention to go to the parts that ask for it (right arm and shoulder, at the moment).

I get a pain in my left shoulder lying in bed. It's so hard for me to get comfortable because my scapular muscles are so wasted. I'm turning into a bag of bones :) But pain seems to go when I get up usually.

Am not feeling well, and when not feeling well there feels to be an extra softness and different sort of awareness that comes up... aware of all the things I'd like to be doing and that there are to do, awareness of all the ways I don't take best care of myself/my body on a regular basis, awareness that life is actually very short... a blip... and that as Wol said recently in email, we should express our thankfulness for one another... for those we love.

But also, for 'all beings'.

Recently, a friend read a poem to me about someone's deep curiosity of their 'enemy'. The poet wrote that they'd not had an enemy before and this made them kind of extra-curious about this person... all about their life and thoughts and how they came to see them as an enemy. This morning at the guardian session, Helen Keller came up, which brings me to consider the treasures of blind spots and dark places... unknown potentials hidden in 'masked' places. Karuna Metta can be a kind of walking into the dark paces... or as Pema Chodron called them 'the places that scare you.'

So, an early offering on the "masks" topic:

You don’t relate directly to your life because you’re wearing a suit of armor. Then you act to maintain the comfort inherent in the suit of armor, which makes you numb towards relating directly with actual experiences. The alternative is not exactly a question of taking off the armor. It is a question of seeing the possibility of nakedness, seeing that you can relate with things nakedly. That way, the padding you wear around your body becomes superfluous at some stage. It’s not so much a question of giving up the mask; rather the mask begins to give you up because it has no function for you anymore.
-Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche edited 00:04, 25 Jun 2012

Still here... :)
Didn't get time to write.