2014.05.03 _ 11

Hi all,

Today has been similar to yesterday. Little successs but at least some.
Enjoy the weekend :)

Fell asleep on the cushion this morning. Enough said.

At the end of another busy day. Wine glass in hand I bid you all good night

Took a jaunt to farmer's market and ran a few other errands, but otherwise this has been a lazy day, watching a TV series on the computer. :) No Qi Gong exercises so far, but always the 55 conscious breaths that i've stuck with since 2010.

Corrected - 2009. :) I'll revisit this commitment in December of 2014. edited 15:25, 4 May 2014

Thank you all dear friends for your appreciation of yesterday's posting. Means a lot to me...
Today I managed my 20 minutes and in it remembered part of a dream in which there was a huge field of dirt ready to build on. Mountains nearby... with a chairlift to carry people up the mountain.

A change of shift day, with its own patterns - a weekly (paper!) newspaper, farmer's market early morning... Met somebody there who pointed me to a poem (Rilke translated by Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter):

http://www.hunterarchive.com/files/Poetry/Elegies/elegy9.html

Weekly google hangout, then worked outside, getting the pond ready for spring, the house for sale. New bird's nest in the front gazebo. Sunset, crescent moon follows. From that poem:

Exalt no ineffable,
rather a known world
unto the angel.

Saying good night to this day...amidst the sound of rain. Seems fitting, as the day has been filled with floods of open feeling which has also let in (or let out) lots of sadness. Just seems fitting...

To hear a Master's words
is to feel at home.

At home one knows
one is in the right place.

Does it matter that the Master is fictional?
No.

There is something within that leaps at the Truth,
for it is always tasted within,
is always recognized within,
is already within.

Eliza, I'd love to hear more about "55 conscious breaths", when you have a moment or two to tell us.

Hi Wol,

I'm interested to hear about the 100 breaths that Stevenaia mentioned, also. It may be more particularly done than my practice...

When I came to PlayasBeing and Kira in 2009, I was already studying Buddhism, and very drawn to Tibetan Buddhism as a practice (even though my reading and study was wide-ranging). In Tibetan Buddhism, there are practice commitments one makes before one moves on to the next "level"... things like 10,000 prostrations and/or various mantras. Possibly because of my background and resulting skepticism of religion (and myself as 'true believer') however, I have not found it easy to do what I'm told.

"Conscious" isn't as easy as it seems to be. I began attending a Vajrayana Buddhist temple and consciously took on daily practices, holding them very lightly. PlayasBeing, Kira/Ways of Knowing, and a Buddhist teacher in SL were beautifully and uncannily overlapping at that time.

So the breaths practice, for me, is something I heard from Stim (Steven Tainer), that wasn't even directed toward me but sounded like a good idea. :) I have a habit of 'putting myself in the room' sometimes - which means that when someone else asks a question or seeks guidance I have no issue with 'pretending' it is me asking that question if it applies, and taking the answer on as my own.

I adapted the Vajrayana instructions with the suggestion I heard from Steven, taking on a firm commitment of 100,000 conscious breaths. I didn't trust myself to remember every day, so wasn't exact. I broke down the numbers to 'roughly' 55 conscious breaths every day for 5 years (just because I like 5s).

Although so simple, It has proven to be worthwhile in ways that would be hard to quantify. Maybe especially due to my "commitment issues", which have more to do with unconscious or coerced practices, it is liberating for me. Every breath is chosen... something I slow down to attend to even on days when I don't formally meditate.

Along the way this practice has taken on a kind of tactile visualization, that is also adaptation of other suggestions/instructions about "dantian centers" that my understanding of is deepening of, with learning Qi gong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dantian).

I want to add that for me the commitment is as important.. maybe more important... than the type of practice. I'm terrified of vows because I know how seriously I take them even after I drop a 'belief', and how hard it is to consciously go against a commitment made even when necessary and based on a more authentic desire. I also didn't want to set myself up to fail, thus the appeal of taking lightly.

So... more than you asked to know but this has been helpful for me to almost/nearly/possibly articulate. :)) edited 17:02, 20 May 2014

When love is gone, there's always justice.
And when justice is gone, there's always force.
And when force is gone, there's always Mom.
Hi, Mom!

Fascinating! Thank you.