3P Random Reflections Blog

Whether I am hanging out with family or friends, or I'm listening to someone's experience of suffering, or I'm working on a project, or I'm just peeling potatoes, life is less of a thing to do, less of something to get, less of a way to be, less of a method to apply, less of an objective to achieve, and now is more of a meditation or prayer to live.

Increasingly, there's a discernment for the inner waves of my thoughts and feelings, and how they fully create my experience of the present moment...

...That awareness, whenever it arises, opens a space to gently "self-adjust" back toward presence and grace... which is beautifully and simply what the truest form of meditation or prayer asks us to do.

It asks us to be aware of the feeling-quality of our mind's incessant chatter, noticing how it has taken us away from where we are in the present moment. It asks us to lean back to the quieter, but more alive feeling of our inner ground of being.

And even though meditation or prayer is a very singular and PERSONAL act, it moves our inner world from the personal to the greater IMPERSONAL.

It drops the regretfully perceived personal past and the anxiously imagined personal future, revealing LIFE itself.

And that impersonal state of presence offers wisdom.

Not a wisdom for the "personal me", but a wisdom that transcends me.

A wisdom that understands and considers the greater interconnection and complexity of things.

A wisdom that understands what the personal insecure ego and intellect never could and never would.

So, whenever I happen to notice that I'm starting to feel an internal tenseness, I may then have the awareness to relax, to fully allow for and accept whatever thoughts and feelings are appearing, while at the same time leaning back toward an awareness of love, or understanding, or inner peace, or connection, or awe, or curiosity, or humour... all forms of grace, all very present, and all the ground of being that is found in living meditation or prayer.

While I may not "personally like" a particular situation appearing in front of me, it doesn't stop me from "impersonally loving" it...

...falling back into meditation or prayer in some way, so that I realize a deeper understanding of it... or I see a bigger picture beyond the apparent person or circumstance... or I notice bits of beauty or wellbeing or resilience or joy or humour or kinship or curiosity.

Day to day, I still have PLENTY of moments and periods when I'm stuck in a funk, or caught up in crazy, and feel very far away from any state of meditation or prayer. But even a spark of awareness of NOT being present to a fuller perception of life, helps guide my actions in ways that are wiser with less collateral damage...

...It'll occur to me to pause and reflect before I act. It'll occur to me to wait for the next eventual moment of grace.

And when I'm back in the grace of living meditation or prayer, it offers an internally felt trust... an experiential "knowing" of OK-ness, no matter the chaos inside me or around me.

It offers quiet within me, so that I can hear the wisdom that is beyond me... no personal need for a specific outcome... no personal attachment... just doing and seeing what appears next... doing and seeing... doing and seeing... doing and seeing.

And there's a sense of wonder for ALL of it, knowing that whatever I may think this current moment of LIFE to be, it could only ever be the tiniest glimpse of the incomprehensible vastness of what it truly is.

And so, each day, I keep learning to lean toward that state of living life as meditation or prayer...

...And then I do and see.

My sense is that as I endeavour to do simply that, the universe quite capably takes care of the rest.

With Love and Laughter,

Jonelle

(Photo by Polina Tankilevitch)

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