By Dr. Adela Sandness
The podcast currently has 38 episodes available.
Touching Joy
There are many contemplative traditions that emphasize the importance of balance. First Nations traditions - in reference to the Medicine Wheel - will speak of balance, the balance, for example, of the emotional, physical, spiritual, and intellectual aspects of ourselves. Many First Nations traditions will hold that, by bringing these aspects into balance, we become a balanced, whole, harmonious person.
Chinese traditions, historically, have also had strong influence in our understanding of balance. The symbol of the yin yang is, at least in part, about the balance of opposing principles. The inner and the outer, the black and the white, where there is white inside the black and black inside the white. By coming together in a balanced way, often our parts are understood to become a whole.
The ancient Indian tradition, from which Hindu and Buddhist traditions arise - the origin of Indian understandings of enlightenment – sees harmony and wholeness in a slightly different way.
We are part of a whole. We will be whole to the degree that we connect to that wholeness of which we are apart. The means to connect to that wholeness is not so much a question of balance as it is a question of alignment. Our inside world and the outside world is composed of many composite elements. Our well-being depends, they would say, on those composite elements coming into alignment.
In this view, there is an organic alignment of things. Humans are connected to a cosmic whole: the inner world of the body and the individual person can only mirror this much larger flow.
It is similar to the Chinese understanding of the Ta0. There is a way of things, an ordered and sequenced flow of things.
For my students, I illustrate this idea by telling a simple creation story which outlines this view. Once upon a time, there was a golden egg. It floated on an ocean that existed in the time before time. This ocean has always existed: it will always exist. There is nowhere for it to go. The golden egg floated…and it moved. It opened…and the top became the sky, the bottom became the earth, and the space in between became the atmospheric realm in which we all live.
The ocean is life itself. Although it would be perceived and articulated differently as Buddhist and Hindu traditions would develop each in their own way, both traditions would begin - in the time period between about 1500 and 500 B.C.E. - with a view that says: there is life itself which pervades everything. It is just like water: the water in our bodies, the water in my teacup, the water in the rivers, and the streams, in the oceans of the earth, in the ocean that is the sky (for if it were not an ocean, it would not be blue! If it were not an ocean where it could rain come from!)
There is this quality of the mirror, a reflection. Life is just life. Water is just water. It will take different forms, and different shapes, in different places or different times, perhaps a bit in the way that water is liquid, or solid, or steam. Yet life is just life. It is present with us. We don't earn it. There is no question of deserving. It just is, in the way that oxygen in our atmosphere is. We are enough.
Life is just life. Will we vibrate with it - celebrate with it - be fed by it as if connecting to an electrical current, or will we somehow come to feel cut off, or atrophied and desiccate . We are parts of a whole. We will feel whole to the degree that we connect to that wholeness of which we are apart.
At its most basic, the old Indian worldview is a tripartite system: heaven, and Earth, and the space in between, where the opposing poles of anything serves simply to define – to help us to see - that space in between in which we all live.
Watch a sunrise or a sunset, and notice. Because of the opposing poles of heaven and earth, we are able to see this space which is everywhere, inside and outside the world of form. The hand, or the body, or the stars under an electron microscope will show itself to be 99.999% space, the space inside of us and outside of us in which we live. It is as omnipresent as water. This space is life itself. We are able to see it when it is defined by this structure of colour and shape and form, because of the limits of earth and sky.
We can see the room that is created as a result of the structure of the walls. The one is dependent on the other.
In some counts of the system, heaven, Earth and the space in between are each understood to have their own top and bottom and space in between. So the vision of the world by that count has seven elements. The bottom, the middle, the top of the earth, which is the bottom for the middle and the top of the atmosphere, that is the bottom for the middle and the top of the sky. It is like a three-story apartment building: it has seven parts.
It wasn't just seven elements, though. It was eight, because the wholeness which was the entirety of this composite group of seven was also considered to be an element. So eight would become, an ancient India, the number of wholeness representing a cosmic infinity. 108, 1008, 100,0008: eight would come to symbolically represent the entirety of the cosmic whole of which we are apart.
The part and the whole would be a fascination for much of ancient Indian ritual and philosophy. We have wholeness because of a seemingly infinite series of elements that somehow all seem to line up and come into place: the ordered succession of the seasons, the ordered movement of the planets and the stars, the ordered unfolding of the generations one after the next.
Like the individual human body, it would come to be understood as a system of systems of pieces joined: the skeletal system, muscular system, circulatory system, endocrine system, the mechanism of sensory perception, of cell division, the layers of the skin. It is a system of systems of pieces joined.
For me, among the most easy to visualize is the spinal column: a system of systems of pieces joined. There is fluidity of movement because of the precise alignment of these composite parts. One small piece slightly out of place and the movement becomes obstructed, the body loses its flow.
Life is like that.
In this vision of the ancient Indian world - with its pictorial description of enlightenment - we relate to our lives like the bones of a spinal column. It is a system of systems of pieces joined. When these pieces relax into place, there is a flow of movement that happens without obstruction.
This alignment - as a real for the individual, as for the social, the natural and cosmic whole - was named with an ancient Sanskrit word “rta”. It is a vocalic “r”, rolled a bit like the Scottish or Gaelic “r”.
How this vision, or idea, becomes rendered into European languages varies with the cultural lenses that have sought to understand it each in their own way. German Indologists have tended to render it as “truth”. Trained in Paris, it is perhaps my cultural bias to appreciate the French understanding of one of the tradition’s early female Indologists, Lillian Silburn, who described it as “agencement exact”, the harmonious alignment of things, like the movement of the spheres, the movement of the stars and the movement of the spine.
“Agencement exact”, an alignment that is “juste”, or “true”, in the way that an arrow flies “true”, without obstruction: when our pieces come into place, we experience wholeness, we feel the flow of things.
“The flow of things” is how the ancient poets saw it in 1500 BCE, like a golden river in the sky. It was the union and transcendence of water and fire, the union and transcendence of masculine and feminine principles, the experience of the enlightened mind.
This golden flow of things pervades life itself; it is life itself. We, as individuals, come and go: the sun, and the sky, and the ocean remain. It is in us. It is of us. We do not possess it. We live our life; we do not own it.
The central story in the oldest Sanskrit text of the Indian sub-continent describes how to remove obstacles to this flow. The great hero, whose name is Indra, wields the thunderbolt and kills the dragon whose name means literally “obstacle”. We become the hero ,in the story of our lives, to the degree that we wield our thunderbolts and overcome our obstacles. It is the prototype - the origin story - for both Hindu and Buddhist understandings of enlightenment.
Obstacles to what?
The hero wields the thunderbolt and destroys - or overcomes - obstacles to the flow of things. The sequential unfolding of time, the in-breath and the out-breath, the expanding and contracting of the heartbeat: our lives are a system of systems of pieces joined. When the parts of our lives come into alignment, we taste the flow that is joy.
This self-existing flow, the life principle, is always there. It cannot go anywhere. We may be born and die: life itself remains.
In the same way, our health and vigor, our vitality and joy, our inspiration: it cannot go anywhere. It is like the sun in the sky. We may see it or not: this is irrelevant. It is the Earth that turns: the Sun remains. The sun doesn't go anywhere. There is nowhere for it to go.
Our joy is like that. It is self-existing, inherently enough. We may connect with it or not, as we work with the obstacles that show themselves in the course of our days.
If you are feeling cut off from your joy, consider the possibility: is there something here - in my life, in the unfolding of my world - which has somehow come out of alignment? Is there an obstruction that somehow needs to be overcome in order that I can reconnect with my delight? Do I need to pick up my thunderbolt to cut through an obstacle? Or is there some other adjustment – a re-alignment of my wheels - that needs to take place?
The joy is self-existing. We either cut ourselves off from it or not.
When our parts come into alignment, we connect with the flow and touch joy.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
Roll in the Sand
As some of you know, this week was moving week on the university campus where I teach. Extensive renovations in one of our main office buildings meant that we moved out of that office building into temporary housing for about one year's time. They stripped that office building down to its bricks to do a major renovation. This week we, and our countless boxes, moved into the completed new building.
While I was unpacking one of those boxes, I came across an envelope of photographs that had gotten lost at the back of a filing cabinet about 10 years ago. It contained one of the best photographs that I have of Sarah The Wonder Dog, my magnificent golden retriever who died just over three years ago.
In the photo, Sarah – as a two year old – is sitting on the beach, at sunset, chewing on her stick. Where else would she be? And what else would she be doing there? Of course she is on the beach chewing her stick.
The beach in that photograph is about a 15 minute drive away from the beach where she had her last big play before she died at the age of 13. It was a miraculous Christmas day here on the East Coast of Canada where - very oddly - the snow had melted, and the sun was warm, and the weather tasted of spring. As a Christmas present to both of us, Sarah and I went to her favourite beach. It was a very flat beach, that we could access from very close to the car: at the age of 13, she could no longer climb over rocks or walk up steep hills. This was a very flat beach, with very shallow water, and it was possible to walk on a flat surface for quite a long distance.
We walked for about a half hour. It felt like a long time, because at home – with her sore hips – we would walk about two blocks before it was time to head back.
On one side of the beach was the ocean with its waves and the pull of the tide. She knew that she wasn't strong enough to be in the pull of that tide, but she realized that on the other side - maybe some hundred metres away - there was an inland lake without tide, and she had even managed to get a little bit wet in that water. We were both so delighted by the treat of this!
We had finished our walk on the beach, and we were heading back to the car, when suddenly there arrived a Christmas miracle: three dogs and their humans, all six of them visiting from away, came out of a car.
There was a big, black and fluffy, very friendly and lovely, Newfoundland dog. There was a smaller dog who had been hit by a car and recovered with some difficulty. So this dog also knew what it was to have to struggle a bit in order to play on the beach. Then there was a blond, gentleman dog, a golden retriever just like her, an elegant noble gentleman dog slightly larger than herself who was wise enough to understand her perfectly. In all of her years, I had never seen her look at another dog with such love.
It was as if this Christmas day on the beach – the last big play of her life - had been predestined for many lifetimes before and dreamed of in many dog dreams. The humans who belong to these dogs knew what it was to work with a pack and how to play in a way that included everyone. They had helped the smaller dog heal from the car accident. So they knew how to include in the play someone who moved more slowly than the others.
Sarah was so happy when she encountered these dogs that she immediately lay down on her back and began to make snow angels in the sand, wiggling back and forth with such joy - paws flailing in the air - and all of us, the three dogs, the three humans and me, stood around in a circle watching her as she made a full 360 Dog Angel in the sand. She was ecstatic.
Then it came time to play with the stick on the beach. Now the younger dogs, they could run far and fast to fetch that stick, and if the stick went into the water they could swim against the current in the ocean in order to bring back that stick. Sarah understood this, and you could see that she was both engaging the play but also holding back, tentative and feeling a little bit sad that she couldn't quite run like the others. She was happy to be with them, but also knowing that she wasn't quite a part of it, until - in a moment of genius - one of the other humans did a fake throw of the stick, pretending to throw the stick far into the water. All of the other dogs ran madly after the fake throw of the stick, but the humans showed Sarah that they still had the stick, and they threw the stick right in her direction, about 18 inches away.
She was able to pick up that stick. She was the one who got the stick. The others came running madly back, and she had the stick, and the miracle of this moved through her entire body. It is perhaps the happiest moment that I witnessed in her life that - even at this very end of her days -she got the stick. The other humans, and the other dogs, somehow understood the miracle of this and celebrated with her.
The gentleman golden retriever - so much like Sarah that they were hard to tell apart except that he was larger - understood Sarah's situation. When the play moved into the ocean, into the pull of the tide, he would swim slightly behind her and very close to her: it was very obvious that he was taking care of her. He knew she would not be safe swimming in the ocean by herself. So he stuck by her and - because he was there - she could swim out into the waves of the ocean, and then swim back again because he would be there to help her if something went wrong. Again and again, the two of them went out into the ocean and back again. In her 13 years, I may have never seen her so consciously feeling cared for and loved by another dog.
In another great moment of that miracle Christmas Day play, the gentleman golden retriever took this stick and gave it to her, in order that they could play pull the stick, in the way that dogs play the pulling game. He pulled on the stick as gently as one would feed an infant with a spoon - so unbelievably gently - in order that Sarah was able to play the pull game, but she would not be hurt by it. It was, I think, the most glorious day on the beach of her life.
The day of her very last big play Sarah the Wonder Dog taught me about sticks.
Action and reaction. Cause and effect. In our reflections on karma, we have observed that humans, by nature, must act. All creatures that move, by our nature, act, and when we act we must also receive the result of that action. So it is that we, too, will pick up both ends of a stick.
The trick is, what we do with those sticks once we've got them? In my experience, it is an oddly short list of options.
Sometimes we hit ourselves with our sticks or hit other people with our sticks. In that action and reaction, sometimes we cause harm to ourselves or to others.
Some sticks are fun, and we pick them up, and we play fetch in the companionship of our pack. We pick up our sticks, and we toss them in delight. We run after them, and fetch, for the pleasure of picking them up again.
Sometimes we chew on our sticks. Is there a stick that you're chewing on at the moment? Something that's eating you, that you can't quite digest? So you keep chewing on it… enough to get splinters in your jaws?
If you play fetch with a dog on the beach, you may observe that – sometimes - among the hardest things is to know how to drop the stick.
How do we let go?
Sometimes we couldn't hold on anymore even if we wanted to. Sometimes we simply decide to drop it. Sometimes we forgive, and our end of the stick naturally falls away. Because we’re ready to forgive? Because it hurts us less to forgive than it does to keep holding on?
Action and reaction. Cause and effect. We pick up both ends of the stick. Then what? Do we hit ourselves with it? Do we hurt someone else with it? Do we sit and chew on it? Do we delight in the tossing of it and the playing of fetch? Do we trip over it? Who is to say?
But I learned from Sarah the Wonder Dog that we do need to drop the stick before we can roll in the sand.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
A Blue Moon
This Saturday May 18, at 6:11pm Atlantic Standard Time, is the Blue Moon. It’s the time to do things that you would only do once in a blue moon!
The May 2019 full moon is a seasonal Blue Moon. Usually there are three full moons between each astrological season. That is the time between each Solstice and equinox. In some years, there are four full moons in a season. When this happens, the third full moon is called a Blue Moon.
This year, for we in the northern hemisphere, the astrological season began with the spring equinox on March 20th. The first full moon was less than four hours later on March 21st. The second full moon was April 19. The third - the Blue Moon - is May 18. The fourth, and last full moon before the Summer Solstice, will be June 17. A blue moon occurs only roughly every two or three years. So make the most of it!
The full moon day in the month of May is celebrated in Buddhist tradition as Vesak Day. It is sacred to Buddhists because the full moon day in the month of May is the day of the historic Buddha’s birth, the day of his enlightenment, and also the day of his parinirvana, the day of his passing at the age of 80.
Vesak Day is celebrated by Buddhists around the world. It is believed to be a day when the karmic result of anything we do is amplified – is increased – 100,000 times. What we do on Saturday, may we do it wisely!
So in honor of the blue moon, and the full moon day in the month of May, today we reflect on karma.
Karma is the relationship between cause and effect. We eat the fruit of the seeds that we plant. Traditionally, it is said to be like the full moon reflecting into one hundred bowls of water. The moon has no desire to reflect into them all, but, because there happen to be one hundred bowls of water, there are one hundred moons at the same time. They are part of one moon, the full moon in the sky.
Action is just action. Each action will have one hundred – an endless number – of effects. We don’t necessarily desire those effects, but because there is action, there will be the results of that action. They are all part of the one action.
The Sanskrit word “Karma” is derived from the verbal root “KR-” which means “to do”. So, the noun means “action”. There is no such thing as “good karma” or “bad karma”. Action is just action, like the full moon in the sky.
Gravity is just gravity. It is impersonal: it will be experienced in the same way by any being on the planet. Actions have reactions. It is not personal. The principle applies to everyone on the planet. It is part of the natural world, like us and like the moon.
Some actions will yield desirable results; we might think those are “good actions”, from “good karma”. Some actions yield undesirable results; we might think those are “bad actions”, from “bad karma”.
Yet the principle of cause and effect doesn’t care if you like it or not, any more than gravity cares if a bird falls from the sky. If you plant apple seeds, you will get apple trees. You may wish they were oranges. It doesn’t matter: the apple tree yields apples.
Cause and effect are two ends of a same stick. We pick up both ends of the stick.
Traditionally, it is said that there are four different types of action. The first of these is “pacifying”. Action which is pacifying is able to calm a situation or make an environment peaceful. It softens our rough edges and helps things go smoothly, in the inside world or in the outside world.
The second and third types of action are “enriching” and “magnetizing”. These are inter-related. “Enriching” action is able to see the inherent richness and potential of a situation and draw that out. What we need, we already have: “enriching” action helps us to see that. “Magnetizing” action comes from our strength of presence, our “beingness”. It is the ability to draw what we need – opportunities, people, situation – to us as naturally as metal is drawn to a magnet.
The fourth type of action is “destroying”. Pacifying, enriching and magnetizing have a quality of compassion: can we be present with what is in an elegant way and work with this to be of benefit to beings. The action of “destroying” is understood in this context. Can we let go of what was in order to create space for new growth and new life to come? Can we let go of what needs to be released? Can we destroy what needs to be destroyed, in the same way that we might prune a tree in the spring, removing the old dead branches that are no longer necessary in order to support the growth of new life to come.
It is traditionally believed that one who is brave, and kind, and wise will have the ability to work with pacifying, enriching, magnetizing and destroying like so many tools in a tool box. Can we draw on these abilities to offer whatever a situation may require?
In this ancient, traditional world view, the full moon reflects on one hundred bowls of water. This is the relationship between cause and effect: there may appear to be a difference, but there is not. It’s two ends of a same stick.
In the same way, the full moon reflects on one hundred bowls of water. You may think there is separateness between you and the situation or person who receives your action, but there is no more difference than the full moon reflected on the water.
The actor who acts is playing in a racquetball court. It is not a tennis court. It may appear that this ball that we have set in motion is going away from us and is directed at a person or a situation outside of us. This is an illusion. It’s a racquetball court. What we set in motion will come back to us.
If you spit on someone, you yourself will get wet. If someone has spit on you, notice that – no matter how you may feel in that moment – it is they who got wet. If you work to sink a ship (your home, your relationship, your workplace), you yourself will drown.
Finally, let me offer something that I learned from my garden about the planting of seeds. Weeds come first.
Where I am in Atlantic Canada, we have quite a short growing season. Our last frost of the year will take place in late May or early June. For the moment, I have about 450 tiny seedlings growing indoors under grow lights. These are the flowers and herbs I will plant outdoors later in the season.
Outdoors, the weeds grow first.
The wonderful professional gardener that I co create this land with did a first weeding of the property some weeks ago when she did our spring fertilizing. Today, I began my first outdoor weeding of the season.
The weeds grow first, long before herbs, and vegetables, and flowers. They flourish. They grow especially well in manure.
Is there someone in your life who is a weed in your garden? You know what to do with weeds. I have a wheelbarrow full of tools to help me handle weeds. So do you.
Are you yourself a weed in someone's garden? Are you an obstacle, or obstruction to the happiness and success of a person or a situation? You also know what to do with weeds. If you spit on other people, you yourself will get wet.
The 16th Karmapa is credited with saying, “When you do things, then obstacles will come, and you can go through them. Obstacles are a sign of success.”
If you do something brave and wonderful, something creative and rich in potential, something bold that expands horizons, there will be pushback. This is a sign of success. People may try to stop you. There will be obstacles. Then you can overcome them. This is how you build your strength.
Weeds come first. Herbs, vegetables and flowers follow.
Weeds are a sign of rich soil.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
Dance into May
In my neck of the woods, in eastern Canada, the midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice will be May 5th, at 2 minutes to 4 o'clock in the afternoon. This is the moment when we astrologically step from the end of spring to the beginning of summer. Since ancient times – since the Iron Age - it has been celebrated as the final victory of life over death, light over darkness, and the return of life to the earth as the heat of the sun makes its way back into our world.
In the wheel of the year, this is the opposite pole to Samhain. Like Samhain, it is believed to be a time in the year when the veil between the world of the spirit and the physical realm is at its most thin, and humans can more easily connect with the spirit of the land. The celebration of coming of summer, honors fertility, abundance, sexuality, sensuality, creativity of all sorts, and the growth of everything beautiful on earth.
Bealtaine is named after the Celtic god of light known as Bel or Belinus. It celebrates the return of the heat of the sun – and the heat of our passions – by the stoking of large bonfires, usually lit by striking two pieces of wood together, and rubbing and grinding till the sparks fly. A symbolic union of the earth and the sky, it represented the inner heat of light, insight, intelligence, and the fecundity and creative passion of life. The bonfire was believed to foster and protect the fertility of the growing season to come.
In ancient times, Druids would kindle great “Bel-fires”, or bonfires, made from nine different kinds of wood. The fires would blaze on top of Beacon Hills. Each village would have its Beltane fire, believed to protect and bring healing and fertility.
Cattle would be released from the barns after a long winter. They would then be driven between the two fires to cleanse them of disease ,and ensure their fertility, and the richness of milk yield, in the coming months. Young couples would leap over the twin Beltane fires, running between them or dancing around them clockwise. Young unmarried people would leap the bonfire wishing for a husband or a wife. Young women would leap the bel-fire to ensure their fertility, and couples leap through the twin fires together to strengthen their bond.
Beltaine celebrates the fecundity of the earth, and the fertility of we humans who are also part of that natural world. Beltaine became the traditional time for hand-fasting in Celtic culture. The hands of the couple would be tied together in the symbolic gesture of tying the knot. It marked the engagement of the couple. A trial marriage would then last for a year and a day at which point the couple could decide to officially marry or to go their separate ways.
Beltaine was a time for young couples to make their way to the woods for nighttime love-making. The village would welcome the “children of May” nine months later. It's a time when a broomstick could be laid on the ground, and a couple jump over that threshold together, as an early form of marriage.
In Scotland, sometimes juniper branches were added to the fire to increase the smoke’s purification quality. The bright fire - or White, shining fire at Beltane - would protect a couple's love, just as it would protect cattle from disease. To pass between the fires, or to pass through the smoke, cleansed the spirit - burning up and destroying any harmful influences - bringing health, vigour and vitality. On Beltaine eve, all the hearth fires and candles would be doused, and at the end of the festival they would all be re-lit from the Beltaine bonfire, renewing the fire of life.
In old Roman culture, the first of May was celebrated as Floralia, the festival of Flora, goddess of flowers. Flowers are part of the Beltaine celebrations in many parts of the world. Hawthorn blossoms would be used to decorate homes and barns and turned into a sweet wine. May baskets were filled with the first flowers of summer and left on doorsteps of friends or family, loved ones or the elderly. Branches of the hawthorn tree, or other types of trees, would be decorated with bright flowers, ribbons and painted shells. Sometimes there would be dancing, and singing, and celebrating in circles around the May tree.
In many parts of the world, a very large pole or trunk of a tree would be erected high in the sky as a symbol of fertility. Ribbons would be interwoven around the May pole as people danced in circles around the tree to celebration fecundity and the flowering of life.
Yellow flowers, such as Primrose or Marigold, were set in doorways and windows. Sometimes loose flowers strewn on the ground at thresholds of doorways. Yellow flowers, representing the sun, were fastened to cows to encourage protection and abundance of milk.
At Beltaine, people would journey to visit sacred wells, rivers or lakes to ask for blessing and protection. People would leave offerings at the well, sometimes throwing a coin into the water or making a food offering to the spirit of the land. It was said that to wash one's face with the morning dew at Beltane would maintain youthfulness and increase one's sexual allure. It is a time to celebrate the magic that is life itself.
Beltaine is the time when those seeds that we planted in the spring – in our gardens and in our lives – become fertile and potent. Whether it’s the conceiving of a child, or a business venture, a new relationship, or any kind of creative project, now is the time for things to flower and grow.
Beltane continues to be celebrated in many parts of the world as May Day, the eve of April 30th and the day of May 1st or 2nd. In Bulgaria, the holiday is associated with rituals to protect people from snakes or lizards. In the Czech Republic, bonfires are lit to celebrate the holiday of love. In Finland, it is one of the four biggest holidays of the year. There is a great carnival-style festival with sparkling wine, singing and dancing, freshly baked cakes and mead, an alcoholic beverage made from honey.
It was May 1st, 1561 when King Charles the IXth of France received a lily of the Valley as a lucky charm and decided to offer lily of the valley flowers each year to the ladies of the court. The custom continues, and on the first of May lilies of the valley are sold tax free in bunches of flowers to be offered to loved ones. In Germany, there are bonfires, and May tree covered in streamers can be taken to the house of the girl that you love: in leap years, the women bring one to the men. In Greece, flower wreaths are purchased from flower shops, or woven from wildflowers, and hung at the entrance of the family home. In Serbia, May 1st is a night to spend by a campfire, and it marks the official beginning of barbecue season.
The beginning of summer: it’s a time for singing and dancing, and feasting and drinking, bonfires, flowers and delight, a time to celebrate the sexual, and the sensual, and any creative union which brings life.
So in this season of celebrating the coming of summer may you be inspired to give pause and notice the magic of a world that has come into flower and bloom.
If you wish, build a bonfire on the beach, or a fire in the hearth, or light a large pillar candle and reflect. Notice the cleansing, protecting quality that comes of stoking our inner flames as we burn off what it is that we need to let go.
If you wish, bring yellow flowers into your world. Prepare something fun for a feast; there should be something sweet. Watch a sunrise. Dance. Spend time in nature. Make an offering of birdseed to the spirits of the land. Place a flower wreath on your door. If you feel inspired, you may wish to wash the front door, and clean the glass, as we cross the threshold into summer. Pay attention – take joy and delight – in the pleasure of your own sensuality, or sexuality, whatever that looks like for you. This is the time for a romantic weekend, or a romantic evening beside the fire. Pay really close attention while you enjoy excellent chocolate. Walk barefoot across the lawn.
Beltane, the coming of summer, is hedonistic. Celebrate the abundance of life, fertility, fire and fun. Stoke your inner flame and welcome the sun. We will feel whole and alive to the degree that we connect to that wholeness of which we are a part. So, shake off what it is that you need to let go, and dance into May.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
Being and Becoming
It's wonderful to be back having taken some time away – at semester’s end - to take a deep breath. Today we explore being and becoming.
I had a wonderful conversation last week with a remarkable student in one of my classes. It was a long conversation over tea as we made our way to semester’s end. Among the questions she asked was: “what is the relationship between being and becoming?” How do we become what we are? How do we become what we are meant to be?
She was exploring the question because a very dear friend of hers had told her: “You have not yet planted the flag in the ground and declared, ‘this is who I am’”. Do we ever plant the flag – like Neil Armstrong on the moon – and declare “this is who I am”? Is the work of becoming ever complete?
My student, like so many of her colleagues, is getting ready to graduate. She will move from one stage of her life to the next, from the known to the unknown, and into the next stage of her own journey of self-discovery.
I have watched hundreds of students cross the stage at university graduation ceremonies. They cross the stage, often at about the age of 22 or 25, and have all the rest of their lives stretching out before them. The thing is: so do I. The power of that potential is always with us. I have all the rest of my life waiting for me, in front of me as well. So do you. So does everyone else.
To be alive is to engage the journey of self-discovery.
What is the relationship between being and becoming? What we are is the result of our choices, as we take our next step or place the direction for the rudder of our boat. Through our choices we become who we are.
The great high renaissance sculptor Michelangelo: they asked him, “How did you make your statue of David?” He is reported to have said, “It's very simple; you just chip away the stone that doesn't look like David.”
How do we become ourselves? It is a work of artistry. We are the artists who carve our lives and make the choices that shape what we become. As we chip away the parts that aren't ourselves, we increasingly become who we are.
Becoming: from one perspective, it is quite simple. One who lies becomes a liar. One who steals becomes a thief. One who bullies becomes a bully. One who cheats becomes a cheater, just as surely as one who paints becomes a painter. It is a common sense observation which is part of old Indian karma theory.
The idea of karma is understood slightly differently in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions. Each would agree that the effect of our choices shapes – in very physical ways – who we become.
Have you ever walked down the street and looked at someone and thought to yourself, “Oh that person is slimy. That person gives me the creeps.”? What we do creates a residues that stays with us and is hard to wash off.
Have you felt someone walk into a room and said to yourself, “That is a good, decent and honest person. That is someone I can trust. I feel good when I'm in the presence of that person.”
What we do – how we behave - determines what we become. It is part of the basic principle of cause and effect, as inescapable as gravity. One who manipulates becomes a manipulator. It has a smell, a texture, a look, a stench: it becomes part of the presence of that person. It cannot be hidden. It cannot lie. As we behave, so we become. The weight of bad behaviour, that coats people with sticky residue, covers up the beauty of what we could become.
Genuine becoming is a question of taking the unnecessary bits away.
So how do we engage our hammer and chisel to take away the unnecessary bits? Is it by planting a flag in the ground like Neil Armstrong on the moon, declaring, “This is me!”?
If I look back on the journey of becoming, there are a series of occasions, when in some sense, I would have planted the flag. So it's not a single incident, unveiling a finished work of art.
The person, like life itself, is in a constant process of unfolding. Any organic process is characterized by change. We unfold, gradually revealing what we are, just as surely as the seasons, the flowers, and the trees reveal themselves through their unfolding.
Yet there are a series of flags that I see behind me, left like sign posts along the path. I see them at the important junctures, the small number of places where the decisions I made would set the course of my unfolding such that there was no going back.
It is not in the big, public moments, with fireworks or applause. The big moments – like the student crossing the stage at graduation – are the results of our choices. These are not the moments that are decisive, that carve away unnecessary bits.
If you look back on your life what are the decisive moments that have shaped the person you have become. Are they the visible, public events, the high rituals of our rites of passage?
I lived here. I moved there. I had this job, then that job. There was this relationship, then that relationship. What has shaped the person that you have become, like the artist chiseling away at the stone? Can you name five moments that were pivotal in shaping who you are?
If I look back at my five moments, part of what I see is that these were private moments of decision. No one on the outside – and likely not even me on the inside – would have recognized at the time how that event, or that decision, or that conversation, would shape everything that followed.
These moments of artistic self-creation also happened in the spaces in-between. They weren’t the busy days of running between task lists and deadlines, stop lights and traffic. Self-creation, like any creative process, happens in the open space in-between.
One such moment happened in Banff National Park in western Canada. I was visiting a friend who lived in Calgary. Banff is a very easy day trip away. It was a weekend when I needed to make a decision about my education path. Where would I do my master's degree? Who would I study with? What would that subject be?
I spent a day with myself in Banff. I took a gondola up to the top of a mountain and spent time with the winds. There was a cave halfway up the mountain, and I spent time sitting still in that cave. I went swimming in the hot springs - the hot, mineral spring waters that come out of the mountain – and I listened. Can I listen to the winds, and the waves, and feel what I should do next, where my foot should next touch the ground?
Much of the unfolding of my adult years is traceable to that moment of decision. That step of the foot landing on the ground directed the shape, and line, and flow of all future consequences, for me. Anything that followed was in some way directed by that decision.
If I look back on the act of carving my life, the next decision is a French language decision. It was the moment “j’ai fermé la porte de la Sorbonne”.
It is custom in France that if it is your birthday you bring the cake to share with your friends. In the same way, it is custom for a graduating doctoral student to host the celebration following the Ph.D. defense. In my case, it was a three hour debate – three hours of questioning from my teachers - and then I, as the student, hosted the reception. This is the social rite of passage: you were a student; now you become a colleague. Is it the right champagne, served at the right temperature, with the right hot and cold canapés?
It was dark by the time the reception was finished. Myself and my two Italian friends were among the last to leave the old historic Sorbonne building. This university, founded in 1253, is among the oldest universities in Western Europe. It is a very old stone structure. The historic Sorbonne building has large, medieval doors, of the kind that might see in the “Lord of the Rings”. These massive medieval doors have door handles, about a foot in diameter, that you grasp by reaching up above your head. As we left the building that night – with my two Italian friends beside me -– I got to reach up to that large brass door handle and close the door of that ancient historic building. There was a resounding thud. It marked the end of about a ten year time in my life. This is part of the journey of becoming - as we chip away the unnecessary bits and gradually reveal ourselves: what doors do we open, and what doors close?
It is in small and private moments that we trace the shape of our lives. The visible outside changes are merely the consequence of those internal moments of decision. What do we hold on to? What will we let fall away?
Is there some finished sculpture inside the marble that one day I will reveal? I shall have to live longer to find out.
In the journey of becoming, we make our choices and choose our directions. We engage the process with hammer and chisel, doing the physical work of the artist. In our moments of chipping away, we feel of loss of what was, the letting go of the familiar - and the polishing of our rough spots - as we unveil ourselves, taking away the unnecessary bits one piece at a time.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
Own Your Strength
I received a fun email this week. It said: “Loved seeing a strong woman in a key position of power yesterday. You were fantastic.” Who wouldn't want to celebrate that?
So, today we reflect: what is it to own our own strength? For the key position of power that we most genuinely occupy is the power, authority and responsibility that we hold in relation to the choices that we make in our own lives.
A position of true power is not assigned from the outside world. A position of true power is claimed by owning our strength in relation to the inside world.
There's a metaphor for this that comes from Buddhist practice. When one sits on a meditation cushion or bench, this cushion or bench is often placed on top of a larger, thin cushion. This larger cushion, about two feet wide and three feet long, softens the impact of the ankle on the ground. So the space that belongs to you in a shared, community shrine room is the size of that cushion: three feet long and two feet wide. In the meditation practice, this is the size of the world for which you are responsible. Can you take your seat? Can you own the strength of that world? Can you rule, like a sovereign, that world, within which you sit: three feet long and two feet wide?
Can we own the strength and confidence that we bring to our own bodies, and the power and strength that we embody through our own voice?
That’s how I described the exercise of final exam preparation to my students this afternoon. We will have a final exam. It means that there will be grades to support them as they move towards graduation, but the test isn't actually about writing the test. The test is one of growing in our capacity to own the power and strength of one's own voice.
Can they think in an interesting, creative, flexible and sophisticated way? Can they own the strength of one's own voice and say what they have to say? Just like in life, there is no single one right answer. There is only the answer that we claim as being right for us.
Can we own the strength of one's own voice? The real test is how well we know how to do it in our lives.
What is it to own one's own authority such that one's voice becomes heard?
Let me offer some suggestions.
First, I propose that it is an error to confuse kindness with weakness or aggression with strength. Aggression - in the sense of dominance, control, territoriality and the old colonial perception of “success” - the capacity to manipulate, to expand one's territory of control - is an expression of fear. It is rooted in fear. It seeks to compensate for an internal sense of “not enough”, grasping for more on the outside because there is some sense that there's “not enough” on the inside. Because it is an expression of fear, it merits my compassion not my complicity. We don't need to empower cowardice by confusing aggression with strength.
What then is strength? It is that which creates, supports sustains and maintains life.
Genuine strength is honed and polished like a well-tempered sword.
Owning the authority of one's own voice, owning one's own confidence, owning the capacity to vibrantly “be” is honed over time. It is polished by means of the friction we have with others.
We become increasingly strong because we have to be, for whatever reason. Then, because of whatever it was, we have become more strong. How could my strength have been developed were it not for the hard things, the undermining or the oppressive presences, that I have encountered?
The overt expression of forcefulness is sometimes required. Strength itself is more often revealed through the spaciousness of our being, not the hardness of our edges. It’s in grace and joyfulness, subtlety, playfulness, elegance and discretion. Genuine strength seldom shows itself through the pushing of buttons, any more than it allows one's buttons to be pushed. It's not a pushing and shoving situation.
The meditation posture – sometimes called the “mountain pose” because it is so strong – is characterized by a straight back. Because of the strong back, there is an open heart. It is an interdependent relationship. It is trained in meditation practice, among many other disciplines.
Can we be where we are when we're there? Can we know with confidence that we are able to meet what arises, without pushing away, or clinging, without being blown over by the winds?
Genuine strength comes from connecting with the deep, inherent strength of one's own being. So one would neither take from - nor be taken by - others. There's no need to lean on, or steal, the power of others. Strength isn’t what we accumulate on the outside.
Strength is inherent. That's why it shows itself through behaviour which is creative, life supporting, and life maintaining. It comes from connecting to life itself.
No one is stronger than another from that perspective. It's rather that one more deeply relaxes into the inherent, self-existing strength of “beingness” itself.
This inherent strength - honed and polished by the frictions of our days – can be trained, just as we would train the strength of body. For what is the difference between the body, and emotion, the voice and the mind? It's only as different as we choose to believe it to be. To strengthen one is to strengthen the other.
So let me offer you a passage called “Build your Strength”. It is an excerpt from my book Mindfulness: How to Cope with Hard Things, A Workbook”.
“When we train the body at the gym, we tear down the muscle fibres slightly so that when they grow back they will become stronger. The mind is like that. As we engage the journey, working with hard things, the mind becomes stronger. As we are able, as we grow, it seems to me that often – somehow - weight gradually gets added to the bar. The hard things are part of how we build our strength.
Will we be cut apart? Will we be broken open? Is our life torn down? We will find the strength we need for it to be re-built stronger.
[There is] construction happening on the campus where I teach…: [the building’s] renovation will strip all of its interior down to the bricks. They have begun to paint the bricks.
Why not tear down the whole thing? They would have, if they could. They couldn’t.
Neither can we….
If it is in our experience today, it is because we are able to find the strength, engage our resourcefulness, build our intelligence and awareness, and choose how we will work with it, and when we will work with it, in our own way and our own time.
We don’t tear down entirely. We renovate and re-paint the bricks, are re-born and re-built.
What distinguishes destruction from construction?
We are pushed: we push back. We are constrained: we come through. We are tied: we cut loose. It is how we are born. It is how we are re-born. Everyday.”
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
Self-Existing Joy
Where do grown-ups come from? Where do the children go?
It was my great delight this week to make a new acquaintance, the friend of a mutual friend. This person spent an evening with me and my students in class, bringing the wisdom of someone who has lived, rather than simply having circled the sun.
He has lived long enough to enjoy many adventures: a children’s doctor, a poet, an artist, an activist, a writer, a gardener….and one who continues to actively create through the course of his life. He did ground-breaking, profession-changing work bringing art therapy into hospitals at a time when most people in hospitals - those who are helped and those who work there - had long forgotten how to play.
He came and did art therapy, with me and my students, as we reach semester’s end. We played with coloured markers. We sang and we danced. He taught us about those in ages past who knew, in their practice of medicine, the healing power of music and art.
Among the many gifts he gave was the reading of one of his poems: “Children’s Doctor”:
I began by aligning bowed bones;
learned the trick from an ER nurse
who lacked the license but took license anyway,
there being no other mentor.
A vain and sloppy art it was:
their pliant ulnas [bones] lined up straight whatever I did.
So I learned another skill: cartooning stiffening casts,
my clumsy craft surmounting puckers and whimpers.
Later we’d play, as I chased them
over and under cribs for H-and-P’s: [history-taking and physical examinations]
outrageously fit-to-bust, go-for-broke,
sweet-as-nuts playful they were.
So where do they go to, these young ones?
And where do grown-ups come from?
It was wonderful to have full permission to play together with my undergraduate students for an evening, and to watch them all remember how to laugh.
We coloured, and made art together. We created space, space in-between the action of our days. It is because of the rests between the notes that our lives make music.
It was marvellous to notice, in that moment, that those undergraduate students (many of them a generation younger than me), and this wise one, who knows ways of healing and medicine, (perhaps a generation older than me) stepped into a space of timelessness, in that space in between where all of us played together.
So where do the children go? And where do grown-ups come from? Do we grow old only if we stop growing?
We tend to think of human development in terms of childhood development. There is prenatal development, infancy, the toddler, early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, early adulthood: a movement from dependency to relative autonomy. So this would be where grown-ups come from. Children move through stages of development and enter into adulthood.
It is assuming that time is a line, that somehow what came before is past, and somehow what is to come is future, as if somehow we do not take all of ourselves with us wherever we go.
It can have the illusion of finality: “Now we have become grown-ups. Now we are adults, and so we don't behave like children anymore”, as if somehow we have traded in our ability to play in exchange for our ability to work.
For this poor grown-up - who has traded the ability to play, in exchange for an ability to work - is there somewhere to go from there?
What is it that makes the elders old, when so often - it seems to me - it is possible to encounter someone who is timeless? Four or twenty-four, forty-four, sixty-four, or eighty four: when we play together it can all look oddly the same.
Let me offer some suggestions.
It is my experience that we do indeed take ourselves with us wherever we go.
Time, therefore, is not a line. It occurs simultaneously. For the toddlers and the children, the adolescents and the grown-ups exist simultaneously in the texture of the layers of our being.
If I look to those who are twenty or forty years older than me, who have somehow grown timeless instead of growing old, I have the impression that they accomplish this by stepping into the now. They are living not in the past, or in the future, but in the now, and they remember how to laugh, and how to play. They know self-existing joy.
Somehow, with elegance and grace, they have accompanied themselves - taken themselves with them wherever they went - and somehow mended the broken bones enough to remain intact in the process.
We do not leave the children that we were behind, and my sense is that we risk to grow old if we stop growing.
It is the ability to connect with joy that makes the growing possible. Not that it’s easy, or comfortable necessarily, but that in the process we have remembered how to laugh. For joy is not the result of an external circumstance: it is a state of being.
Time isn't a line. It can only be now. In the moment, we are timeless, and self-existing joy is right there waiting for us.
We all know 60 year old’s who are children - who never really managed to grow up - and some of us know adults who are 6. When do we reach a stage of a relative maturity, independence and self-reliance? When we must.
It is no small feat to bring all of ourselves with us wherever we go. It implies that we are sufficiently whole to have integrity. Can we accompany ourselves in the journey of our lives, and work with what is and what was, such that we can simply be what we are, and not be haunted by it?
Let us listen again to the story told in the poem “Children's Doctor”.
I began by aligning bowed bones;
learned the trick from an ER nurse
who lacked the license but took license anyway,
there being no other mentor.
A vain and sloppy art it was:
their pliant ulnas [bones] lined up straight whatever I did.
So I learned another skill: cartooning stiffening casts,
my clumsy craft surmounting puckers and whimpers.
Later we’d play, as I chased them
over and under cribs for H-and-P’s:[History-taking and physical examinations]
outrageously fit-to-bust, go-for-broke,
sweet-as-nuts playful they were.
So where do they go to, these young ones?
And where do grown-ups come from?
Our bones never stop healing themselves. No part of our body ever stops healing, or re-creating, itself. It may be supported by outside intervention: the body itself heals. We can line ourselves up straight, and make ourselves whole again.
Yet, what gives the most healing: the cast that holds the bones in place, or the cartoons coloured on it?
Joy is self-existing. It is there in the beginning, there in the middle, and there is the end. There is no-where for it to go. It is as natural as breath, and it is deeply healing.
It is not dependent on space, or time, or circumstance, on companionship or solitude, on wholeness or wounds. It is there for us when we laugh, and in the spirit of play.
It implies a basic sense of safety, that we have turned off our inner surveillance cameras sufficiently to relax: in the company of ourselves or others, with crayons or dance, in the woods or by the beach.
Yet, it is the ability to connect with joy – at every stage of our lives - that makes the growing possible. Joy is perhaps the most visible sign of growing.
Joy is self-existing. Connecting with it connects us to existence itself.
I went for a contemplative walk with some of my students this afternoon. We got to watch a puppy learn how to play fetch. Who enjoyed it more: the puppy, the humans giving the lesson, or those who got to watch?
If you feel you would benefit by more actively, more consciously, more intentionally connecting with joy in your life, schedule regular time to spend with children, or animals, perhaps especially baby animals. Find a place where you can volunteer, if there are not children or animals in your immediate world. This afternoon I talked to a student who taught young children how to skate this winter. Often, children and animals – especially young animals – help us to remember the taste of self-existing joy.
Joy is self-existing in the way that humor is a natural part of our being. Make art. Use your crayons. Play music and dance. We are fed by it.
Instead of growing-up, or growing old, we will just keep growing when we actively foster our natural connection with self-existing joy.
The poem “Children’s Doctor” is re-printed with permission. It is written by John Graham-Pole, M.D., - children’s cancer specialist and author - is included in a poetry anthology entitled, “Quick: A Pediatrician’s Illustrated Poetry”. You can further discover John at: www.johngrahampole.com.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
Sweetness is the Antidote to Bitterness
It was a week for an unusual amount of baking. For me, this week, there was baking for co-workers, and baking for students, and baking for classroom guests.
Amongst these was baking as part of a thank you gift for a group of four nurses who had traveled to give a talk to one of my classes on campus. They had had a full day, and a hard day, in their hospital workplace before driving the two hours to spend time with me and my students. They would then drive two hours home, after our night class.
As part of their thank you gift – one of several thank you gifts I baked this week - there was a gift bag full of a series of treats, as - with the help of Angela Liddon from Oh She Glows - I continued to experiment with the new paradigm: it doesn't have to be bad to be good.
So, there were vegan, and gluten free, refined sugar-free, “real food containing only”: dream bars, and cookie dough snacking squares, and brownies, and peanut butter truffles, and a really fun little jar of caramel sauce.
In one case this week, I made a batch for a work colleague, knowing that peanut butter/chocolate treats were among the favorite treats of his wife. So, there was the box for him, and the box for him to give away to her. It was just so lovely to observe that one of the best gifts I could give to him was something he can give and to her.
Sweetness - it can be easy to forget, and sometimes hard to see - is the antidote to bitterness, in the same way that kindness is the antidote to aggression or humility the antidote to pride.
Hard things happen. They can leave a bad taste in the mouth. It can be good to know the intentional skill of how to make things sweet again. It can be an exercise in paying attention, and awareness, to know how to distinguish, and choose, the kind of sweetness that will actually nourish.
Perhaps that's why I enjoy the playfulness of the vegan, gluten free, refined sugar-free, so- healthy-it-hurts, utterly easy to make and yummy delights from Oh She Glows: it doesn't have to be bad to be good. It can just be “all good”.
What actually is this sweetness that can help us to feel that good taste in our mouths again, and help to bring us back to a place of relative balance when we're working with hard things?
I'm here in eastern Canada, in the north, so perhaps it's like asking the question “can we choose maple syrup over white sugar?”; “can we choose something that's real over something ‘wrapped in plastic’, that might look good but is likely to actually cause us pain?”.
Part of what happens, in the beginning of the beginning of spring in the north, as we've explored together, is that the sap of the trees begins to flow again. The sap will pull deep into the trees through the depth of the long winter, and part of coming out of that period of cold and darkness is the time when the sap begins to flow again.
Here on the east coast, in Maritime region of Canada, in about February or early March, it's possible to put a tap inside of a maple tree, and to draw out the sweetness of that maple sap. It is then boiled, and condensed, to make the sweetness of maple syrup, then transformed into any amount of breakfast – and other - works of magic.
It can be useful to observe that tapping into sweetness like that is part of how we can get our own sap to start flowing again.
In my experience, when hard things happen, it can be possible to pull deep inside ourselves, and to somewhat cut-off: like having nicks, and corners, and parts of ourselves where our own juiciness has somehow spilled out onto the ground, or hardened deep inside, like a tree shivering its way through the winter.
Hard things happen. It can leave a bad taste, and become frozen slightly like that. It can be hard to wake our way out of it again, the way that our trees do in the spring.
So it becomes an exercise in remembering how to reach deep inside of our inside worlds, or how to reach deep inside of our outside worlds, and get our juices flowing again.
Can we reach in, and touch once again, the sap or the juiciness of life itself, to once again begin to feel more alive?
Most often I drink my tea black. An uncle, now several decades deceased, used to tell me it was because I was sweet enough. From time to time, it does happen that it's good to put milk and honey - and often some ginger in that tea to warm me up again - and bring back some sweetness after hard times.
Where does that sweetness come from? How do we reach in and touch that juiciness of life again?
It is actually like the sun in the sky. The sun might be covered by clouds. For a time we might feel like there is no sun. We can say to ourselves, “there is no sun out today”, when in fact the sun doesn't go anywhere. It is the earth that moves. The clouds are not as solid they appear. They are not really real. They come, and they go.
It's an old Buddhist metaphor for the nature of mind, which is said to be - like the sky – clear, bright, warm and wise, radiant, intelligent and aware. Thought and emotions: they come, and they go, like the clouds. The sun is constant.
It's a older metaphor of the Indian subcontinent that life itself is - in its nature - juicy, and rich in sapfulness. It's a word we've seen, called “rasa”. This vitality and vibrancy, richness and delight, like maple syrup or honey: it is the basic taste of life itself, and it is always possible to discover it again, even if it may feel - from time to time - that instead of honey in that tea there is lemon.
How do we find that sweetness again?
That sweetness hasn't gone anywhere. It is constant. That sweetness is the nature of life itself. Yet sometimes we do need to remind ourselves of this.
So let me tell you about the visiting nurses, who were my guests in class this week. They had had a hard day in the clinic at the hospital. They had worked very intensely, especially with one woman who was in a very difficult domestic situation. By virtue of their role, the nurses had offered: counsel and support, information and advice, and a safe place to come to where this person could shape some perspective, and work through the process of perhaps choosing to make different choices, helping her situation to become more safe, more respectful, and more kind.
That particular day, one day among many - when that client at the clinic may choose to do something very different tomorrow - they had had to watch the client return home, knowing it was likely to be an environment that was unsafe, disrespectful, and unkind. They talked about how hard it was to watch her go home.
Then they came, and spent time with my students and I, and there was such joy in the quality of the companionship that they had amongst themselves that it was utterly contagious. So we shared in that joy, and delight in the companionship, as we met each other as friends of a common friend.
They were so happy to talk to the students. The students were so happy to talk to them, and there was sweetness in that exchange that was medicine of a kind that is real, even if it’s not prescribed by doctors or sold. There was sweetness, that was medicine, in the quality of the companionship, and delight in the company one with the other.
Knowing that they were coming - and boldly experimenting the new paradigm that yummy treats don't have to be bad to be good - part of their thank-you gift was: dream bars, and cookie dough squares, almond brownies, and peanut butter truffles, and magic no-cook caramel sauce: creations Angela Liddon, the Canadian Food artist behind “Oh She Glows”.
There was something delightful in that exchange of sweetness, the delight of the companionship communicated in the gesture that somehow embodies the sweetness of life itself: no refined sugar, but a touch of maple syrup, and the sweetness of the laughter and the warmth, the support and the care, the honor and the respect of one and the other.
What is this sweetness, this delight that is the antidote to bitterness?
The love and the kindness, the warmth and the friendship, the compassion and the care, the humor and delight, the wisdom and the patience, the forgiveness and the generosity: the sweetness of life itself that we offer to one another all the time.
It is our basic nature. Sometimes it comes in a gift bag with tissue paper. More often it comes with a hug.
It is obvious as the space in the room, as obvious as the warmth of the blood in our veins, so obvious we can forget how to see it, so obvious it can be hard to notice.
Why are there gifts on birthdays? Chocolate and flowers on Valentine's Day? Why do we celebrate with feasting?
The flowers, the chocolate, the feasting, the gifts: they are ways that the inherent natural sweetness that is life itself symbolically takes form, shifting and moving from one to the other.
I gave my work colleague two boxes of treats: one for him and one for his wife. The sweetest gift that I can give to him is a gift of favorite treats that he can give, in turn, to the one that he most loves in all the world.
It is warmth, and kindness, respect and love that moves from one to the other, through the offering of sweetness. It moves between us as humans – from one to the other – in the way that the sap that is life itself moves through the many branches of a single tree.
Sweetness: it is the antidote to bitterness.
There are, perhaps, ways that we can try to explore this that arguably hurt us more than help. It is possible, I'm told, to take refuge in a box of Haagen-Dazs ice cream, wishing to numb away the troubles of the world, in the way that one might do with alcohol or drugs, choosing a processed “what appears to be real, but isn't really real” kind of sweetness, the kind that will hurt instead of heal, and be poison instead of medicine.
Yet, the sapfullness, the sweetness of life itself - vitality and dynamism, kindness, compassion, warmth and well-being, generosity and open-heartedness: this moves, in many vehicles, from one to the other, making all of our lives richer and stronger.
We know how to make juice out of our lemons, how to handle the hard things and overcome them. We can also put honey in our tea.
An old Indian tradition, the sweetness of life itself - the sapfulness called “rasa”- was not so much described in terms of maple syrup. South Asia isn't a land of the big red-leafed maple trees like Canada.
This “rasa”, or the sapfulness of life itself, is embodied in the classical Hindu offerings that humans give to each other, and that humans offer to the gods in the context of temple ritual practice. So it's flowers and fruit, rice, milk and ghee, and this often symbolized by the sweetness of honey.
So let me offer you a passage from the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, one of the early works of philosophy in ancient Indian tradition, dating from the Axial Age of human philosophy, in about 500 B.C. From the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad, Book 2, Chapter 5:
“This earth is the honey of all beings, and all beings are the honey of this earth. The radiant and immortal person in the earth, and, in the case of the body, the radiant and immortal person residing in the physical body. They are both one's self. It is the immortal. It is life itself. It is the whole. (1)
The wind is the honey of all beings, and all beings are the honey of this wind. The radiant and immortal person in the wind, and, in the case of the body, the radiant and immortal person residing in breath. They are both one's self. It is the immortal. It is life itself. It is the whole. (4)
The sun is the honey of all beings, and all beings are the honey of this sun. The radiant and immortal person in the sun, and, in the case of the body, the radiant and immortal person residing in sight. They are both one's self. It is the immortal. It is life itself. It is the whole. (5)
This space is the honey of all beings, and all beings are the honey of this space. The radiant and immortal person in space, and, in the case of the body, the radiant and immortal person residing in this space within the heart. They are both one's self. It is the immortal. It is life itself. It is the whole.” (10)
Sweetness is the antidote to bitterness. If we're feeling torn apart, reconnecting with that sweetness of life itself can help to make us feel whole again.
I offer you some sweet treats to try from Canadian food artist Angela Liddon’s “Oh She Glows”.
Here is her vegan, gluten-free, soy-free, grain free, freezer-friendly, five minute Magic No-Cook Caramel Sauce.
1/3 cup (75 ml) virgin coconut oil softened
½ cup pure maple syrup
¼ cup smooth raw cashew butter (home ground from nuts or store bought)(you use peanut butter instead, if you wish, for peanut caramel sauce).
2 tablespoons raw coconut nector [for best flavor and caramel colour. You can swap 2 tablespoons (30 ml) brown rice syrup and 1 teaspoon (5 ml) fresh lemon juice, if needed.]
¼ to ¾ teaspoon (1 to 4 ml) fine sea salt, to taste
May you enjoy the sweetness of life.
The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself. Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.
I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
Spring in Your Step!
You can feel it in the air. In my neck of the woods in the north, it's this coming Wednesday March 20th, at 6:58pm, that we will astronomically cross the line: the sun will shine directly on the equator – at the moment of the spring equinox - before continuing its journey which shapes the cycles and the seasons of our lives.
The spring equinox is the time when day and night are equal. We will rest – poised and balanced at that mid-point for a moment – before we cross the line, and the days will once again begin to get longer, and we step out of darkness into the time of the light.
While Imbolc, in early February marks the “beginning of the beginning of spring”- a time when the frozen ground begins to thaw, the sap of the trees begins to flow again, the equinox marks “mid-spring” as – here in the north – our lives, and our natural world, begin to come into bloom. South of the equator, the movement is the counter-balancing opposite pole: they will move inward as nights begin to grow longer.
This experience of changing and shifting and moving together, along with the cycles of the movement of the spheres, is among the most intimate and basic elements that joins us all together as members of a planetary community. This moment of transition, from darkness to light with the coming of spring, has been celebrated all over the world, in so many cultures, through countless generations of time.
The Saxon goddess Eostre will give her name to the direction “east” and the holiday “Easter”. She is a goddess of dawn, like Aurora. Just like the dawn is the time of new light, the spring is the time of new life.
The Roman new year began on the Ides of March, March 15th. The astrological year begins on the equinox when the moon moves into the first sign of the zodiac, Aries, the Ram. The god Aries is a Greek god corresponding to the Roman god Mars, who will give his name to the month of March. Between the 12th century and the year 1752, March 25th was the day the calendar year changed in England and Ireland. March 25th, 1212 was the day that came after March 24th, 1211.
It's the season of Nawruz, the Persian new year, a time of feasting and celebration at this month of re-birth.
The month of March contains holidays associated with many of our cultures’ mother goddesses: Astarte, Isis, Aphrodite, Cybele. Their re-birthing of the year shows itself in the time of blossoms, leaves on the trees, the sprouting of crops, the mating of birds and birthing of young animals. We have made it through the time of darkness; we are assured that life will, indeed, continue anew.
Eostre is the Saxon version of a Germanic goddess whose name was Ostara. Her Feast Day was held on the full moon following the spring equinox, the time when the Christian Easter season is celebrated. There is a legend, that once Ostara found a bird that was wounded, on the ground in late winter. To save its life, she transformed it into a rabbit, but the transformation was not complete. The bird took the appearance of a rabbit, but it retained the ability to lay eggs. The rabbit would decorate these eggs and leave them as gifts to Eostre. So it is that today Easter is celebrated amid the feast of fertility symbolised by bunnies and eggs.
In medieval societies in Europe, the March hare or rabbit was considered a very strong fertility symbol. This species of rabbit is nocturnal most of the year. In March, when its mating season begins, there are bunnies everywhere all day long. The female of the species is so fertile she can conceive as second litter even while still pregnant with the first: Easter eggs and rabbits, fertility and rebirth.
Attis, Adonis, Osiris and Dionysus: these are gods of the year who, in their own cultures, were believed to be the son born of a god and a mortal woman. They were believed to die each year at the harvest and be reborn again with the coming of spring.
Easter is the setting for the Christian celebration of the death and rebirth of Jesus. In Catholic tradition the Easter vigil service, the night preceding Easter Sunday, begins with what is called the “Service of Light”. It includes a passage saying: “We pray you, therefore, O Lord that this candle, consecrated in honor of your name, may continue endlessly to scatter the darkness of this night. May it be received as a sweet fragrance and mingle with the lights of heaven. May the morning star find its flame burning”.
Around the world, through countless generations, as part of a global culture, we have celebrated rebirth at the time of the spring equinox, when life comes again after darkness.
The spring equinox is a reminder that it's time to celebrate and plant seeds, metaphorically and physically, for what we want to bring to blossom in the upcoming season. It's a time to honor all the things we've achieved since the winter solstice. It’s time now to bloom, and breathe, create and procreate, and to reap the sweetness of what we've manifested as we're brought further into the light. Flowers start to bloom. Baby animals are born. It's a time to plant the seeds whose growth will symbolize life beginning anew. Is it time to make that change you've been thinking about all through the winter?
The symbol of the egg has in many cultures been part of the symbol for this potential of rebirth. Druids would bury eggs in fields in the spring to invite abundance to the land.
Colouring eggs, as symbols of new life, has long been part of the celebration. There are many ways to use natural substances to colour eggs. A single onion skin boiled with eggs will give a soft orange colour. A handful of onion skills will yield a dark rust colour. A half teaspoon of turmeric will give a sunny yellow colour. Beet juice and vinegar turn make them pink.
Seeds are, like eggs, symbols of this potential to be reborn again. In ancient Italy, in the spring, women planted gardens of Adonis. They filled urns with grain seeds kept in the dark and watered every two days. The custom is still followed in Sicily. Women plant seeds of grains, lentils, fennel, lettuce or flowers in baskets and pots. When they sprout, the stocks are tied with red ribbons and the gardens are placed on graves. They symbolize the triumph over death.
It ties us with our ancestors of generations past to notice that we celebrate the triumph of life over death in many ways, and we always have. It can also help us to notice that light does, indeed, return after darkness. It is the nature of the flow of life on this planet that follows the pathway of the sun. After night comes the dawn. After winter, there is spring. From death, comes re-birth as light returns to the world.
Although there is a specific moment, when the sun is at the equator, when we cross that line from darkness into light – and while many people who are sensitive to the vibe of things can feel that shift - spring is a season. You can choose your own time, and your own way, to celebrate. Maybe it’s easier on a weekend: this weekend or next. It can feed us very deeply to connect with the rhythms of the cycles of the earth, and the rhythms of the cycle of the generations, by joining in that celebration.
Perhaps you can plan to spend time outside in nature: watch a sunrise, or a sunset, walk in the park or take a hike. Search and actively seek out signs of spring coming into the natural world. Observe all the new life beginning to sprout around you. Plant something, if you can. For me, this is the weekend when I will begin to plant the seeds - inside the house under grow lights – for the annuals that I will transplant out in the garden later in the season when the soil has warmed. Are there seeds – of any kind - that you would like to plant this weekend or next? Plant a seed – of any kind – that will begin to grow. If it feels closer to hand, perhaps you can bring some flowers into the house or otherwise into your world.
It can be a time for feasting and paying attention to foods that honor the spring: eggs, or spring greens and sprouts, local bread or wine. If you're able, consider making a bonfire to celebrate the return of the sun. At the time of the spring equinox itself, I take my winter wreath off the front door and replace it with a spring wreath, to symbolically mark the change in the cycle of the year: it is time for the seeds in our lives to root, for buds to form and bulbs to blossom!
Are there ways that you wish to actively or symbolically do a final letting go of what needs to be left behind from the winter's rest? As we come out of that winter cocoon, what are the seeds that gathered inside of yourself through the winter that you will summon out of that darkness, having held them underground and get ready to plant in your life? If you can, consider beginning something new in your life. Perhaps you would like to add a fresh element to yourself care routine. For me, it's a time when my body begins to ask for freshly squeezed juices again, a time when it longs for fresh greens raw again…the time for kale in soup has passed.
Listen to yourself, and you will know how you need.
To celebrate, to connect with the cycle of the seasons, and the cyclical movement of the spheres, is to connect to our planet: all who live on her – and with her together - and all who ever have in the times that have come before. It is to connect to the cycle of the seasons of our lives, and prepare for new beginnings to sprout.
A Man, My Son
I see increasingly in some of my male colleagues and students the sense that, if one is born male (and perhaps especially white, and heterosexual, and male, if one is born into a position which many Western cultures would historically have associated with privilege), somehow one must walk about feeling badly and apologizing for it, and never quite feeling comfortable in one's own skin.
We are in a time of cultural change, as traditional gender roles become increasingly a thing of memory. There is sufficient turmoil to create space for a rewriting of so many of our culture’s stories. It is an interesting occasion – perhaps especially on international Women’s Day - to think of women and womanhood and men and masculinity.
What is it to be strong, and capable, and competent, and compassionate and masculine at the very same time? It is, perhaps, very similar to what it is to be strong, and capable, and competent, and compassionate and a person at the very same time. Men and women – and those in the space in-between – we are people. We are all persons: we don’t need to be enemies.
It is an error to confuse aggression with strength, and therefore fail to own the depth and subtlety of possibilities of one's own inherent strengths for fear they may be confused with aggression.
There is a meeting that I chair about once or twice a month. I hold the boundaries in that room - a somewhat intense meeting environment with many waves of undertones – so much more effectively than many men that I have seen do it, because I am a woman. Because I am a woman, I both must, and can, be much more direct, more commanding, and more straightforward. It is a tremendously useful way to lead in that context, where the strength and clarity of the boundaries are creating both safety and space. People are relaxing, and speaking more freely, and it is rather astonishing the amount that it is now being accomplished in such a small amount of time.
I have often reflected this past year that a man could never do that: the room would never permit it. Anything that I will do will be softened, because I am a woman, and therefore my strength can be received as strength. It will earn respect. No one is going to confuse that with aggression. It's coming from me.
If a man were to be direct, and straightforward, and commanding like that, that strength would be confused with aggression. The man would be attacked for it. It would not be permitted.
So much conversation has happened this past year about gender roles. I feel there's a great deal yet to be discovered in relation to the inherent strengths that come from the breadth, and variety, and texture of each of our experiences of personhood.
I don’t want to be an “equal” to a man in that room, in the sense of being “the same”. What I want is to apply the many strengths that come to me from my womanhood.
In the case of my first of two male guest speakers I had in class this week, it is someone, who through the course of the past year, has worked remarkably well in the midst of many social storms. He has shown an impressive ability to not be blown over by the winds that come and go in the course of our days. It seemed appropriate to acknowledge – or at least not to ignore - that as I introduced him as a guest speaker in the class, and so I introduced him using a poem I have known since childhood.
For me, the poem is a definition of integrity: can we stand in the winds and not be blown over by them?
It is refreshing that what is, for me, a definition of “integrity” was, for the poet, a definition of manhood.
So, let me offer you this well-known poem, a piece of advice from a father written to his son, in 1895, by the Nobel Prize laureate Rudyard Kipling. It's one of very few poems that I knew by heart when I was ten.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when others doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
For me, when I was ten, it was a description of integrity. Can you stand in the winds and not be blown over by them? Can you know that you are stronger than your fear? Can you dare to be stronger than your doubt? Can you be stronger than your impatience? Your exhaustion? Can you be what you are, knowing there is nothing to prove and no territory to defend?
For Kipling, in 1895, it was a definition of manhood: to be strong, and yet humble, brave and forgiving, gentle and kind.
So much has happened in the 125 years between Kipling and now: two great wars and the many others which followed, and the shifts of things, and change of things, as we as persons - in so many ways - are stepping out of culturally contrived boxes, socially contrived descriptions of ways that we are to snip, and trim, and cut, and tailor our perceptions of ourselves, confining ourselves to someone else's ideas of a womanhood, or manhood, or gender roles in a space in-between. Old ideas in so many ways are gone.
Listen to my undergraduate students, and they will look back to 50 years ago when couples began to first experiment: what it might be like if there were social permission to divorce, and women had the possibility of divorce – often, possibility of safety - because they were able to generate independent income?
It may be useful to look further back in our process of moving forward in our perceptions and thinking about men and manhood, about women and womanhood. We've tried to let go of a great deal, and in so many ways, I would say, we are floundering. We seem to know, more or less, what we don’t want. We are perhaps not quite ready to know what we do want or how to get it.
How can we find ourselves in a place where we can be at peace with ourselves instead of being at war with each other? Historically, there are signs of the predator-prey relationship as we've thought about masculinity and womanhood. In recent times, there are also signs of a predator-prey relationship when we think about womanhood in relation to men.
And so we shift, and change, and dance the dance of trying to figure it out: what does integrity look like?
I have reflected, and taught, and researched, and worked with this for some 25 years now in the context of ancient Indian thinking. Let me offer you this. That which is powerful, which is genuinely strong, is that which is life-giving, life-supporting, and life-sustaining. If it is about control, dominance, territoriality - if it is somehow seeking to diminish life in some way - then it is based in fear. It is an expression of weakness. It merits my compassion, not my complacency. There is no need to confuse such fear-based aggression with strength. Genuine strength: it is a kind of victory over war, the wars we have inside of ourselves and between each other, as we dance the experiment of a redefining of womanhood and masculinity, and the space in-between.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when others doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;….
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
For me, when I was ten, that was a description of integrity and therefore a description of personal strength. For Kipling, it was a description of manhood, and therefore a description of a genuine strength, because it is life-giving, life-supporting, life-maintaining, humble and wise.
As we dance the dance of redefining, and figuring out, what will become the description of manhood and womanhood in our contemporary time, it is possible to learn to dance together.
I asked my second male in-class guest this week: what is a genuine masculinity? What is it to be strong, and capable, and compassionate, and a man all at the very same time? We decided: it’s a lot like what it is to be strong, compassionate, and capable person, all at the very same time.
We don't need to confuse kindness with weakness or aggression with strength.
Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness
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