Day of Delirium #327 - A Profound Bow

This seems timely to me:

"All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power." ~ Lao-Tzu

There is a Yoga mudra, a kneeling posture of exercise, where by bringing your head to your chest while extending your arms up and out behind you, you can practice placing your head beneath your heart. And from this humbling position, you can't help but tire, and so, you must put your arms down. With your head beneath your heart, you must stop doing.

Soon after learning this, I came upon a woman who had been a nun, and she told me that she would practice for days upon days similar postures of Gregorian Chant: incline, bow, and profound bow - each bringing the head lower and lower to the earth.

This holds a powerful lesson: Time and time again, the head must be brought beneath the heart or the ego swells. If you do not bend, life will bend you. In this way, humility is accepting that your head belongs beneath your heart, with your thinking subordinate to your feeling, with your will subordinate to the higher order. This acceptance is key to receiving grace.

Lay your head down and the world of being will open its joys.

- Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Day of Delirium #326 - 5 Fandom Friday 3-8-16

Please see me post on my other blog Bookended By Cats to see my Fandom Guilty Pleasures.

Day of Delirium #325 - The Courage of the Seed

All the buried seeds crack open in the dark, the instant they surrender to a process they can't see. 

What a powerful lesson is the beginning of spring. All around us, everything small and buried surrenders to a process that none of the buried parts can see. And this innate surrender allows everything edible and fragrant to break ground into a life we call spring.

In nature, we are quietly given countless models of how to give ourselves over to what appears dark and hopeless, but which is ultimately an awakening beyond all imagining. 

As a seed buried in the earth cannot imagine itself as an orchid or hyacinth, neither can a heart packed with hurt imagine itself loved or at peace. The courage of the seed is that once cracking, it cracks all the way.

— Mark Nepo from The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have