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

Day of Delirium #324 - The Energy of Being Real

From "The Book of Awakening" by Mark Nepo

"Mana" is a term originally used in a Polynesian and Melanesian cultures to describe an extraordinary power or force residing in a person or an object, a sort of spiritual electricity that charges anyone who touches it. Carl Jung later defined the term as "the unconscious influence of on being on another." What Jung speaks to is the fact that the energy of being real has more power than outright persuasion, debate, or force of will. He suggests that being who we are always release an extraordinary power that, without intent or design, affects the people who come in contact with such realness.

The beautiful and simple truth of this can be seen in looking at the sun. The sun, without intent or will or plan or sense of principle, just shines, thoroughly and constantly. By being itself, the sun warms with its light, never withholding or warming only certain things of the Earth. Rather, the sun emanates in all directions all the time, and things grow. In the same way, when we are authentic, expressing our warmth and light in all directions, we cause things around us to grow. When our souls like little suns express the light of who we are, we emanate what Jesus called love and what Buddha called compassion, and the roots of community lengthen.

In this way, without any intent to shape others, we simply have to be authentic, and a sense of mana, of spiritual light and warmth will emanate from our very souls, causing others to grow -- not towards us, but towards the light that moves through us. In this way, by being who we are, we not only experience life in all its vitality, but quite innocently and without design, we help others be more thoroughly themselves. In being real, in staying devoted to this energy of realness, we help each other grow toward the one vital light.

--Mark Nepo

http://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=563

Day of Delirium #323 - The Carter Corps

From http://themarvelreport.com/the-carter-corps/

Peggy's Pledge

1. I pledge to know my value

 

2. I pledge to value others

 

3. I pledge to defend my own value by not

tolerating any kind of bullying in real

life or on social media

 

4. I pledge to defend the value of others by

not condoning any kind of bullying in

real life or on social media

Watch Agent Carter TONIGHT on ABC 9pm-11pm EST