No amount of practice can rewrite a fundamental contract of being alive: pain and hardship will touch everyone, and no practice offers a permanent get-out-of-struggle-free card.
At the time, I couldn’t quite tell if my teacher’s words were a promise or a warning. "If you take up a transformative practice," he said, "it will transform you." I remember nodding along, pretending I knew what he meant, when really, I had no idea if I’d end up enlightened or just more confused.
Has someone's turn of phrase, or a glint of clarity in a moment of stillness, or some snippet of prose ever transformed an abstract concept into 'felt insight' for you?
Circumstances, common sense, and intelligence dictate physically distancing ourselves from each other just now. But there's no health dividend from putting 'tender sympathies' on lockdown.
We are rattling around in times that can feel as if the whole world is at its own throat. Getting our minds and hearts in shape to make it together through this ride on the HMS Crazy-Pop is essential. We constitute the pit crew, after all, for each other and for the planet.
