Hey friends! It’s Tasha Schumann here, Jeff’s BFF and podcast co-host and writer/meditation weirdo over at Bodhisavage.
This past week, while Jeff’s been at adult stay-away camp (aka silent meditation retreat), I’ve been having my own way less silent, way less serene retreat here in the middle of the city.
The heat has been intense in Toronto, so much so that I’ve found my body taking on an almost liquid quality. It’s as if my cell walls are a little looser, a little more permeable, my whole self just a little more melty.
In response, my nervous mind has been kicking up a fuss: “You can’t be melty! There’s no time for melty! Gotta work harder! Be faster! Deadlines, deadlines! Achieve, dammit!” Stuck in the middle, I tried to do both: be as cool and calm as a JC Penney summer catalog model while still cranking out the work.
But then Nature upped the ante and threw a freak torrential storm at us, rendering much of the city powerless and flooded. (Including 2 inches of water in my basement!) In the battle between my desire to achieve and nature’s insistence that I give myself over to the elements… Nature won.
So this week, while ambling around, hot and wet and smelling like the underside of a bridge, my practice has been a relinquishing, an un-doing. I have surrendered to being a molten human. It’s exactly the passive, discombobulating kind of healing that my bodymind needs right now.
Chances are there’s a lot going on for you right now, too - in your life, your community, in the freakish weather around you, in the churning, burning sociopolitical world at large. So here’s an invitation to recalibrate. One of my teachers, Alan Wallace, aptly calls this practice “The Infirmary.” I call it “Awareness, Melted.”
Hopefully, it’s exactly what you need today, too.
Love,
Tasha
PS. If you wanna practice live with me, you can do so tonight! At the monthly Bodhisavage Full Moon practice party. Register free, HERE.
A few quick notes—
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Many thanks!
THIS WEEK ON THE MIND BOD ADVENTURE POD
Enough with the talky talky, friends! Grab some paper and a pencil: in this episode, we’re waking up our inner artists and making Zentangle magic! Our sister guides are Martha Huggins and Molly Hollinbough. Many years ago, their parents – Maria and Rick – devised the Zentangle method, and ever since have been teaching it to people as a way to slip into a fulfilling creative flow and make beautiful works of pattern, shape, and color.
Being Human Takes Practice
August 16 - 18, 2024
Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, New York
This retreat explores what meditation teaches us about being human. It teaches us about healing stuck emotions and expanding stuck views. It teaches us mercy and forgiveness, majesty and humility. It teaches us how we relate to other people and to ourselves. All this and more happens when we sit. It’s mind-blowing and makes me want to weep. Maybe you will weep too. Or laugh uproariously. Or pass out in a patch of drool. Who can say? We go deep, we go home – we go nowhere! – and none of it can be captured in words.
