Third straight day of sunshine, and things are looking up. This time of year is so hard for me! My instinct is just to curl up in bed and daydream with a cup of tea until spring comes. I answered that urge this morning until the decadent hour of 11 am. The house was quiet, the sun shone through the curtains, my little dog agreed that snoozing in bed was an excellent idea, I indulged in two cups of my new favorite tea while reading the new issue of Shambhala Sun from cover to cover, including Alice Walker's beautiful article Anxiety Soup. In Anxiety Soup Alice Walker gives her recipe for staying heart-sane in challenging times. Alice's soul medicine contains four ingredients: Dance, Meditation, Actual Homemade Soup, and Snuggling. YES!!! But the bottom line, she tells us, is that Anxiety Soup can be made out of anything - any combination of the simple disciplines, joys, and sustaining pleasures of daily life, onlythe main thing it assumes is that you are coming to it in your right mind - that you've put the liquor bottle back on the shelf, said no to drugs of all kinds, and made the manly or womanly decision not to pick fights. In fact, it assumes you consider yourself free...
This message is coming to me from all over lately: that life is actually very simple; that we are at our best when we are simple and true; and that the major ingredient of Joy is not, as we might prefer to believe, indulgence, but rather a simple and voluntary discipline. What do you think?
1 comment:
This is so true. As humans we tend to make the simple complicated however when we stop, breathe and are conscious in each step we take the world opens up.
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