Day 226 – Abundant mental, physical, and spiritual health should not be a privilege; it should be available to all of us.  Education and health care should be accessible, efficient, and equitable.  Instead, it has turned into a quagmire, just like many institutions and entities that should innervate our life.  However, we look to our doctors, our bosses, our news, our trainers, our leaders, our teachers, and our friends for answers to why we suffer. Moreover, this starts so young and innocently, we are almost born to die.  Increduously, we survive, individually and collectively, even though we fear, feel alienation.  Rolf describes this, writing:  “Our minds are split off from parts of our bodies, our souls are disconnected from our hearts, the privileged in our society are split off from the nonprivileged.”

Rolf describes asana as a “program of forced integration,” whereby the mind and body and spirit must reside in a posture as an “integrated whole.”  Asana, in his mind, awakens a “reassertion of life force,” bring the body into balance actively with the mind and the spirit.  Meditation brings internal balance as “intimacy with the felt experience of the body and breath [in silence and stillness] brings peace of mind.”  Bountiful health is something “we have yearned for but have despaired of ever finding.”  We look into the quagmire, but never into ourselves.

Last night, I settled into a Buddhist meditation.  The mantra was “Let me be at ease with myself, with my body.”  I had a quite profound experience within this short session, extending my compassion to others, including  my enemies (the only thing that popped into my head, ridiculously, was Donald Trump).  Significantly, I experienced nonattachment in that moment.  A sweet calmness spread over me as I let go of the grip of fear and separation, which sometimes (honestly, most kinds) wreak havoc in my mind and lead to judgment and verbalization of such.  Reflecting on this brief epiphany, I think only that I experienced nonattachment, presence, and peace because I was able to understand that the very compassion I extend myself and my healing body (which is a BIG part of why I am meditating daily) can also be reasserted in other aspects of my life in moments of stillness, silence, nonreactivity/nonattachment, reflection, patience, presence.  And, upon opening my eyes, the only thing that I could feel/hear/see/taste/touch was my heart and my breath, the reassertion of my life force.