playing in heart land

When I play, which I don't do often enough (although I consider some of my cooking time play time), I am truly in the moment. Young children play all the time. That's what they do. It's their job. They learn by osmosis, through playful imitation of the adult world. Playing leaves the left side of the brain, the rational-analytical side, out of the equation, and stays in right-brain mode. Play is creativity and spontaneity, not calculated analysis. Games like chess or poker or truly competitive sports are not play because they are about left brain strategy, which involves thinking in words.

What makes play play is its state of mindfulness, which is absent of words. The younger children are, the more they exist in this state, not thinking about what they ate for breakfast or what they will play this afternoon. Martha Beck wrote in Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: "the way to cope with the increasing complexity of the wild new world is to play more." Her enlightened advice for dropping into the mindful world of play is to leave the words out - by the way, that's exactly where meditation is headed. "Words are the language of the mind, emotions are the language of the heart," a fellow grad schooler said to me in that regard. Drop the words, drop your beingness down down down - until you reach your heart. Here words don't exist. Words separate, words tag, they have their role, but we spend most of our time in word land and not enough in heart land.

Let's go on a journey to heart land and play.

balancing act

        Each yoga session is different for me.Some days I'm more flexible than others.Some days I balance better than others.The flexibility has more to do with the time of day - stiffer in the early morning, more flexible as the day goes by and I move my body more.The balancing ability, on the other hand, has everything to do with my state of mind, how balanced I am internally, how focused I am.Some days, when I try to do tree pose I can only get my leg to ankle height, and still I wobble and have to put my toe down periodically.Other days, as if by magic, I get my leg all the way up to rest against my thigh and I stand in suspended stillness.

The more scattered or agitated I am, and the less balanced my state of mind, the more difficult the balancing poses are.The more calm my state of mind, the better those poses work.  Most important, I find, is to let go of straining or willing myself to get somewhere.Instead, I pick a neutral focal point in mid-distance, maybe a nail on the wall or a light switch, and use this to keep focused on the pose instead of watching my thoughts galloping through my head.  The less I strive to create a perfect tree pose and simply follow wherever my body takes me, the better.Then it becomes like a meditation in action.

the color of life

I find the color Green very soothing. It seems restful to my eyes. I love when vibrant green begins to mix into the drab gray browns of winter and slowly takes over by the end of May. I can look at an expanse of thick juicy green grass for ever and feel peaceful. Walking in the woods I enjoy staring at the dense green tree canopy.            "Green, the result of photosynthesis, which creates all of our food, is the color of life," says Petra Fromme of AZSU. The NY Times reported in a recent article on the color green that blue and green are the world's favorite colors. Our vision is optimized for green, says Bevil Conway of Wellesley College.

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Not only our mind, but our body, too, thrives on greens, whether in the form of leafy green vegetables, that miracle healer wheat grass juice (2oz of it provides as many nutrients as 5lbs of raw vegetables - wow!), that other super healer chlorella algae, and various other mineral rich sea vegetables.

As Popeye already said.....

effortless perfection

On this sunny morning I heard a bird chirping away in a nearby tree while I was getting ready - how beautiful after a long winter of silence. I find that there is nothing more pure and clear than the bright voice of a song bird - effortless perfection. I didn't know what kind of a bird I was listening to, and it didn't really matter. Besides, words often utterly fail to describe an experience. They tend to be insufficient and cumbersome.  That moment was an exquisite experience, no words needed.

deeply experiencing

After a long winter indoors it feels so good to be outside, open your arms wide in exuberance, and breathe in the fresh moist spring air in big gulps. Ahhhhhh.........Smelling the air is a thrilling experience, just like digging into the dirt and feeling the soil crumble in your hands, touching the tender spring flowers and shoots that are coming up out of the ground, seeing the fresh spring colors emerging, and listening to the gentle breeze whooshing in the trees.

What we don't usually realize is that all of these sensations occur simultaneously. What a much deeper experience to pause and take all of these impressions in together, the way they actually occur.  When you are fully in that moment with nature it becomes an overwhelmingly complex, almost dizzying meditation. How does that moment feel then?

On the other hand, when we dissect a moment's experience into the different names we give it - hearing the breeze, smelling the fresh air, feeling the tender shoots, seeing the fresh colors - we experience these sensations consecutively.   The separation occurs because we put the sensations into words, which inherently happen consecutively, and because we think about them. We can't simultaneously think about three different sensations that happen at the same time. Impossible. But we can experience them if we become still, get the words out of the way, and just BE. Just being makes you shift from seeing the world in consecutive flat segments, to a complex holographic whole.

playing with stuff

A vignette is a small still life of things in your home or office, a grouping of a few pretty items pulled together around a common theme. Why order your clutter and put it on display? A vignette not only looks very decorative, it also draws your attention and makes you pause. It creates a moment of mindfulness, of stillness and enjoyment. Putting a vignette together is fun because you get to play with your stuff. A vignette brings order to the chaos of your tchotchkes, and it looks like art when artfully put together.

A vignette is definitely not a random assemblage of stuff. It takes some time and thought to put one together. It works when it's pulled together by theme. Such a theme might be color (different items of the same color), it might be shape (a cube, a sphere, a pyramid), it could be material (various things of the same material), or it could be purpose (consolidate all your bathroom vanity top clutter on a pretty tray). Several pictures with frames of the same type, or small artwork hung together in a grouping, make a nice wall vignette.

 You can play with rocks, shells and other nature things; or plants, a flower, an attractive pot or two. In your kitchen colorful fruits and vegetables in beautiful bowls looks gorgeous.   Unless lined up in a row, uneven numbers seem to work better for larger objects than even numbers.  See your stuff in a new light and play with it!

make it special

Splurging is only splurging, and treating myself is only a treat if I don't do it all the time. Otherwise it's excess, or habit, or addiction. When you treat yourself for every little excuse, whether it's with shopping or eating sweets or something else, it's no longer special. And then it's no longer fun. You only feel special when it's really special. I believe that it's important to splurge and treat yourself every once in a while, constantly being a miser is miserable. My daughter's special reward for a good math test used to be a sweet afternoon treat with a cup of rich hot chocolate at our wonderful French pâtisserie. But then she got to be very good at math, and we went to the pâtisserie very often, and then it wasn't special anymore. So we had to redefine those rewards.  Meat used to be special, hence the traditional Sunday roast. If you have meat every day, and lots, it quickly becomes an unhealthy addiction.  Going out for dinner is special. Yet, if you do it all the time it loses it's luster. We went to a Broadway show this past week-end. That was very special. As a matter of fact, it was my daughter's first Broadway show, that's how rarely we do it. And it felt like a real splurge.

Make it special, and make it rare. It will sparkle a lot more.

deep listening

Deep anything is about doing whatever you are doing more thoughtfully, more mindfully, focused on the task, not thinking about the past nor the future. You can practice Deep Living, Deep Speaking, Deep Playing or Deep Walking. It's like a doing meditation or a mindfulness practice. Deep Listening is listening to your partner with an ear to her story, her needs, her feelings. When you listen to someone deeply you hear where they come from, you open your heart to them, you respond to their needs. Here an example of listening and responding shallowly: You: "I just twisted my ankle." Me: "Oh no. You know, that happened to me last winter, and I went to the doctor, and the doctor....blablabla." In this case I am not tuning into what you just said, instead following my own narrative. This is Shallow Listening, something we all do all the time.

Here an attempt at listening and responding deeply: You: "I just twisted my ankle."  Me: "Oh no, that must have hurt. What happened? (pause to let you respond)  Is there anything I can do for you?"

The difference is a shift from the me perspective to the we perspective.  Deep Listening tunes 100% into your partner.  It really deepens relationships.

grass fed is best

I used to think that the most important improvement to our dairy consumption was to buy organic milk, butter and cheese, what with the grow hormones and antibiotics they feed the poor cows these days (and that make it into our body and into the groundwater). But I have had to adjust my thinking. Buying organic butter, and cheese and milk, only assures that the cows were fed an organic (grain - gulp) diet (which is unhealthy for the poor animals and makes them sick).  That meat from grass fed cows (their natural diet) is healthier for us than from grain fed or grain finished cows has gradually trickled into mainstream awareness (less fat, more healthy Omega-3, higher in various other micronutrients).

But the same is also of course true for milk, cheese and butter from grass fed cows - much higher levels of vitamin K2 and Omega-3 fatty acids, which actually promote heart health (yes, eat more of it!).   Studies have shown that countries where cows are mostly grass fed (Ireland, Australia) have much lower levels of heart disease!

Organic butter really does not buy you much, butter from grass fed cows does.

comforting rituals

Ritual is something that's "always done in a particular situation and in the same way each time," according to Merriam-Webster's online dictionary. Rituals that come to mind are daily rituals (getting up, taking a shower, going to bed), religious rituals (mass, prayer), and rituals connected to specific occasions (holiday celebrations, funerals, last day of school). My (almost) daily ritual is to shut the computer after a day's work, go down to the kitchen, and begin cooking dinner while sipping a glass of wine. Brushing my teeth as soon as I get out of bed is a ritual, too, because I do it every day, in the same way, with the same movements. But the rituals I really want to talk about on the cusp of this Passover/Easter week-end are the special ones for special occasions. Why do we create and need ritual? Ritual is reassuring, and we need certain routines in life. It is reassuring to know how, when and in what fashion to celebrate an occasion, instead of inventing it anew each time. Annual holiday rituals tie us to nature's cycles as well as to our ethnic culture and roots. Like the seasons that always come back every year in the same sequence, like the moon that waxes and wanes always in the same predictable way, rituals are grounding specifically because they don't change. There is reassurance in knowing what to expect because the rest of life is so full of change, adjustment, fluctuation and surprises.

It is especially comforting for children to learn and have rituals because it creates rhythm and it helps them to find their place in the world, in nature, in their culture, in their family. My Easter menu doesn't change much from year to year. It's always a leg of lamb, always asparagus and some other green springtime vegetables. Like a ritual I buy a white hyacinth every year a few weeks before Easter, and we all associate its smell, which permeates the entire house, with Easter and the beginning of spring. Each year about three weeks before Easter we bring up the Easter storage box from the basement to pull out the painted eggs and decorate pussy willow or other bare branches, which will start to sprout tender leaves by Easter. Same thing each year.  Here's to a new spring.