I love fall. (Photo By Melissa Farlow/National Geographic)

This may be short and/or rambling, but I wanted to share this  while it was on my mind. This was the “voice” today in my Verse and Voice email:

“I vow to offer joy to one person in the morning
And to relieve the grief of one person in the afternoon.
I vow to live simply and sanely,
Content with a few possessions.
I vow to keep my body healthy.
I vow to let go of all worries and anxieties
In order to be light and free.”

-Plum Village, A Verse from Plum Village’s, Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist community in France, chanting book

I love this. I love the connection of health, letting go of anxiety and living simply.  I want to copy this down and tape it up in all my “probable freak out zones” – work, the car, that place in my wallet where money is supposed to be.

I haven’t had many huge breakthroughs yet during my daily meditation “homework” from my class, and for my challenge to myself. That is probably because, well, those things take a while and most of the time I begin them begrudgingly, but end thinking about how glad I am that I took 15 minutes to do them. But, last night I was doing a guided body scan exercise and had a light bulb moment.

Laura, my instructor and also the voice on the recording, said to be “with” a part of the body – not thinking about how it appeared, but sitting with it and being OK with how it existed. The way that it was at the moment was perfect. This meant so much more than just being at peace with how my back – or whatever body part it was – existed. I realized that I’d been missing the point of mindfulness. I realized I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my restless emotions, rather than being with them.

I’m a great observer and analyzer, and all this time I’ve considered mindfulness in my terms. I could examine what I was feeling, and judge it to be OK, rather than experiencing it and being OK. I’ve been perceiving that I was stressed, or lonely, or whatever, and I could intellectually tell myself that those were OK things to feel, but I’m not sure I was really buying it. I wasn’t allowing myself to have those feelings without judgement, and I definitely wasn’t judging them to be perfect.

So, that is something I’m going to keep working on, because I living “simply and sanely” sounds like a great goal to me.