Hello, community of practitioners…. Our practice group will continue to meet on zoom at the new time 6 a.m. HT/ 9 a.m. PT/ noon ET for 30 minutes of practice and then some folks stay and talk and share experiences with practice.
Today insights from Kuwa Jasiri, Debbie, Bonnie, Liz, Simone, Pati we’re shared and they orbited in different ways about returning home whether a physical place, to the body as it needs to move or unable to move, to the present moment at this age with a sense of temporality.
With our collective reflections on home today, coming home to my body and brain is not just when it feels good. The cycle of head pain and then ease has returned. New insights and remembering about listening to the present moment —- the different birds at sunrise and the coqui frogs at sunset, my head when it starts to feel pain and cognitive fatigue sets in after a short time, my mind and its critique of cognitive fatigue, and when needing to rest the brain.
I am reminded that one can not run away or numb out. That qì gōng or contemplative practice is an invitation to be with the present moment. It is a practice of being present with and being awake to what this is in the present moment and what is here. — even with all the contradictions and the cycles.
So this is brain relaxing and feeling joyous after a swim in the ocean AND the pulsating pain of cognitive fatigue after talking with someone on the phone for 40 minutes and after 8 months of rehab after a car ran a red light and hit my car. This is the present moment of tourists streaming off of a cruise ship to drink Kona coffee AND ICE coming to a rural, small town and abducting several people who were fleeing violence and having been kidnapped in their home country who pick the coffee as workers. This is awakening to the possibility that my brain may not heal in time to return to teaching full time in a month for the academic year AND being hopeful for continued healing.
As I finish writing this, a rainbow on the horizon has appeared amid the different bird sounds of the morning. And, my head is beginning to throb from cognitive fatigue of writing for 20 minutes. I am learning to hold both with tenderness. Breathing in, I feel the physical pain. Breathing out, I smile at the rainbow and the physical pain.
Be well, Kathy
Dr. Kathy Yep 