Happy Thursday!

It’s been a busy time so finally able to sit down for a minute and do some writing.

I’m involved in some fun projects right now which have gotten me thinking about the whole concept of “follow the energy”.   If there is a flow in your life right now, then I believe there is an opening right there, something worth checking out at the least and stepping in to to get carried away in to a new world at the most.  😉

I’m thinking this is just the way I’m going to live my life from here on out.  Not stopping to second guess things or understand them fully.  But simply noticing energy and following it.  Or stepping away from situations/relationships/events/goals which are just not filled with life and magnetism.  I’m thinking this is just a magical way to move through life and without that kind of enchantment, life can get pretty dull, pretty quickly.  I’ve never been a person who’s been comfortable with stagnancy.

Last weekend in Sedona I went to work out with Rob at his gym and he, being Rob, brought me not only a bottle of water but some headphones for the treadmill.  Lo and behold I got to watch a truly inspiring Oprah show on her “Super Soul Sunday” with the poet and effervescent individual Mark Nepo.  Now if Mark Nepo can’t keep me on a treadmill for 40 minutes, no one can.  I have to say it was so fun walking next to Rob who was elypticalling on the next machine.  I just love him.

I was particularly struck by this segment with Mark Nepo.  I was only wishing I had a pen/paper on the treadmill to write it down so I’m happy I found it on Huffpo:

Nepo, who is now in his 60s, also shares the most humbling thing he’s learned. “We’re asked to learn how to keep asking for what we need only to practice accepting what we’re given,” he says. “And that’s a paradox. But what’s so important about this, for me, is that asking for what we need doesn’t always lead to getting what we need. Sometimes it does, and that’s great. But the reward for asking for what we need is that we become intimate with our own nature. We learn who we are by standing in who we are.”

“The reward for practicing accepting what we’re given is we become intimate with everything that’s not us,” he continues. “We become intimate with the nature of life. And it’s the rhythm between our own nature and the nature of life that allows us to find the thread we are — the thread we are in the unseeable connections that hold everything together.”

Please take a look at this.  The latter part of this segment, to me, defines prayer in a way that makes more sense to me than anything I’ve ever heard.

I’ve also been thinking about living questions vs. answers and this seems to dovetail, at least for me, with what Nepo is saying here.

I remember these words of Rilke which have been informing my life, literally, since my early twenties:

Mark Nepo, in this Sunday talk, also spoke about how we identify ourselves in the world.  He was saying something about how we are so quick to label ourselves this or that.  Oh, you’re good at writing, then you must be a writer!  That kind of thing.  How he less wants to be identified as a poet than as a living poem.

That really struck me and got me contemplating.  I’ve been saying since returning from Washington that I’m going to take a sabbatical and go back there to write my book.  And I am going to do that but with a slightly different intention.  I’m going to take some time off to let my life unfold in a different, out of my routine kind of way, to discover just what it is I need to write about.

I think just asking the question “how does a person like me, living through the mine field of this life I’ve been given, manage to discover and live this amazing magical life I find myself living?” opens my life for me in a new way of finding that amazing life and is really the point of any book–to enhance my reason for living ultimately, then share it.  So what I need to write about is how this unfolds after the fact, not some recipe or lessons learned type of thing.  The juice is in the inquiry. And if a book comes of it, great.  A book is more a motivation to ask the questions, not necessarily serve up the answers.  The practice is not in some goal or aspiration other than living in the continual asking of the question.

I’m fortunate that I have a life and lifestyle that will allow me this kind of break and time to focus and defocus.  It’s sort of an inside out goal making process but the only one that makes sense to me.

So back to following the energy, again as Whyte writes in one of my all time favorite poems Sweet Darkness:

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.”
― David Whyte, The House of Belonging

I look around my life and energy is pulling me toward writing, toward poetry, toward Watsu, toward exercise, toward smoothies, toward a more healthy lifestyle, toward my family and more soulful relationships.

my smoothie this morning

At the end of January, I’m going to be bringing Sebastian in for two days of Watsu sessions here then a little fun field trip to Sedona. I decided to bring the mountain to me vs. traveling to him to continue my Watsu practice.   All I did was start mentioning this possibility to friends and clients and within five days had 20 people on the list interested in sessions with him.  That’s what I call energy flowing around an event.  It’s unfolding so easily and effortlessly that all I feel like I’m doing is holding the reins.  I have a lot of energy around this new friendship too as he feeds my soul in a way I’ve been longing for.  It feels like a long lost friend finding his way back to me.  I think he feels the same.

he made this his Facebook profile pic this week…awww…so I did the same

I believe this commitment to this kind of lifestyle is some serious piece of wisdom infusing me on how to live in this world and make the most of it.  I find myself continually glancing around for openings and flows and more easily drawing myself away from things that feel constricted without asking why or analyzing (I could get better at that so I’m practicing).

How are the ways you are following the flow in your life?

I’d love it if you shared.

xoxo