: Lamento :
Posted: October 3, 2014 Filed under: Meditation, Yoga | Tags: blogging, compassion, Competing, culture, cycling, Cyclocross, exercise, family, fitness, free range, freshly pressed, gluten free, gratitude, happiness, health, hipster, kindness, life, love, lululemon, marathon, meditation, Mindfulness, motivation, musings, natural, nature, Omaha, paleo, passion, perspective, running, whole foods, Winning, yoga, Zen 6 CommentsFame you’ll be famous, as famous as can be, with everyone watching you win on TV, Except when they don’t because sometimes they won’t-
Watching a cycling (running – whatever) event affords both participants and spectators alike, an intense experience of competition, and if we pay close enough attention – An unfettered obsession with winning. Many hard-working, competing riders define success as a podium finish and anything else as an utter failure.
How do we address competition and competing in a different way?
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Opening up and pouring my spirit before you … Winning is an outcome. When I become obsessed with the outcome, rather than the moment – I lose sight of the journey, I lose sight of my true spirit and how I arrived in this magical moment. I lose appreciation of simply being and my sole focus on is on me … And sometimes, I don’t enjoy this side of “me“.
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Our culture is obsessed with winning, often at any cost and by any means. Once we have tasted winning, we need more of it – Winning is an addiction. The alluring pleasure, the rush of winning is fleeting, unlike the deep-rooted satisfaction of knowing that you have done your best. Winning makes people focus outside themselves for validation of their self-worth.
Daily Meditation:
My past obsession with competition and winning, restrained me from engaging in a personal journey of self-knowledge and finding my place in life. This journey is entirely an internal and personal process, not one that requires a podium finish or constant competition with others as a measure of my true self-worth.
Kindness
Posted: October 2, 2014 Filed under: Meditation, Yoga | Tags: Buddhism, compassion, Gratefulness, gratitude, kindness, meditation, Naomi Shihab Nye, Poetry, Prose, Talking Voice Inside 2 Comments: When a friend opens a random page in your life :
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Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Passion, The Savior
Posted: October 1, 2014 Filed under: Meditation, Yoga | Tags: blogging, Buddhism, compassion, cycling, Cyclocross, exercise, Faiure, family, fitness, freshly pressed, gratitude, happiness, harmony, health, hipster, kindness, life, love, lululemon, marathon, meditation, motivation, musings, nature, Omaha, passion, pilates, running, trail running, Truth, writing, yoga, Zen 10 CommentsAlways aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well-
Before a cyclocross race recently, I was listening to a close friend describing his favorite hobby – He likes to make wooden toys and other wooden “things“. Although, he starts many projects and simply lets them stack up, unfinished. “I don’t have a real passion for my hobby at times,” he said to me … His last words before we started the race planted a question in my head that I have often thought about: How do we cultivate and nurture our passion(s) in life?
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You know it when you feel it don’t you? You get that butterfly sense deep inside that “something” significant is close and you gently move towards it. You make room for “it” and you fully awaken to its presence in your life. Maybe these new-found feelings affirm what we desired, or maybe they will completely change them? For some folks, a single passion burns for their entire lives. It’s their true essence, their true authentic self and they would never give it up …
Daily Meditation:
I know that whatever compels me toward these deeper experience(s) will likely wear thin at certain times during my life. But you know what? It’s totally fine with me.
The Last Swim of Summer
Posted: September 25, 2014 Filed under: Meditation, Yoga | Tags: blogging, compassion, exercise, family, fitness, freshly pressed, gluten free, happiness, Jonathan Galassi, kindness, life, love, lululemon, marathon, motivation, musings, natural, nature, nebraska, Omaha, passion, perspective, pilates, Poetry, recovery, rest, running, simplicity, The Last Swim of Summer, walking, whole foods, writing, yoga, Zen 4 Comments…
ought to be swum
without knowing it,
afternoon lost to
re-finding the rock
you can stand on
way out past the
raft, the flat one
that lines up four-
square with the door
of the boathouse.
Freestyle and back-
stroke and hours on
the dock nattering
on while the low sun
keeps setting fin-
gers and toes getting
number and number …
how could we know
we were swimming the
last swim of summer?
Midnight :Sun:
Posted: September 23, 2014 Filed under: Meditation, Yoga | Tags: blogging, Buddha, Buddhism, calm, compassion, fitness, free range, freshly pressed, gluten free, happiness, health, hipster, hope, kindness, life, love, lululemon, marathon, meditation, Mindfulness, natural, nature, Omaha, passion, perspective, running, trail running, yoga, Zen 11 CommentsDo not ruin today with mourning tomorrow-
Struggling to eliminate our flaws, tossing abrasive feelings to the side … Fighting ourselves into a place we deem more pleasant and less disruptive. Our instinctual fight or flight response operates in perpetual “autopilot” mode, navigating us toward safety. Although, what happens when we switch our autopilot system off?
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I quite literally stumbled, and flicked my autopilot switch from “on” to “mindfulness” about five years ago. Mindfulness offered me a very specific and helpful way to accept, and value myself, by gently inviting me to pause … To look within my thoughts, and notice what I am experiencing moment to moment – The polar opposite of killing the gym and running myself into the ground. Rather than conclude something was “wrong” with me for experiencing troubling thoughts and feelings, I simply acknowledged and attended to whatever I happened to notice at the time. Acceptance of who I am is enormously freeing, as long as I pause long enough to recognize that the path forward is awakening to myself, and not who I want or wish I could be.
Daily Meditation:
As the many experiences in life arise and float away, we dip our toes into a pool of stillness that has long sat stagnant.
CultFit 