Let’s talk about the impermanent nature of life shall we? The pain of dealing with loss seems like a good topic for a Monday morning, don’t you think?
This week’s practice inquiry comes to you from Rhonda and calls on our relationship to spirit, nature, interconnectedness and that which never changes as a place to draw on through times of loss and change, particularly the loss of loved ones.
Watch the video to explore this topic more and hear a sweet story about wise words my father brought to me when I was fearing loss and seeking comfort.
As usual, if you’d like a custom practice created for you, please click here.
Practice: Get yourself out into nature and settle into your surroundings. Take in your experience through each of your senses. As you move your awareness from sense to sense, notice the movements around you, pay attention to the impermanence of it all. You may notice a particular season you’re in, the growth or death around you, the movement of wind. Feel your own impermanence and connection with this dance.
Next, draw on, in your imagination or memory your loved one or loved ones. They may be still living or no longer with you, but feel into their qualities, who they are for you. Now sense into your environment and feel where those very qualities exist around you. Do your best to sense into this, rather than over intellectualizing it. Feel the presence of the qualities of your loved ones that are always accessible to you, feel them around you and feel them within you.
Simultaneously, in this meditation in nature, you’re feeling into and breathing acceptance into impermanence, that all that arises passes away, as well connecting to that which has no beginning and so end, feeling yourself and all beings as part of this entirety.
You don’t need to wait until loss has struck to work with this practice. In fact, connecting in this way and building the muscle of acknowledgment and acceptance of impermanence as well as what’s wider and connecting all of us in all of time prior to the occurrence of loss, can be a very supportive anchoring for when it inevitable comes.
May this serve you.
Love,
Chela