Let me be an apprentice to stillness.

Let me be an open vessel

filling with the vastness of each moment

overflowing with every

loving

grieving

lustful

painful

ecstatic

aching

raw

sensation.

Moments that

birth and die

contract and expand

arise and dissolve.

Let me embody exquisite gentleness

and the strength to soften

with my tendrils stretched wide

shimmering in receptivity.

Let me breathe into each question

without ever needing to know the answer.

 

by Gina Puorro

 

That’s a powerful intention that the poet and writer Gina Puorro, author of the book of poetry The Wild Will Call you Back, is setting here! It makes me curious what that would be like, being ‘an apprentice to stillness’, ’embodying exquisite gentle and the strength to soften’… My heart opens at reading the radical allowing of the array of sensations. That willingness to show up and experience I also feel in one of my favourite Rilke poems: You see, I want a lot. And while I’m full of preferences for this rather than that, I feel the even deeper value of wanting to show up to the full range of the human experience, and move towards the kind of receptivity she speaks of… I also hear it as echoing Rob Nairn saying that mindfulness is knowing what is happening, while it’s happening, no matter what it is. It’s all worth knowing, experiencing, sensing into – not living life unlived but fully engaging with it as it meets me here, and now.

PS if you’d like to practice alongside others to increasingly show up to our own experience, there’s a new Level 1 Mindfulness course starting before long, which leads all the way into the 4 level training pathway…

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash