Three Healing gateways for extraordinary times
For so many women, right now, these weeks and months feel incredibly tough.
Along with many uncertainties, not-knowing when the lockdown will end, what the world will look like when it does, there’s a new level of busy-ness for mothers with children at home, perhaps trying to hold down jobs to keep a stream of income while simultaneously caring for their families.
For others, the emptiness of these days yawns wide, the disruption to routine and the medicine of social gatherings bringing challenges to wellbeing.
Here are three gateways to moving through these transformational times with wellness and balance.
Acceptance
When things feel tough, we have an opportunity to reframe our response to it.
First, we invite ourselves into acceptance of what is. We make a choice to stop resisting what feels like difficult circumstances. As we do that, the weight of what we are carrying dissolves, even if only for a few minutes, and we can again feel our true, limitless nature, and the still centre that is always there, beneath the ebb and flow of life.
Love in action
When I transitioned from being a participant in retreats to running them, I found I was so busy that I was able to be in the temple much less. I longed to simply sit on my cushion in meditation again and absorb the teachings.
When we lose the thread of the practices that nourish and rebalance us at a deep level, to remember that we are still on a healing journey whose form has just shifted can help us find that thread again. Our healing journey may be in an activity phase, where we have the opportunity to witness ourselves as we go about the busy-ness of daily life.
Inhabiting that position, of a mindful observer of ourselves in action, we can release ourselves into our days with grace, holding a healing intention throughout all we do. The gift of this medicine remains available, no matter how busy we are, or how disconnected we may feel in the absence of our usual spaces where we go to reconnect, to meet and receive nourishment from others.
Receiving the fullness
Coming back to my time supporting retreats, I recall sitting at dinner one day, hungry to receive the. spiritual nourishment my friends had been receiving all day. I shared the gems I had gleaned from the day from moments of passing by and hearing a few sentences, and my friends shared what they had received.
What blew my mind was this; that we had all received the fullness of the teachings!
On hearing what I had taken in, my friend said to me “In a full day of teachings there are generally only 2-3 jewels I really remember and take in – and you have also received that!”
My teacher,Garchen Rinpoche, said that:
if we could meditate on the nature of mind for just five minutes every hour for the rest of our lives, we could attain enlightenment.
What did this teach me?
This: that whether we have hours a day to practice, or just moments in between busy-ness, if we cultivate an intention to awaken, to drink deeply of what it is that life is teaching us in each moment, how much time we have ceases to matter.
This is a moment to be cultivating deep presence, to be finding the ways in which we can nourish and replenish ourselves as we move through the day, connecting with tools that balance, regulate, settle, soothe, nourish, enliven and inspire our system.
Moon Teitel