Brandyn's Acts of Generosity

Brandyn,

I believe you will like this quote from Stephen Swartz, in his book Pray of the Body.

So when we decide that it is time to truly take care of ourselves, we are saying it is time to give up the myth that this life or anything about it is ours. And to enter into the evolutionary process of expansion and movement, aligned with what we don’t understand, rather than aligned with the resistance of meaning. We come to the body, to the front of the body through our attention. We allow. If we hurt we hurt. If we ache, we ache. If we’re lonely, we’re lonely. If we love, we love. If we long, we long. And we let it be.

And we recognize that somewhere just as a kind of background, as a faint accompaniment, that underneath the longing, underneath the lonely, underneath the grief, underneath the anger is a force, is a creative force, is an evolutionary, expansive force, is a universal pulsation, which is touching the body. And the work of the human being is not to make what it is calling ‘wrong’ a problem, an insight about it and get rid of it and push it away and hate it and find out why it was caused by our mother or our father or our uncle or our past lives, but rather to discover what it means to cooperate with it, to come to it, to enter into it, to surrender to it, to let it create through us and to experience the enormous depth of joy that comes when the tension of trying to own our own lives has disappeared.

The seed pod, we know, doesn’t own itself. We recognize in the fall that when the seeds scatter across the land that not one of those seeds is owned by (felt ?? )…..but is in fact a signal that certain forces are in operation. That’s all. Certain forces are happening. And the seed is restless with life current and becomes so restless that it bursts and out of its bursting comes the trees and the flowers and the grass.

Now what is so remarkable about being a human being is that in a very real sense we are just like those seed pods, scattered upon this planet, scattered in the mystery of the physical realm of the earth here in the great firmament, here in the great mystery. But there is something that we have, that the oak tree seed does not have and that is consciousness. We have a choice. Now while we think we have hundreds of choices, we basically only have one choice and that is whether to cooperate with the cosmic impulse that seeks to blossom us into a higher form, if you will, or whether to resist that and argue with it and try to own it in the process. There’s our choice. There’s our choice, whether to be part of a mysterious cycle, in which one form gives way to another, in which the creative act is so strong, that out of the seed comes the flower, and out of the flower something else, somewhere else….from the invisible to the visible to the invisible again. Whether to be part of that or whether to somehow feel that we have to be against that. Whether to hate our own existence or whether to enter into it and to penetrate it and to allow it. This is the basis of emotional self care. This is the basis… Stephen Swartz……

Tis morning I’m preparing to present the benefits of yoga to the teachers at the school I work in. I am inspired by what you’re doing on your blog and hope its okay to share with others. Sundays class at lulu lemon was the best thing I did all weekend. I am grateful to you and to my friend Brianna for introducing me to you. Have a great week. Thank you.

Hi, just wanted to say i liked this article.