Falling Gently Podcast

You can’t think and feel at the same time You can move between them very quickly But they take turns. Or perhaps more precisely, our attention takes turns If your attention is on one, it is not doing the other But sensing is foundational Thinking happens within the body of our experience And when thinking gets constant airtime We miss a lot I considered feeling as introspective thoughts about what...

Planning my timing for our Thanksgiving meal I am awed and humbled by the vast orchestration of life It feels like advanced math to determine the cadence of 10 items in 1 oven with 3 temperatures While life synchronizes billions of species over 8 biomes in 4 seasons on this planet alone Curiously, it’s relaxing me We are part of something so big and so precise and so unpredictable and yet so struc...

The very first time I noticed a chronic tension in my body Was before my college freshman was born It finally came to my attention that I squinched my toes whenever I stood at my sink Like, really clenched them, bringing my whole center of gravity forward and on top of anxiety Every time I stood at my sink Which is often when you’re a young mother I began trying to remember to notice, release them...

Natalie Goldberg tells the story Of having rearranged her life and moved to a Zen monastery in Arizona To study with a revered rinpoche And, early in her tenure there, after meditation, he began his dharma talk In it he confessed that during his meditation He realized he wanted to quit teaching What was he doing here? It wasn’t as meaningful as he thought He wanted to travel, to serve the poor, to...

I had a rough day today and so, for the first time ever, I asked ChatGPT to write my entry What it returned was actually quite good Piercing, really It wrote about insight as a seductive means of bypassing I couldn’t help but take it personally I work really hard to feel all the feelings To get to know my discomfort, where it lives, how it breathes Not trap it or deny it or stuff it down But we ar...

I don’t blame the snake, or Eve, or Adam for that matter Even though they certainly started quite the episodic drama Let’s revisit the premise, shall we? First there was Light. Then God created All The Things. Then Adam, who requested Eve. For some strange reason, Adam got to be ‘in dominion’ and name all the things There will be another post on what a toxic premise that is… But for today: The rul...

We unschooled our kids Unschooling means no curriculum, no worksheets, no tests What did we do? Lived life. Explored their questions. About 5 years in, they wanted to try school My son had to take a placement test. He scored squarely in his grade level. Without having completed a single elementary lesson or scratch of homework I had not stressed for a moment about him learning his times tables His...

We’re hard on ourselves, as humans Because we can almost always imagine a ‘better’ option It can be very hard to just be where we are To acknowledge and appreciate our quirks And their contributions to the color of the world As we imagine embodying ideals But I’m not completely convinced our ideas about ideals Are at all accurate I’m more of a believer that our quirkiness is more precisely tuned t...

For many years in my youth I was the friendly backstage gate guard at Meadow Brook Music Festival The summer home of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra It was a lot of fun. I’ve got many stories. There were a few times when I was recruited to pick up a soloist from the airport And once the soloist, a violinist whose name I do not remember, wanted to stop for food We went to a modest family restaurant,...

I spent the day researching job opportunities for my daughter Ohmygoodness, it is SO much easier to do this for someone else Especially someone you love I identified a dozen people to reach out to, a dozen more jobs posted today Wrote a dozen cover letters and rewrote a resume to include requirements from all 12 It’s been absolutely fascinating My shoulder didn’t get sore at all, even though I spe...

I have a dear friend with whom I occasionally make pilgrimages One of our favorite destinations is to visit the traveling female Indian mystics Widely acknowledged as avatars, or living incarnations of the Divine Called “Amma” or “Mother”, they travel around the world offering blessings Which, quite frankly, is no small task These women are not young. They sometimes spend 18 hours greeting people....

My two favorite book titles are so good You don’t even need to read the books. The books are great, too, don’t get me wrong But the titles are transmissions They let you know everything you need to know The insides are just examples to get the ball rolling. My first favorite book title is: “Behaving as if the God in All Life Mattered” By Machaelle Small Wright Let’s hear it again: Behaving as if t...

Aren’t you just the sweetest being Bearing with me as I reflect and contemplate Exploring how the mystical wisdom lives and moves Within fractured and often unsatisfying circumstances Thank you ❤️ I’m switching gears today You see, I’ve been so careful trying not to bypass I’ve perhaps overindulged my inquiry And underutilized my orientation of curiosity There’s a difference, at least how I’m feel...

True intelligence has no thought…It is an attunement of the body to the world…” I know this I have not been living it I have been thinking waaaaay too much It just seemed so important to think As if I could counter the uncertainty I’m experiencing with copious thinking You’ve had a front row seat to how that’s gone for me. The quote is from Philip Shepherd Although Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describe...

Prayer has many benefits We all have our go-to There is something very soothing about the repetition of prayers Some traditions believe the deity lives in the prayer And I can say I’ve felt that to be true. I have a number of go-to prayers and mantras I wonder if there should be just one But they fit situations like favorite songs Sometimes they make me feel better Sometimes they are just refuge O...

Have you ever solved a problem And then come up against it again and forgotten that you’d solved it? At the moment of recognition, there’s a downregulation that is such a relief Oh! This isn’t a big hairy monster anymore. Phew! But also intense curiosity on why it had you flummoxed again. I’ve experienced this in lots of ways over the years My daughter is allergic to Neosporin and needs first aid...

My inner landscape goes from lush seaside forest to fiery desert canyon surprisingly quickly The part of me that trusts life, that encounters hardship with curiosity and care, and that is at rest Can quickly be usurped by the one who finds darn near everything unacceptable All of my spiritual practices, all of my physical practices, all of my time in nature Are intended to increase my time in the...

Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu deity Has a brother, Kartikeya, the god of war And as children, they both craved a magical mango that could not be shared So their parents, Lord Shiva and the goddess Parvati, proposed a race Three times around the world. Both boys agreed. Kartikeya rides on a peacock. Ganesha rides on a mouse. Kartikeya set off quickly, prodding his peacock over hills and seas G...

You might be surprised that hell is full of banquet tables, each overflowing with fresh foods Every delicacy imaginable, bright and tempting The problem is: No one can eat Arms in hell are three feet long and end in a spoon And because they can’t bend, you can’t feed yourself. Thus, hell is full of starving people looking at delicious food. So, what of heaven, you ask? Heaven is exactly the same S...

When my kids would encounter a bully on the playground I encouraged them to receive the jerkiness as an indication Something more interesting was happening elsewhere I’d challenge them to look in 360 degrees, a full circle And if nothing else caught their attention, then they could engage with the bully Defend themselves, whathaveyou… It never happened There was always something more interesting h...

Every since once upon a time There has been a little fairy named Eve Eve is a fairy of very small size With a bright sunny smile and dark friendly eyes With her wand she can make the most wonderful toys They’re small and they’re fun and she does it with poise Eve lives in a fairy glen, most fairies do But this special glen is a pumpkin patch, too The fairies carve shapes out to make cozy spaces Th...

We the people In reverence for our shared earth And all of the life expressing on it Wanting our lives and efforts to help create a world that works for everyone Do hereby declare and acknowledge The radical intimacy of all living things Our interdependence And our responsibility for ourselves and towards each other Brings us together to meet our challenges Through the shared wisdom of listening w...

Recently, my friend had an experience around the goddess Sekhmet in Egypt Sekhmet is the lion-headed goddess, and she does not play She represents “being strong” but that can be kindof elusive So, I looked her up and I loved what I learned Being strong means seeing yourself in the most favorable light imaginable Isn’t that a remarkable definition? It makes perfect sense Strength comes from inner f...

It started out simply enough If I found myself walking toward an intersection And the turn I was planning to take had a bunch of lawnmowers or construction vehicles I took the other route New walk. Starting now. Abandon old plan. Quality of walk is important to me That was my gateway into reading life as it presented itself Getting out of my idea of what I thought it was going to be And let it be...

Scilla Elworthy said, “ anger is like gasoline, if you keep it in, it poisons you, if you spit it out, it makes everything around you more flammable. If you put it in an engine, it can move you forward” I like this a lot I’ve kept anger in, and know that does, indeed, make me sick I know how to spit it out, and I’m old enough to have learned that I prefer it when that’s not what I do But what engi...