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But in some ways, it can still be beautiful. Just like the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where we put broken pieces of pottery together with gold, there is simple beauty beyond perfection in embracing our imperfections and flaws as artfully raw and human.
Dr. Ginny writes about two kinds of leadership, one that takes and one that recognizes the give and take.
I am learning about belonging. The teachings of belongingness have come to me slowly from many wise people, communities, and nature. These teachings over the years are like walking a labyrinth, leading me towards the center and away, and towards the center and away from it again and again. A journey.
In this series called “Stuff I’d Rather Not Talk About,” Rebecca Ryan Roshi offers her Zen perspective on different everyday experiences of being human. This month her talk is: “Am I Depressed?” If you or someone you love needs mental health help, please use the Mental Health hotline or its equivalent in your country.
Let that sink in for a few breaths. This is not just a phenomenon of the exceedingly small, but the nature of reality in which we lead, create families and communities, and make our difference. What it shows us is that process of observing is not passive, but a process of resonance or co-vibration that particularizes something by how it registers with us. In physics this is called “collapsing a wave function” where a range of possibilities condenses into a thing upon our pinpointed observation.
By flipping around our usual way of sensing, including our sense of self, we confound our filters, invert our thinking and let the new emerge. Descartes’ famous dictum, “I think therefore I am” flips around into the spacious truth that when we don’t have to reify a self, we don’t have to habitually think the same thoughts. We can put up different antenna and new music becomes possible.
There is something slightly magical about mid-winter in the higher reaches of the Northern Hemisphere, the short days and long hours of darkness, with the sun rising around 8.00 am and setting soon after 3.30 pm. Stonehenge lies not far from my mother’s house, where our prehistoric ancestors laid out a ring of stones to celebrate these circadian rhythms.
In the Zen Leader courses we invest some time working with the FEBI (i.e., Focus Energy Balance Indicator) and exploring how those energies can be…