Waking Up
peace practices
Upon waking from sleep, an opportunity arises, fresh, like falling snow, or the dawn light on the horizon.
An invitation arises to view the world from an un-habituated mind, an unconditioned mind.
Prepare for this moment! Offer the multitude of selves of you a gift of the unusual, the unexpected- a recitation of love from a source you trust. Perhaps you reach for a scrap of paper with a few words, or many. A song or a playlist of music to guide you into the day. The sound of chimes playing softly. A few words, a melody, a memory of your dreamtime mixed with this morning’s invitation may stay with you, may help guide you towards a version of you who gathers the fragments of self and wraps them in kind breath, a steady heartbeat and begins the day, anew, as if this day is unlike any other day, as if this day is a new beginning within a life of abundance.
I vow.
Kindness raises its head from the crowd of the world.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
Suggestions for scraps of paper by the bedside:
Waking up this morning, I smile.
Twenty-four new hours are before me.
I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at beings with eyes of compassion. Thich Naht HanhKindness
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you knowhow desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop,the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindnessyou must travel where the Indian in a white poncholies dead by the side of the road.You must see how this could be you,how he too was someonewho journeyed through the night with plansand the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
What to Remember When Waking
by David Whyte
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others. To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth, you are not an accident amidst other accidents. you were invited from another and greater night than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window toward the mountain presence of everything that can be what urgency calls you to your one love?What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?In the trees beyond the house?In the life you can imagine for yourself?In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?
from The House of Belonging, Many Rivers Press
The Guest House
Translated by Coleman Barks
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,meet them at the door laughing,and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
Rumi