Gone are the days of celebrities helping us reconnect to the necessity for some kind of connection to our bodies (and minds). (Remember Cher‘s workout video?… OK, nevermind.)

Cartoonist Katy Davis (AKA Gobblynne) has created this whimsical (but incredibly wise) animal-filled animation that just might bring you back to the meditation practice you abandoned years ago (or last week). Read more

In the declaration below, Allen Ginsberg explains why it is vital to write.

I’ll simply add this: Similar to the how the ego is targeted as a pariah within the psyche’s field of awareness, the mind also is often devalued and maligned as a function that sidetracks us — prevents focused attention.

Ginsberg reminds us that the mind is a mirror. And when we remember this I think we’re aligned in the right way with our apparatus.
 

“Proclamation of the actual mind, manifesting your mind, writing the mind, which goes back to Kerouac but also goes back to Milarepa, goes back to his original instructions: Don’t you trust your own mind? Why do you need a piece of paper?

So writing could be seen as “writing your mind”, observing your own mind, or observe what’s vivid coming to mind. For the purpose of relieving your own paranoia, and others’, revealing yourself and communicating to others. It is a blessing for other people if you can communicate and relieve their sense of isolation, confusion, bewilderment, and suffering by offering your own mind as a sample of what’s palpable, visible, and whatever little you’ve learned. Read more

Two birds of golden plumage sat on the same tree. The one above, serene, majestic, immersed in his own glory; the one below restless and eating the fruits of the tree, now sweet, now bitter.

Once he ate an exceptionally bitter fruit, then he paused and looked up at the majestic bird above; but he soon forgot about the other bird and went on eating the fruits of the tree as before.

Again he ate a bitter fruit and this time he hopped up a few boughs nearer to the bird at the top.

This happened many tines until at last the lower bird came to the place of the upper bird and lost himself. He found all at once that there had never been two birds, but that he was all the time that upper bird, serene, majestic and immersed in his own glory.

— Swami Vivekananda, Meditation and its Methods

Painting by Huang Shen (1687-1771)

“You think your mind is in your head, but where is it? No one knows. So our practice is to be with everything. When you include everything, that is the real self.”
–Shunryu Suzuki

Art work: Joseph Cornell, Cassiopeia (verso),1960