Don and I are listening to an audiobook of Natalie Goldberg reading her classic work Writing Down the Bones aloud, and commenting after each chapter on her current reflections on it 30 years after it’s publication. It’s a wonderful book about writing as a zen practice, and provides much food for thought about the role and process of writing in my life.   It’s also helping me understand why it has felt hard to keep going with blogging as I re-enter life as a “healthy person.” [...]

At the end of May I attended a 6-day meditation retreat taught by Yongyey Mingyur Rinpoche. His teachings were on a variety of topics and types of meditation practice, organized into a structured curriculum called the Joy of Living. Although the Joy of Living is a secular path, it is heavily informed by Tibetan Buddhism. One of the teachings was about the concept of impermanence. According to the Rinpoche, or “YMR” as he is sometimes referred to, permanence and impermanence are both just concepts, and therefore neither one is ultimately the Truth; in “ultimate reality,” which is beyond concepts, there is neither permanence nor impermanence. However, Buddhists believe that much suffering is caused by illusion, or wrong beliefs, and that some concepts are more true, i.e. cause less suffering, than others.[...]

On Sunday I took time out of this very busy period to attend a workshop called “Write from the Hip,” an experimental partnership between Sasha Lasdon of Integrated Eros and Miriam Hall of Herspiral Contemplative Arts. I’d been curious about the Herspiral writing classes and wanting to attend one for years, and this one, which integrated movement with contemplative writing and met at a yoga studio in my neighborhood, seemed too good to pass up.[...]

Decisions have never been easy for me. This could be for many reasons, including, perhaps, some childhood traumas of feeling I had to make impossible decisions between people I loved (since these are a bit intense I will perhaps save them for the book version of this tale). There are also more positive causes of my indecisiveness: I have a nimble brain and can see things from many perspectives (very helpful as a meeting facilitator, not so helpful in the role of “decider”); and have a lot of privilege and access to many, many possibilities (from the 20 brands of yogurt at the grocery store, to the hundreds of meditation/personal transformation/spiritual/creative retreats and workshops that look attractive and that I have time & money to do).[...]

Since meeting with Jess, “my editor,” in Oakland last week, I have been feeling lots of urges to write, without finding a lot of time in my schedule to do so. Jess had read through all my blog postings at least once, and given me global comments, as well as working through the first few months of entries in more detail with detailed comments. We talked about what the deeper themes of the hypothetical book could be, and how I might structure it, and how I might structure my time to make room for writing it. And, how we might use visual processes to sort out the organization of the book, using sticky-notes in person or a mind-mapping equivalent online.[...]

As I did my daily practice this morning, I shared the space with a pot of pink-yellow tulips that came into my life last week. We’d coincidentally acquired two or three other pots of flowering spring plants around the same time this past week, and they were collecting on our dining room table. Noticing this and wanting to spread the beauty around, I’d brought these into my practice /coaching room a few days ago before a meeting there with an old friend.[...]

This morning I got up early because I had an 8 am Pilates appointment, and wanted to eat and put some beans with onions & garlic in the crock pot before leaving. I abandoned any thought of morning meditation or other practice, but did manage to leave early enough to have time to deliver two thank-you cards to neighbors and then walk slowly & meditatively to my appointment.[...]

Today I achieved a new “personal best” in the swimming pool. Thanks in large part I think to Pilates, I reduced my 50-yard “swim golf” or “SWOLF” score from 92 all the way to 84!!! The swim golf score, which I learned to calculate in the masters’ swim class I took for a year or two at the YMCA, is the number of arm strokes plus the number of seconds it takes you to swim the given distance.[...]

Regular readers, please make sure to at least read the end of this post, for a question I need your input on. Thanks!

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Okay, so having undoubtedly whetted someone's appetite for this topic, I figured I would share my musings with you all.

The other day as I was doing my Pilates exercises I noticed for the umpteenth time how much weaker the left side of my body is than the right side. While I have noticed and worked on/with this imbalance for at least 15 years, lately I have been working a new angle. Instead of just trying to get the muscles on my left side to do more and grow stronger, I am trying to train the muscles on my right side to do less. Huh. Building one’s “core strength” can also mean learning new habits of letting go, of doing less rather than more.[...]