People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.

by William Stafford

Many of the poems that we feature here in this blog, that feel mindful, take us from the busy distracted mind towards moments of space, peace and presence. We need to be taken through this door, and poems are little doorways. This poem however, by Twentieth Century American poet William Stafford, begins in the luxuriation of a moment fully embraced – a ‘piece of heaven’, and then seems to concede to the inevitability of going back through the doorway into the melee of a busy mind and life.

Yet even though that necessity to return exists, because the fulsome early morning moment was deeply absorbed, might the day ahead feel just slightly different? The piece of heaven that was not ‘left lying around’ and was instead taken to heart may well live on clandestinely in the body as the poet gets up off the couch.

There’s something so particularly enticing about the way Stafford makes these moments feel contraband. Quiet little rebellions of mindfulness that are intimately secret. He encourages us to swim against the pervasive tide of doing, monitoring progress and conforming. He seems to be saying ‘Claim this moment as yours to enjoy, don’t give a care to what ‘they’ think. Let taking joy in the moment matter.’

Throughout the day I’m aware of many forks in the road. I can continue full pelt through the to do list and end the day frowning and rung out, or I can claim moments of appreciation for just being in between tasks and stay loyal to a human timescale, rather than a mechanical one. Might time be elastic? If I rebel against the urgency of getting on with it all, will I really end up regretting it and failing to keep up? I’ve been entering into the stealthy experiment of claiming these ‘little corners’ as gifts to myself for a couple of days now, and I feel enriched! There’s a gentle mirthful joy about it, like a serene smile with a wink. And my world hasn’t fallen apart yet.

Will you join in the experiment?

PS if you’d like to practice pausing and claiming ‘little corners’ of time and space alongside others, there’s a new Mindfulness level 1 course starting soon…

Photo by Laurence BL on Unsplash

by Dawna Markova

Happy New Year dear readers! This poem by Dawna Markova encapsulates elegantly what I feel a wholesome new year aspiration is for me. It has all the important components – the wish to open in spite of it all, the power to consciously choose, the resolve to not be stopped by fear, the power of the ‘will not’ and the tenacious commitment to living fully, the wish to be present in my days moment to moment, to ‘risk our significance’, the heart’s bid for freedom and finally the wish for who I am and who I am becoming, to be of benefit to others.

Having not yet done my annual new year’s vision board, I don’t know what the particular flavour of my new year’s contemplations will be this year, but I feel the promise! I can feel a quickening of creative life force in my body – is it ready to take wing, or become a torch? Or maybe – and this feels right as I write – it’s ready to put down roots.

Often at new year we focus on a concrete resolution that can feel like a should or a pressure that sets you up for ‘failure’. What if your new year’s aspiration was a feeling or an impulse or energy stirring within you? What feel does it have? Where does it want to flow or grow or settle down to? Does it have a colour or a metaphor to help you know its wisdom? And after bringing your curiosity to it, can it become a message of aspiration in words?

New years resolutions are often made from the rational thinking mind that has a story about how in this or that way we aren’t doing well enough and this year will be the year where we push ourselves hard enough to finally get beyond it and be better. No wonder they don’t last long! Let this year’s new year’s resolution come from the inside out, like a fountain, or a flower fragrance or a golden egg cracking to reveal new life.

More beautiful metaphors from Dawna Markova:

May you let loving unfurl you
then give you away.
May you remember
you are nest,
harbor,
garden.

All the best for 2026!

Ps. If you’d like to enter into this year with the intention to live your own precious life more fully in it’s uniqueness in this moment and the next, in the ups and downs and joys and sorrows, and alongside fellow practitioners of mindfulness, please join our Wonder of the Everyday course which starts on 14th January.

Photo by Jared Erondu on Unsplash

by Nadia Colburn

In an article in Resurgence magazine Nadia Colburn writes with great eloquence and potency about how for her, from the combination of writing poetry, mindfulness and therapy a path of healing emerged where before there was only despair. You can find the full article here (worth a read in my opinion!). She centres her story on this arresting poem that she wrote when the effects of her childhood trauma began to paralyse her in her mid-thirties. Not only does what felt dead come back to life, but a new engagement with the world is born and she becomes an environmentalist.

I feel awe when I read this poem with her whole story as the backdrop. The poem has the agonising transformation captured within it. The stoniness of her trauma intractable at the start, line by line, is embraced into the elements and the Earth. The silence becomes a space of emergence. How can she say so much in only eleven lines?! From death to life, from absolute desolation to sisterhood, from paralysis to potential.

In reading this poem feel I become witness to the wonder of how we human beings can heal and transform. I also feel a wonder at how Nadia has tapped a poetic intelligence, which is far from rational, to enable this. Something within her spoke through the poem from beyond her thinking mind. A healing force which came from so deep within her that it was only much later that she came to further layers of understanding about what she had written. Her poem was her self-created medicine and she absorbed that medicine over a long time. It was a medicine both to cure and to become.

I’ll finish with by quoting her words:

‘As I had been taught to do in my practice as a poet, and also in my mindfulness practices and in yoga and therapy, I sat with that silence, that weight… as I sat with the stone itself, I saw that the stone itself was no ‘thing’. The stone, too, was part of something larger, a world in which none of us is cut off, but in which we are all interconnected.’

As I close this piece I am feeling the arising of a deep wish. Nadia gives me hope through her story. I wish for us each to nurture hope both for ourselves and for our world. Thank you Nadia!

Ps. Join me to encounter more poetry with the power to heal and open your both your eyes and heart. Our Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry Course starts at the end of October. Find out more here.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery,
but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

by Diane Ackerman, “found poetry” from A Natural History of the Senses

What enables being alive to feel like a love affair with life? Some moments, some days can feel like that to me, but I’ve also lived moments where it’s felt more like I imagine a prison sentence might feel like, and many days where it’s something in between. So how to live more like the poet, writer and naturalist Diane Ackerman is inviting us to do?

Living as ‘variously’ as possible, evokes a sense of embracing things beyond my known comfortzone, seeking out adventures and opening up to different perspectives. And combining that with ‘grooming one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred’, it gives rise to an flavour of living life fully awake, like other poets I’ve enjoyed invite us to do. I’m thinking of  Toyohiko Kagawa when he prays to never find himself ‘yawning at life’, and Mary Oliver when she says she wants to live her life like a ‘bride to amazement’, or when Derek Wallcot urges us to ‘feast on your life’… and there are many more. And also Jim Carrey’s movie Yes Man comes to mind, where his withdrawn character tries out saying yes to everything (although he discovers that some discernment is important alongside that spirit of up-for-it-ness!).

An awareness of the nearness of death can do it too, the knowing that we have a limited time on this bright planet and with the precious people around us…

So it’s a practice! Something to remind myself of in my intentions for the day. Mindfulness and curiosity go hand in hand, so continuing to grow in mindfulness also encourages to explore the ‘savage and beautiful country’ of this life!

PS … and adventuring together is always more fun! There’s a new level 1 Mindfulness course about to start, and there’s also the Living Well to Die Well course which can inspire living to the full…

Photo by Margarida Afonso on Unsplash

You have waltzed with great style,
my sweet, crushed angel,
to have ever neared God’s Heart at all.

Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow,
and even His best musicians are not always easy
to hear.

So what if the music has stopped for a while.

So what if the price of admission to the Divine
is out of reach tonight.

So what, my dear,
if you do not have the ante to gamble for Real Love.

The mind and body are famous
for holding the heart ransom,
but Hafiz knows the Beloved’s eternal habits.

Have patience,
for He will not be able to resist your longing
for long.

You have not danced so badly, my dear,
trying to kiss the Beautiful One.

You have actually waltzed with tremendous style,
O my sweet,
Oh my sweet, crushed angel.

Hafiz rendered by Daniel Ladinsky

Part of me feels like a crushed angel and to have that part of me addressed so tenderly swells my heart. Hafiz (find out more about him here, and about Daniel Ladinsky here) uses a voice of fatherly compassion. He recognises the long hard effort of trying to dance, of trying to awaken our hearts. Our failings are automatically forgiven because the tenacity and endurance it takes to even begin to dance with the ‘Divine’ at all is deeply understood.

We are assured that we’re exactly where we should be, not that we’re somehow forsaken or unworthy of belonging to the sacred dance of ‘Life’. Our attempts to gain admission, to knock on the door of ‘God’s Heart’ or ‘Real Love’ are noble, even in their clumsiness. My crushed wings are seen as the sacred potential for the Heart’s soaring flight. Perhaps on some level I am an angel after all – with grace, dignity and the blessing of ‘Divine’ flight, even if at the moment my wings are crushed by the marred, messy realities of the all too human world.

Maybe we can rest in this paradox: I long to be somewhere else because I feel my separation, but the longing becomes the key that opens the door. Perhaps this becomes less paradoxical if we ‘think’ with the wisdom of the heart. My heart knows its full reach, it’s painful to be so confined and cut off from ourselves and others, and so we ache with longing to feel connected and to let our love flow freely.

Ps. This poem uses spiritual language to describe the journey of opening the heart. If you feel drawn to exploring this journey of heart opening through mindfulness and mystical poetry, you can join the next intake here.