If I were brave enough, I’d tell you how my heart
has raged for love, stretched thin as a high wire.
If I were brave enough, I’d tell you
how my body has been fighting to stay upright
on every precipitous downhill the city
throws at it. If I were brave enough,
I’d climb into your lap and weep with longing.
All I can say is that any attempt at beauty and hope
is land-mined with failure.
And so the dangerous track-making begins.
Wending our way through,
there are possible clutches at sunlight, at windows, at yes.
We are each of us inches from death.
We are each of us inches from life.
We are each of us inches from each other.

by Maya Stein

What does it mean, make an alliance with anguish? Making it your ally? Or even: to ally with it? That definitely sounds counterintuitive at first, yet it immediately makes me curious. What would happen if I tried more of that, rather than the habitual wrestling with anguish, trying to avoid or somehow conquer it?

Poet, writing guide and adventuress Maya Stein talks about what she would do if she were brave enough – daring to be more truthful, more vulnerable, risking the many varieties of failure. It inspired me to make my own list: if I were brave enough, I would… and yes, if I didn’t mind anguish as much, more choices would open up and I might inch my way closer to beauty and hope, to life and the important others in it…

But then of course, the question of how arises. How do I make an alliance with anguish? I guess that’s where the dangerous track-making begins, one step and one moment at the time, aware of the risk of the landmines of failure. And: maybe failure isn’t the end of everything, maybe that would just mean some more anguish which I can also be with, breathe with…

Although mindfulness is usually associated with becoming more calm and peaceful, it definitely also supports me towards living more courageously. Sitting undilutedly with myself, especially for longer periods in a retreat context, has undoubtedly required and further grown my braveness. Chogyam Trungpa said that “ultimately, that is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of yourself.” So here is to more practice!

PS. I love reading about brave and inspiring people, as if their courage and ability to think out of the box could be contageous somehow. Reading a bit about Maya’s adventures was definitely inspiring, and it made me wonder what adventures I could provide for myself…
And if you feel ready for an adventure in mindfulness and discovering what that can bring you, we have a four level pathway plus a number of themed courses to choose from!

Photo by Valentina Stanoaie on Unsplash

Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them
Did not board ship with grief among their maps?
Till it seemed men never go somewhere, they only leave
Wherever they are, when the dying begins.

For myself, I find my wanting life
Implores no novelty and no disguise of distance:
Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts,
Who still am citizen of this fallen city?

On a cot by an open window, I lie and remember
While the birds in the trees sing of the circle of time.
Let the dying go on, and let me, if I can
Inherit from disaster before I move.

O, I go to see the great ships ride from harbor,
And my wounds leap with impatience; yet I turn back
To sort the weeping ruins of my house:
Here or nowhere I will make peace with the fact.

by Mary Oliver

Against the backdrop of spring, we accompany American poet Mary Oliver on her cot by the open window. Lying there, listening to birdsong, she – and we through her – connect with the infinite; to the countless moments since time immemorial, when one human or another has meditated in the sweet company of the birds.
Lying there Mary entertains the mind’s antics, contemplating the human compulsion to try to escape from grief, disaster and dying. With remarkable surety she is not swayed. She has enough insight to know that what Tara Brach calls ‘True Refuge’ can only be found by staying present and making ‘peace with the fact’; allowing the truths of life to be just that, true.

So much of the time, at the first twinge of discomfort we head straight to the harbour and jump on a boat heading for the horizon. We each have a repertoire of ways to not remain here when the going gets tough. When we ricochet into ‘False Refuges’ – addictions, technology or any habit that promises something nice initially but drains or disconnects us in the long run, we abandon the moment, ourselves, others we love or would like to respect, and reality as it is.

Mary Oliver recognises this deeply. She is resolved to stay to ‘sort the weeping ruins of her house’ even though her ‘wounds are leaping with impatience’. ‘Wherever you go, there you are’ says the grandfather of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn or in Mary’s words ‘Where, in what country, might I put down these thoughts?’ Having the insight, tenacity and compassion to do this is no small feat, but the rewards are great.

What can we inherit from disaster? I find I’m often able to ask this question in the midst of the disaster! Standing there even in the thick of it, I already know and trust that there’s a gift somewhere hidden in this apparent wreckage. This doesn’t sugarcoat anything, and it doesn’t make life nicer. But it does feel real, and in my experience feeling real, is often better than feeling nice. Feeling nice can have a fragility to it, you somehow know it’s shaky ground, somewhere you are twisting yourself out of shape in order to resist the truth. Feeling real is connection. It is alignment with truth, and it brings resilience. You are with life rather than against it.

And this, of course, is the promise of mindfulness training and practice.

Ps. Do you feel inspired to develop the skill of ‘being real’ in order to find true resilience? Come along to our free live guided twice daily meditations on Zoom to start your journey, or sign up for an in-depth progressive training in mindfulness here.

Deep in the mountains the road I’m lost on

by Ron C. Moss

I stumbled across the work of Ron C. Moss, a visual artist and poet from Tasmania, Australia who practices the Japanese art form of haiga, where a visual image is combined with a haiku. He is featured on The Awakened Eye website (“a sanctuary where the oft-overlooked relationship between creative expression and the unknown/unknowable can be openly explored and celebrated”) as one of their artisans – and if you are interested in a meeting place between visual art and the ‘intimate unknowable’, there is much to discover here.

I was moved by a number of his haiku’s and images, but this one stood out in its simple but evocative seeming paradox. Lost in the deep mountains, and yet on the road, which much lead from somewhere to somewhere else. I’m familiar with that layeredness of experience: feeling quite lost on some level, while at the same time a deep trust – or maybe you could even call it faith – that this feeling of lostness is included in being on the right path.

This encouragement to trust is also in Teddy Macker’s long and multifaceted ‘Poem for my Daughter‘, where one of the verses reads:

No matter what you do, no matter what happens,
it is impossible to leave the path.

Let me say that one more time:
No matter what you do, no matter what happens,
it is impossible to leave the path.

In other words, however lost you may feel, you are still on the path… May that be an encouragement in unsure times, so that we may move through ups and downs, times of feeling lost and found, with steady equanimity.

PS Keeping in touch with trust even when feeling lost, is helped by the powerful quality of equanimity. If you’d like to explore that further, there’s a weekend workshop on just that topic coming up…

For designs by Rob C. Moss, head over to his shop here.

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.