Your digital eyes look into mine.
I change at Farringdon and I have changed.

Touched by you, my skin is kozo tissue,
my hair rose perfumed ink,

My eyelids are gold leaf.
The woman on my right,

reflected in the window opposite,
takes on the stillness of an icon,

The boy across the way
lifts his cheek to be pure marble

sculpted in living light. Together,
we travel on into the night,

all of us grown precious,
each of us alive and rare.

by Imtiaz Dharker
Have you ever experienced a moment where everything seems to shine as if luminous? Maybe when sitting looking out at a city scene or when looking at an expansive view of mountains or the sea, or when watching children playing…

Imtiaz Dharker, who is a Pakistan-born British poet, artist and video film maker, experiences such a moment through an intimacy with loss. Somehow the awareness of life’s transience brings an acute, luminous, extra-ordinary quality to her perception, as if, I imagine, the air in the tube were charged with effervescence.

We trundle along most of the time in a trance characterised by narrow, calcified tracks of habitual thinking. But, once in a while, something cuts through this and the world springs into magnificent life almost like it’s super-charged.

This can be catalysed by intense life events, spiritual buildings – like cathedrals (stained glass windows evoke this quality I think), poetry, art, films and natural beauty. But it can also become more available in our lives through mindful presence and heart opening compassion.

Ps. If you’d like to taste how poetry can evoke mindfulness and open heartedness, check out these two upcoming opportunities:

• Mindfulness meets Mystical Poetry 6 week course (May)
• Mindfulness meets Mystical Poetry 6 week course (September)

And if you’d like to begin your mindfulness journey at the beginning, try our Level 1 Being Present course.

Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash

There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.

by Rashani Réa

This poem has been in my collection for a while, and this week it jumped out as the one to share as an important reminder in times of challenge or darkness. Reading a little around the poem, it sounds like it came out of the depths of Rashani‘s life, and the words themselves have found their way into many other books on grief and healing since they were first written in 1991.

May they continue to inspire and support whoever reaches for them in times of moving ‘through this, to that‘…

PS Compassion, and self-compassion, are so important in times of difficulty. If you’re looking for a supportive place to train further in compassion, this could be a place to start, and diving in deeply can happen Mindfulness Level 2 – Responding with Compassion…

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash