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.

by Edith Södergran, translated from Swedish by Stina Katchadourian

I hadn’t come across the Swedish speaking Finnish poet Edith Södergran who was born at the end of the 19th century, before finding some of her poems in the beautiful anthology Women in Praise of the Sacred edited by Jane Hirshfield. I enjoyed reading a bit more about her interesting life on wiki (see link above) and marveled at how she was able to savour the sweetness of summer – and life itself? – in the midst of what sounds like challenging circumstances.

And isn’t that the art of life, allowing the heart to be open to receive the magic that is present all around us, if only we open to it? In the book Wanderful that I was recently reading, it suggests imagining at random times (and especially when you’re not particularly enjoying yourself) that you’ve died a while ago, and that you are given the opportunity to come back to life for 1 minute: this minute. How do you experience this minute? What happens to your boredom, irritation, sense of lack? What can be relished?

May there be much ripe sweetness dripping into your heart!

PS Receiving this sweetness may require showing up, being present. And while we all have moments of being present, with practice we can have many more of them! If you’re ready to train in the practice of mindfulness, why not start with a free online introduction course?

Photo by Amanda Flavell on Unsplash

Saigyō, translated from Japanese by Meredith McKinney

This is a Tanka poem by Japanese hermit Saigyō Hōshi who lived in the 12th Century. Saigyō is very widely known and much loved for his poetry of renunciation and nature. He was a wanderer and spent much of his life meditating deep in the natural world and far from human habitation.

I find his poems luminous and potent, as I’m reading them in Meredith McKinney’s translation Gazing at the Moon: Buddhist Poems of Solitude. The images envelop me in a calm, earthly transcendence. When I let this poem in to my practice I first sense that I’m invited towards the deep mountains. This feels to me like turning towards the uncontrived, towards wild natural being. The majesty of life as signified by the mountains and the moon, is a reflection of potential of the mind/heart to open into presence and freedom, through awe.

Is the moon out there or in here, in my own heart? The poem becomes almost holographic.

I think it’s worth noting that the Japanese word kokoro here translated as ‘heart’ actually means mind and heart as one. In English we have two words and so we separate the two conceptually, in Japanese this division is not made in the same way. How does this awareness effect the way you experience this poem?

Ps. If you enjoy exploring poetry and mindfulness you might want to book on our Mindfulness meets Mystical Poetry course in the Autumn.

Photo by Nathanaël Desmeules on Unsplash

my brain and
heart divorced

a decade ago

over who was

to blame about
how big of a mess
I have become

eventually,

they couldn’t be
in the same room
with each other

now my head and heart
share custody of me

stay with my brain
during the week

and my heart
gets me on weekends
they never speak to one another

– instead, they give me
the same note to pass
to each other every week

and their notes they
send to one another always
says the same thing:

“This is all your fault’

on Sundays

my heart complains
about how my

head has let me down
in the past

and on Wednesday
my head lists all
of the times my
heart has screwed
things up for me
in the future

they blame each
other for the

state of my life

there’s been a lot
of yelling – and crying

SO,
lately, I’ve been
spending a lot of

time with my gut

who serves as my
unofficial therapist

most nights, sneak out of the
window in my ribcage

and slide down my spine
and collapse on my

gut’s plush leather chair
that’s always open for me

~ and just sit sit sit sit
until the sun comes up

last evening,

my gut asked me

if was having a hard
time being caught
between my heart
and my head

nodded

said didn’t know
if could live with
either of them anymore
“my heart is always sad about

something that happened yesterday

while my head is always worried

about something that may happen tomorrow,
lamented

my gut squeezed my hand

‘just can’t live with

my mistakes of the past

or my anxiety about the future,’
sighed

my gut smiled and said:
‘in that case,

you should

go stay with your

lungs for a while,’

was confused
– the look on my face gave it away

“if you are exhausted about

your heart’s obsession with

the fixed past and your mind’s focus
on the uncertain future

your lungs are the perfect place for you

there is no yesterday in your lungs
there is no tomorrow there either

there is only now

there is only inhale

there is only exhale

there is only this moment

there is only breath
and in that breath

you can rest while your
heart and head work
their relationship out.’

this morning,
while my brain
was busy reading
tea leaves

and while my
heart was staring
at old photographs

packed a little
bag and walked
to the door of
my lungs

before could even knock
she opened the door

with a smile and as

a gust of air embraced me
she said
“what took you so long?’

by John Roedel

This poem was sent to me by kind friends no less than 3 times in the space of a couple of days, which felt like a sure sign to share it here. I appreciated its creative description of that feeling of dividedness, and the gentle resolution of simply being present with breath as a way to resting in the wholeness of this moment. When I looked up John Roedel, the author of these words, I enjoyed browsing his website as well as a series of conversations between him and God on Facebook. So many ways to land in the kind embrace of acceptance…

PS if you’d like to practice resting with the breath together, do join us at one of the free daily sits!

Image: artist unknown

by Joy Harjo

This poem was read to me by a friend at the beginning of our meditation session, and it landed deeply in me. Such an important question: ‘And whom do I call my enemy?’ I don’t tend to think in that term about people, but that’s not to say I welcome everyone into my heart or that I relate to everyone as friend. In fact, even with my loved ones my heart tends to close to a degree when they do or say something that goes against something I strongly believe in – to not even mention what happens in my heart in that situation toward people I don’t know except from the news. So I could confess to some animosity at times, at the very least.

But what if I asked that question from the heart, as the current US poet laureate Joy Harjo of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation does here? How would it be to live with the door to the mind only opening from the heart, rather than letting my mind be the gatekeeper to my heart!?

I could easily relate to Joy seeing the heart as ‘the smaller cousin of the sun’ seeing and knowing everything. Sitting after hearing the poem, there was a sense of my heart shining or radiating in all directions, and from that place, not an enemy in sight…

In my search for getting a sense of who the writer of this poem is, I enjoyed listening to her recent speaking here and I loved finding out she’s a gifted performer and soulful sax player as well… rejoicing in the good work and many gifts to the world from this two-legged human!

PS if you’d like to explore what’s happening in your heart and exploring how to relate to people you find difficult, the Level 2, Mindfulness Level 2 – Responding with Compassion course might be of interest to you…

Photo by Lawrence Walters on Unsplash