hope Archives - Mindfulness Association

Stone girl – Nadia Colburn

Fay Adams — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 22:12:50 +0000

with the stone face.
The stone heart stone hands stone feet.
See in between she has also stone
and does not speak.
She is acting her part in the dialogue
like the wind listening to wind
or the wind listening to stone.
Stone on wind. Wind on stone.
I think you are almost sisters.
I think you have sat together a long
time. Oh silence, What, from you, wants to emerge?

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.

On Safety – Nadine Pinede

Kristine Mackenzie-Janson — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 10:14:25 +0000

When the storms of life
come bearing down
threatening to
lash you senseless,
seek shelter.
Find the warm
blanket you caress
like the felted fur
of your cat
curled before
a glowing hearth,
of breath that fills
both heart and earth.
Breathe.
There’s always time
to curse the darkness.
After the tears,
light a honeycomb candle
and heal your own sun.
The bridge
from sorrow to joy
may seem to vanish
in the flood,
but who says you
can’t join those
who cross over,
with a single
braided rope
of gratitude.

by Nadine Pinede

What really helps, when ‘the storms of life come bearing down’? What supports us to dig deep to find the resilience to keep going and find new goodness in the eventual aftermath – or even in the thick of it? From reading a bit about Nadine Pinede’s life on her website, I have the sense that she has distilled her life experience into the wisdom that has important things to say on this topic – and this poem offers some powerful hints. Warmth, breath, lighting a candle – and: crossing over from sorrow to joy with ‘a single braided rope of gratitude’. Wow!

And immediately the question: where to find gratitude in the midst of the storms? How to braid a rope out of the thread that might be there? I guess the first and most important thing is to know to look in the direction of gratitude – and then to practice so it grows!

PS We have an upcoming weekend in October 2025 on the topic of gratitude – free for members! Do join us if you’d like to explore what gratitude can bring in your life…

Photo by Nikita Ivanov on Unsplash

Poultice – Brother Richard Hendrick

Fay Adams — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 21:46:56 +0000

Now,
In this time of times
perhaps we have
such need again,
for a poultice placed
gently and
with kindness upon
the rounded body
of the earth
where too long
our self-sickness has
burrowed deep
within and brought
the breaking and the burning
of fever dream,
of pain and sorrow
become now a crown of pain,
a pulsing pandemic
bound tight
about our
wounded world
filled with the,
the pus and poison
that would
set our soul cells
against each other
tearing the woven thread
of being apart.
So then, hear
the ancient remedy,
ever old and ever new,
and with faith go out
to gather the gifts
of kindness,
gentleness,
peace
then bind them
with the binding cloth
of love
and anoint
the broken body
of the world with blessing
that after crisis
cools this earth,
the hearts, the souls
of all that live
may wake from
this fever dream
and see, as
only those who
touch death see,
the grace of dawn
the gift of life
the oneness of
our being.

by Brother Richard Hendrick

The conflict in the Middle East is on many of our minds and hearts. I find the poem above (by Brother Richard Hendrick, a Capuchin monk from Ireland) to be a beautiful prayer for healing. Although it sounds idealistic, I think it expresses a dream that we must have. If we don’t have hope, we won’t have resilience, if we don’t have resilience we can’t act. So, to connect with the dream of healing, to be able to imagine peace, is necessary and important. Joanna Macy says that we must live the hope, and that to live from hope is what ignites possibility. David Adams, a psychologist in the US, did research that found that those who had an optimistic view of human nature, were more likely to be peace activists.

I know I’m speaking for many when I say I feel powerless to help, and for many more when I say I need to limit my exposure to the news. This poem feels like the balm to soothe my frustrated, aching heart. Reading it helps me to continue to look reality in the face. Holding what’s real in one hand and the dream in the other, I feel I can head onwards.

Ps. If you’d like to learn a new way to receive the gifts of poetry come along to our retreat day on Mindfulness Practice Days which is on the 18^th November – a day of mindfulness and poetry, inspired by the serenity prayer.

Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash

The Lost Words Blessing – Various Artists

Fay Adams — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 15:33:14 +0000

Enter the wild with care, my love
And speak the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you travel far from heather, crag and river
May you like the little fisher, set the stream alight with glitter
May you enter now as otter without falter into water

Look to the sky with care, my love
And speak the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you journey on past dying stars exploding
Like the gilded one in flight, leave your little gifts of light
And in the dead of night my darling, find the gleaming eye of starling
Like the little aviator, sing your heart to all dark matter

Walk through the world with care, my love
And sing the things you see
Let new names take and root and thrive and grow
And even as you stumble through machair sands eroding
Let the fern unfurl your grieving, let the heron still your breathing
Let the selkie swim you deeper, oh my little silver-seeker
Even as the hour grows bleaker, be the singer and the speaker
And in city and in forest, let the larks become your chorus
And when every hope is gone, let the raven call you home.

These are some of the most beautiful words I’ve read and listened to in recent years. On the Lost Words website it says their intention is to ‘Sing nature back to life through the power of poetry, art and music’. The beauty becomes deeply melancholy against the backdrop of loss which is behind the project. I recommend listening to the song while mindfully resting in the body. If it speaks to you, you may experience a firework display of tingles…

These words bring deep recognition for me – it’s a recognition of the wonder of the natural world and a recognition of my own profound care for it. I feel as if I’m tied to it by a thousand golden threads of love. These golden threads gleam against a backdrop of tragedy though. In earlier years my love of nature felt innocent and joyful, now it feels more like the threads are entwined all through with heartbreak. The Lost Words book itself came into being as a response to many nature words, such as acorn, kingfisher and wren, being removed from a widely used children’s dictionary in the UK – an ominous symptom of the times we live in.

Mindfulness, poetry and the arts in general are all ways to remember the golden threads with which we are bound together into nature. The poem-song plays with this inseparability by letting us momentarily feel that we are the starling singing its heart out, an otter slipping into water, a goldfinch in flight or a selkie swimming deeper into the depths. A fern unfurling is used as a metaphor for grief. Aren’t the spirals within spirals in the photo above exquisite? Have you ever felt grief to be like that? And, ‘Let the heron still your breathing’ – have you ever experienced this kind of stillness when in the company of nature?

I believe that we must keep our hearts as alive to the natural world and as intimate with it as we can. This is key at this historical moment – as it says on the website, ‘…what we do not love we will not save’.

The Lost Words Blessing offers in its last lines the most shattering invitation – ‘when every hope is gone, let the raven call you home’. Even in a time when we feel the future is threatened, the eternal refuge of nature as our home is always here.

The Lost Words Blessing was cocreated by a group of artists all named here:

Kerry Andrew

Kris Drever

Julie Fowlis

Seckou Keita

Robert MacFarlane

Jim Molyneux

Jackie Morris

Rachel Newton

Karine Polwart

Beth Porter

Ps. If you too want to keep your connection to nature alive and wonder about how you might be part of saving what you love, check out the upcoming Engaged Mindfulness course here.

Photo by Agathe on Unsplash

Hope – Nicholas Mazza

Kristine Mackenzie-Janson — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 11:12:05 +0000

Hope
is the belief
that one hand
reaching to another
can eventually
touch the moon,
allowing the light
to guide us
through the night.

by Nicholas Mazza

In this week before COP26 starts, I found myself reflecting on hope, where to find it when it feels illusive, and on the role it plays in my life. Clearly I have a preference for feeling hopeful rather than hopeless, but there’s something tricky in its seeming relationship with what I may or may not feel hopeful about. How much are my feelings based on reality, and can I (or anyone else) even really know what the reality of the the future will be? So I wonder about its tendency to take me out of what’s actually happening now and into the virtual reality of my imagination, especially where it may stop me from acting in a way that may be helpful to bring about what I hope for. I appreciated Joanna Macy’s reflections on hope in a recently released video of her speaking about the climate crisis as a spiritual practice. She said:

“Hope and hopelessness, they’re just feelings. They arise and pass. Sometimes I feel hopeful. Sometimes I feel helpless. Sometimes it has to do with what I had for breakfast or what somebody just said to me.

So the greatest gift we can give our world is our full presence and our choice moment by moment to be present, to stay open. And when you’re in the middle of a big adventure, you don’t have time to decide whether you’re hopeful or hopeless. David going out with his slingshot… Say, “Excuse me, Are you feeling hopeful?” Or, “Excuse me, Frodo and Sam, how hopeful do you feel today?” We just got a job to do. Don’t waste my time. That question can bring you out of the present moment. It can throw you into imaginings and conjectures when all your energy should be right here in the moment.”

Also, I found myself touched by Nicholas Mazza’s short poem above. As a professor in Social Work he has written much about the healing power of poetry, including a book on Poetry Therapy. And what could be more hopeful than the power of people working together to reach a common goal… May we learn to live together in a way that allows all of us to flourish, on a flourishing planet!

PS if you would like to explore the practice of Active Hope in relation to love of and care for the world we live in, you may want to join the weekend workshop Engaged Mindfulness this summer…

Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash