But in recent years, I’ve rediscovered poetry through mindfulness and this is a whole new world!

Poetry is an available and priceless source of life-wisdom. It’s sad that so many miss out on this because they think they have to understand the poem from the head. When we receive our natural response to a poem mindfully ‘doors open up in the air,’ as American poet Jane Hirshfield puts it.

When we sit mindfully and allow the words, images, sounds and feel of a poem to drop into our mind/body/heart, we will notice natural responses moving within us – attraction, repulsion, insight, sadness, confoundedness, love… Amazingly, these arise autonomously, even when we don’t intellectually understand what is being said. In this way we discover the gold hidden in the often opaque words. Many poems have a gift to give us and, tantalisingly, the gift can be different for each receiver. But many poems also hold universal life-wisdom which then speaks to the well of wisdom within each of us. I love the feeling when the wisdom in a poem unites with my own inner knowing! Hearing the words, I feel the kindling of recognition stirring within me, feelings or sensations constellate and something is woken up from slumber, an inner light turns on and a bit of magic has sparkled into my present moment.

In this way poetry speaks to us at a depth that is rare and very precious. We can take this gift of light with us then, into our daily life and our mindfulness sits. Perhaps as little poetic mantras (a line or phrase from a poem), as instructions for living well or as instruction for practice itself. My notebooks and kitchen cupboards carry many scribbled reminders. My texts, emails and cards to others are sometimes sprinkled with what I hope are appropriate poetic quotes, to bring comfort, empowerment or wisdom.

At its best poetry encourages a blooming of our humanity and contemplative potential. I have been struck by how, in poetry books and on websites, we can find a compendium of spiritual insight to rival any religious tome. Interesting that in the West many of us think of ourselves as living in a secular world, and yet the ancient mystical insights of the world’s contemplative traditions are popular and at our fingertips like never before. Bookshops and online stores stock the likes of Rumi, Hafiz, Kabir, Teresa of Avila and St. Francis of Assisi. Meanwhile more recent poets craft words that are full of a new more contemporary flavour of deep humanity and mysticism – I’m thinking Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, Jeff Foster, T. S. Elliot to name but a few.

Each time I start a new Mystical Poetry meets Mindfulness course, I find myself suggesting that we back-peddle away from a technical, analytical style of looking at poetry. Instead, we practice ‘receiving our response’ to a poem. American poet Billy Collins guides us in this beautifully by saying the following:

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

These instructions light me up with a sense of the magic that poetry can bring, when we receive it with our whole being. This is why I think that poetry and mindfulness are a match made in heaven!

Let me finish with a line that I just found written in my diary:

‘We need as human beings, the vessel and the lantern that poetry offers.’ (Jane Hirshfield)

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Fay’s new Mindfulness & Mystical Poetry course begins on September 12th. It’s a 6 week online course, on a Thursday Evening.

Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry

But in recent years, I’ve rediscovered poetry through mindfulness and this is a whole new world!

Poetry is an available and priceless source of life-wisdom. It’s sad that so many miss out on this because they think they have to understand the poem from the head. When we receive our natural response to a poem mindfully ‘doors open up in the air,’ as American poet Jane Hirshfield puts it.

When we sit mindfully and allow the words, images, sounds and feel of a poem to drop into our mind/body/heart, we will notice natural responses moving within us – attraction, repulsion, insight, sadness, confoundedness, love… Amazingly, these arise autonomously, even when we don’t intellectually understand what is being said. In this way we discover the gold hidden in the often opaque words. Many poems have a gift to give us and, tantalisingly, the gift can be different for each receiver. But many poems also hold universal life-wisdom which then speaks to the well of wisdom within each of us. I love the feeling when the wisdom in a poem unites with my own inner knowing! Hearing the words, I feel the kindling of recognition stirring within me, feelings or sensations constellate and something is woken up from slumber, an inner light turns on and a bit of magic has sparkled into my present moment.

In this way poetry speaks to us at a depth that is rare and very precious. We can take this gift of light with us then, into our daily life and our mindfulness sits. Perhaps as little poetic mantras (a line or phrase from a poem), as instructions for living well or as instruction for practice itself. My notebooks and kitchen cupboards carry many scribbled reminders. My texts, emails and cards to others are sometimes sprinkled with what I hope are appropriate poetic quotes, to bring comfort, empowerment or wisdom.

At its best poetry encourages a blooming of our humanity and contemplative potential. I have been struck by how, in poetry books and on websites, we can find a compendium of spiritual insight to rival any religious tome. Interesting that in the West many of us think of ourselves as living in a secular world, and yet the ancient mystical insights of the world’s contemplative traditions are popular and at our fingertips like never before. Bookshops and online stores stock the likes of Rumi, Hafiz, Kabir, Teresa of Avila and St. Francis of Assisi. Meanwhile more recent poets craft words that are full of a new more contemporary flavour of deep humanity and mysticism – I’m thinking Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, Jeff Foster, T. S. Elliot to name but a few.

Each time I start a new Mystical Poetry meets Mindfulness course, I find myself suggesting that we back-peddle away from a technical, analytical style of looking at poetry. Instead, we practice ‘receiving our response’ to a poem. American poet Billy Collins guides us in this beautifully by saying the following:

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

These instructions light me up with a sense of the magic that poetry can bring, when we receive it with our whole being. This is why I think that poetry and mindfulness are a match made in heaven!

Let me finish with a line that I just found written in my diary:

‘We need as human beings, the vessel and the lantern that poetry offers.’ (Jane Hirshfield)

If you’d like to join in the adventure there are two opportunities coming up:-

A 6-Week Course – Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry starting on May 22

A 6-Week Course – Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry starting on September 12

Fay Adams

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.
Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

This poem, by Austrian poet Rilke, gives us guidance for using breath as a support in the way only a poem could. The words don’t make easy sense in common parlance. But if we let our usual assumptions of sense-making loosen, if we let the words resonate within an open awareness, perhaps then they’ll make a kind of visceral, heart-felt, intuitive sense.

How do you feel in your body when you imagine that your breath ‘divides and rejoins behind you’?

The poem elevates meditation with the breath towards a mystical practice. It invites us to experience our breath not as ‘our own’, but as a way to ‘give yourselves to air’; breath coming from a greater expanse of movement and being, which we can’t hold on to, but can ease back into.

Then there’s the invitation to ‘Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back into the earth’. The word ‘back’ here is an important reminder to similarly not ‘own’ our pain in the way we may often do. Our pain is the pain of the earth, because we are born of Earth. All human beings have their own stories of suffering. These define us as human, and they also gradually season us towards the beauty of deep humanity.

What wisdom poems have for us, if we take the time to really let their gifts in!

Ps. Join me for the upcoming Mystical Poetry meets Mindfulness course which begins soon.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

All things seen depend
upon the Unseen.
All sounds depend upon Silence.
All things felt depend
upon what is not felt.

by Adyashanti

Here non-dual spiritual teacher Adyashanti helps us step beyond our rational, literal minded tendencies in a very common-sense way. Sometimes it’s hard to remain connected to the enigma of what he calls the Unseen. And of course for some this may not be part of their belief system at all. For me however, despite my conviction that there is an awesome ‘Unseen’, recently, with the demands of day-to-day life taking up a lot of air time, I often feel that I’ve somehow got myself unplugged from the wonder and power of what is beyond. It’s ungraspability, it’s mysterious ways, it’s ineffable nature can easily elude us. Adyashanti reminds us that we may always be in the company of a great mystery, of God if you prefer, of something powerful and beyond our limited perceptions.

Last week I heard about a near death experience which gave me a strong felt remembrance of the extraordinary awesome potential of what is beyond our usual human small-mindedness and I have had experiences which have left me in no doubt about this. Fortunately, there are ways to plug in again, to find our connection to a higher power. Poems have a special ability to bring this kind of remembrance, to connect us in a real way to something bigger than ourselves, to what some call the Mystical.

And if you feel the call to connect to the Mystical through poetry, come along to the upcoming Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry course beginning online in September!

Photo by NEOM on Unsplash

I want to share with you something a friend said to me recently. She had been reading poetry mindfully and subsequently, when she did the bodyscan, she experienced her body in a very fresh and free way.

She, like most of us, had been experiencing her body as concrete, problematic and mechanical lot of the time. Now something opened up, because of the invitations in the poems, to experientially go beyond this narrow, contracted perception. The poems had been speaking to her on another, rather mysterious plane and this came to fruition in her practice.

What is this other plane? And what is going on here? I think the secret is expressed beautifully in the phrase ‘poem-light’ used by poet Jane Hirshfield. My understanding of what she means is that poetry uses a metaphorical language which we instinctually understand, before we’ve thought about it. This feels like a twilight place of knowing. It’s between the neon light of our obvious thinking and the darkness of unconsciousness. Rob Nairn, initiator of the Mindfulness Association, called this the ‘subliminal’ layer of mind. He would repeatedly remind us that the subliminal is where it’s at in terms of transformative potential!

If we can become aware of the subliminal, change can really happen. This is because the compulsions and impulses can be ‘caught’ here, before they become ingrained thinking. Rob also believed the subliminal is a place of great potential. If we can learn to hang out there, we can bear witness, not just to our limiting tendencies, but also to the freedom, openness and rich array of possibility, which lives within us. Poems help this to be possible because they speak to us like dreams. They nudge us into the right hemisphere and sometimes they speak more truly and directly than left brain word maps do. Perhaps they are closer to the lived territory than rational word constructions tend to be.

So how do you access the subliminal? And how do poems connect us to our potential through the subliminal?

A poem introduces imagery, feeling and impressions that swirl into our subliminal, bypassing the thinking mind. If we can learn to hover in the poem-light of the subliminal, we’ll be able to truly receive our response to the poem.

To do this we practice mindfulness! We become present, rest in the body as we experience it (not as we conceptualise it) and let our mind and senses be receptive. We attune ourselves to the subtle realm of the subliminal. Then we listen to the poem. We rest gently in awareness watching the ripples the poem makes within. Shifting sensations, feelings, impulses, felt-sense. We notice and continue to hover here.

Most of the time when we hear a poem our inner wisdom response is lost. Lost in our attempts to analyse it or in our too-fast skim across it. When we receive poetry into our mindfulness practice, we have a unique present moment recognition that comes from inside us, even if analytically we have no idea what the poem is about. You could try this out by yourself. In a moment, read the poem below and sit in mindful presence. Notice your responses on the subliminal level. You’ll discover all kinds of happenings! These happenings are usually a big soup of limiting and habitual tendencies, mixed up with possibility, flow and openness. Often, when it comes to poetry however, the happenings become a mirror of the poem. They express our own personal piece of the universal wisdom that the poem is expressing. The poem speaks and we resonate and reply within. We understand on this feeling level, because we already ‘know’ deep down. In this way bringing mindfulness and poetry together connects us with our inner wisdom and with universal wisdom, when we know how to let it.

Consider this small poem by Japanese hermit of the 12^th century Saigyo, which says what I’m trying to say in a much more elegant, immediate and alive way:

Among deep mountains

the heart’s moon

shines pure

and I see within that mirror

the whole world enlightened.

The poem is a prism which casts rainbow light into your depths so that you can see, feel and know what’s there.

This is what we’ll be experimenting with together during the course which begins in September. Join us for the adventure!