Category Archives: Meditations
Monday Meditation: Free to Walk Away
Grief can make us feel confined, stuck, frozen in place. The restrictions put upon us during this pandemic may exacerbate those feelings, especially while grieving. Rather than look at the way in which grief (and life) have shrunk because of our current circumstances, what if you saw the things you were able to release yourselfContinue reading “Monday Meditation: Free to Walk Away”
Monday Meditation: A Calming Place
To focus on yourself, on your self-care, and on your body’s needs, you must have a calming place to which you can retreat. However, ongoing pandemic restrictions make this difficult. This is a moment in which we must adapt the best we can to a less-than-desirable situation.
Father’s Day 2020
As those of us who have lost our fathers and father-figures celebrate relationships with loved ones no longer present, let us remember the lessons and love they gave us.
Monday Meditation: Open Your Focus to Compassion
When we focus on ourselves while suffering, when we wallow in our despair, it is easy for us to shut out other people’s experiences and other events in the world. While we need to take care of ourselves to heal from, and process, our suffering, we can become so taken with ourselves that it beginsContinue reading “Monday Meditation: Open Your Focus to Compassion”
Monday Meditation: What’s Going On?!
Monday Mediation: Set Goals
The last thing that may come to mind when thinking of grief is the prospect of setting goals for yourself. Rather, grief seems to be a time when there are no goals to be found. Grief, in fact, is a chance to rethink what your goals have been and to develop new ones. Grief mayContinue reading “Monday Mediation: Set Goals”
Monday Meditation: Keep Breathing
After I lost my mother, I started driving from home to work (Richmond, VA to Washington, DC) instead of taking the train. I found driving and listening to music very therapeutic. I would put on my Pandora radio and still as loudly and as vivaciously as I could while driving.
Monday Meditation: Interconnection
Loss is a point where we realize that, despite our penchant for independence, we are massively interconnected. Life becomes drastically different when one person is missing from it. Grief is the ripping open of interconnectedness, and it is the gradual healing of that wound. We live on a delicate spider web, through which we touchContinue reading “Monday Meditation: Interconnection”
Monday Meditation: The Promise (Tracy Chapman)
I listened to “The Promise” the other day while playing with my daughter. I hadn’t heard it in years. Amidst pandemic uncertainties, my first Mother’s Day as a motherless mother, and missing my mom, the lyrics touched me deeply. The first Mother’s Day without my mother was difficult. The ones since then have largely passedContinue reading “Monday Meditation: The Promise (Tracy Chapman)”
Monday Meditation: May the Fourth
It is May the Fourth, and Star Wars Day offers a helpful meditation on life and our place in it. Every living thing is connected through the Force. Every living thing also contains a piece of the Force. The Jedi, wielders of the Light Side, do so in service of others.
Monday Meditation: Waiting with Patience
Self-isolation and social distancing require a great deal of patience. We have to wait out the run of a highly communicable virus. We have to wait out a difficult economic situation. We have to wait out loneliness. If we’re grieving, we have to wait out the chance to grieve communally and receive comfort for ourContinue reading “Monday Meditation: Waiting with Patience”
Monday Meditation: Living in Fishbowls
In a state of social distancing, we are living in a type of fishbowl, and sometimes a fishbowl within a fishbowl. We can’t do anything for our loved ones who are languishing from COVID-19. We can’t do anything for our family or friends who are watching their COVID-positive loved ones and waiting, from more thanContinue reading “Monday Meditation: Living in Fishbowls”
Monday Meditation: A Marathon with Grit
Backbone. Constancy. Fortitude. Guts. Spunk. Grit.
Monday Meditation: From Suffering to Inspiration
This is a horrible and scary time. The majority of our society has never dealt with something like this before. Some lived through the Great Depression, where they saw more than toilet paper depleted from store shelves. Others lived through the turmoil of WWII, when homes were destroyed and food and goods were rationed. AContinue reading “Monday Meditation: From Suffering to Inspiration”
