being peace

after having a very slow-moving, relaxing yoga session in my living room today (as i am still recovering from the obscene amount of hiking i did a few days ago), i sat for awhile in silent meditation...just following my breath. during this sitting i experienced a series of moments where my sense of time became incredibly spacious and slowed down. i felt every breath to be unusually full and long, and suddenly found myself more fascinated than i had ever been with my own breathing. i had a moment of feeling like "this really IS all that matters right now." (which is a very rare experience for me! usually i have about 10 things that matter equally all at once!) i felt my entire body dropping down into an ocean of deep calm.....muscles loosening their grip on bones....tissues easing away from each other....organs expanding and relaxing with the space inside of each breath.....i felt that calmness slowly washing over my bones like warm water, moving through and around my muscles, tissues and skin, permeating every cell until it was all there was. i think this experience lasted for all of 2 minutes, though it felt like an entire lazy, summer afternoon....
buddhist teacher, sylvia boorstein writes, "every moment of mindfulness erases a moment of conditioning." this mantra repeats itself quietly in my thoughts from time to time. but today, in those two minutes, for the first time i really understood in a bones and sinew kind of way the meaning of that teaching. because i chose to sit quietly for a few minutes this afternoon, instead of bustling about as usual doing all that it is i do....i was graced with the experience of two minutes of deep and spacious mindfulness leaving no room in those precious moments for conditioning or habitual mind patterns to wear their rut ever deeper into my psyche......it is becoming more apparent each time i choose to slow down and sit with myself, breathing mindfully, that this ritual is one of most subversive acts one can commit at this point in history.
being peace.....