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Breathe:

More Kindness for Ourselves and Each Other

Leaf Meditation and Amazing Fractals

7/19/2017

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PictureLeaf with three lobes and sawtooth edges, like triangles along edge. Network of three main lines, with each line dividing and subdividing into smaller lines. bright green along three main lines. light yellow, white, and red colors.
In summer, it's a wonderful time to be outside, whether in the foggy days of the Bay or in the bright sunshine. Long evenings and sometimes opportunities for travel bring us closer in connection with the natural world. You might take a moment to notice the trees around you, even if you can see part of a tree out of a window or find one planted by a volunteer on a sidewalk.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer beautifully says in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, "Trees constitute the environmental quality committee – running air and water purification service 24 – 7. They are on every task force, from the historical society picnic to the highway department, school board, and library. When it comes to civic beautification, they alone create the crimson fall with little recognition… These processes are what ecological scientists term ecosystem services, the structures and functions of the national world that make life possible.… And yet these services go unaccounted for in the human economy.… We get them for free, donated continually by maples."


Leaf Meditation

If you like, take a moment and observe a tree. You might look deeply at it, as if getting ready to draw it. Noticing the shapes of the leaves and their colors, how different parts of the leaf give way to a range of colors. Noticing the network of lines.

The pattern of lines in tree leaves make fractals, amazing geometric patterns and shapes in which each part is similar to the whole and similar patterns repeat at progressively smaller scales.

Do these network of lines remind you of anything? They might call to mind the patterns in lungs, blood vessels, or other parts of the body.

Coming back to the tree, gently.

If you are close enough, you might touch a leaf, whether it is on the ground or still connected to a living tree. Feeling the texture.

Breathing in.

Breathing out.

Conspiring, breathing with, the tree.




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Mama Earth gets a mammogram

4/24/2017

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PictureImage: Earth from space, Blue enrobed with abundant ice on South pole, Apollo 17, 1972, NASA, https://www.nasa.gov/content/blue-marble-image-of-the-earth-from-apollo-17
Mama Earth gets a mammogram
 
she gets up with the sun
for her appointment
and has to take two buses
 
on the second one, she stands holding onto the strap
and the young people glowing into their screens
don't offer her a seat
 
she gets up slowly
with a rocking motion that propels the great globe
of her belly forward
with an audible sigh
 
the driver kneels the bus down
taking pity on her slow progress
aluminum walker with split tennis balls on the hooves
 
she looks around with the sun
squinting at an angle into her eyes
cradled by their rivers
carved by years of laughing and concentrating
to puzzle through
 
sees the semicircular driveway and metallic windows
and shuffles her bulk
through the door to information
 
spells out her name
for the unfazed ponytailed volunteer
chewing gum
who sends
Ms. Earth
to mammography
without looking up
 
the plates are cold
and seem to smash her breast
between them
with unnecessary force
 
her breath tightens and catches
against the pressure
but that's been going on for a while now
like a century
 
she hasn't had time to get it checked out
so many other fires to put out
the job she has seems always to take more than 24 hours in a day
if that's possible
and never came with the kind of insurance or sick days
that would allow her time to get her lungs checked
 
it's harder to remember details these days
but it seems like she hasn't had a raise
since the Rockies popped up
mmmmm, that was a hard birth, too
 
the tech asks her to switch breasts
and the plates descend again
 
she heard through the grapevine
there was this new preventative care plan
free mammograms every year
or in her ancient case
eon
 
she doesn't know what she'll do with a positive result
a biopsy sounds not only painful but expensive
and she doesn't know if it's covered
the little she'd been saving for retirement
disappeared in the
crash
 
the tech’s eyes behind her glasses
look concerned
mama knows the tech isn't really allowed
to tell her anything
but those women are always the first to know
 
she hopes it's not too serious
and if they do find something
that it's not
too late
 
Reba Connell, Berkeley, California, USA, 37.9° N, 122.3° W, June 2013, Cenozoic era



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Water is Medicine

12/13/2016

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Picture

“Mni Pejuta: water is medicine and Mni Wiconi: Water is Life,’ says Wakinyan LaPointe, Lakota community organizer. ‘In our Lakota way, it is our responsibility to strengthen our relationship with water.’”

Modern research continues to affirm indigenous wisdom, that water is one of our most useful medicines. Water can improve energy, mood, anger, concentration, and focus. The brain is very sensitive to small changes in levels of water in the body. Water is vegan, free, and in most cases comes with few side effects. You can do an experiment on yourself.

Like many of you, I've been deeply moved by what is happening at Standing Rock. Lakota Sioux have been joined by hundreds of indigenous nations from the Americas and the world, as well as other people of conscience called to protect the water, support the rights of our First Nations to their sacred ground and water and to protect the earth from from further global warming.

I read that the water protectors received word that the police had put out a list of requests including granola bars, energy drinks, soda, and warm clothing and gloves. The indigenous water protectors were the ones to respond to the police request.  They said, we gave them everything they asked for except for the soda and energy drinks, because water is life.

If you are moved to do more to support the water protectors, the current request is to contact the banks funding the pipeline.

In socially engaged mindfulness, we may engage with full energy but not attach to the results of our actions. 2 unexpected healings at Standing Rock were forgiveness ceremonies from the church and the military over the 500-year history of colonialization.

For heart-opening images, see a video clip of the 13 year-old Lakota Sioux girl, who had started the Standing Rock petition, after a successful goverment response to her efforts,  and images of the elders from many Native nations who gathered as water protectors.

Thank you. Water is life. Mni Wiconi. Water is Medicine.



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Water Meditation

11/29/2016

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Picture
Noticing a desire for water.

The desire may be experienced as a dryness in the mouth, an interest in the mind, a feeling of fatigue, or a cue -- of the morning, a meal, or a workout that reminds you of water.

Filling a drinking vessel with cold, room temperature, or hot water. Noticing the sound of the water as it fills your cup. Noticing how listening to the sound is experienced in the emotions and the body.

If you like, adding tea, lemon or anything else, or just drinking your plain, pure water.

Feeling the weight of the drinking vessel in your hand. Noticing the temperature of the water that is conveyed from the cup to your hand.

Looking at the water and seeing what you notice.

Telling your water, "I love you."

If you like, contemplating the sources of your water. Remembering or imagining where your water comes from to arrive at your cup. Does it come from a reservoir? Is it fed by a glacier, does it come from a river in the Sierras or other mountains? Noticing what you know and what you don't know. You may pray or send good thoughts to the sources of your water.

You may notice gratitude for being in that portion of humanity  that has running water in their home.

Smelling the water and noticing what you notice.

Taking a drink and noticing the temperature of the water in the mouth and the temperature of the water as it travels into your body.

Noticing that the water in your cup joins the water you are.


With a deep bow to the Lakota Sioux teen girls and elder women, traditional allies of water through the flow, who are leading the way and teaching us how to pray for and honor water. Thank you to the Ohlone people for the land where I sit and write. Please accept humble apologies for any misunderstandings of the teachings.




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YUM! Mindful Eating, Mindful Nutrition: Eating with the Brain in Mind

9/1/2015

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Picture“Tuscan Plate and Eggplant” • Sally Baker Watercolors, click image for www.sallybaker.com
"YUM!"

My Food as Medicine conference teacher, chef and culinary translator tells fellow cookbook author Mollie Katzen in an interview that "yum" is an involuntary response to pleasure.
"Yum!" is a common response to her Everything Drizzle or Triple Triple Brittle in her book, The Healthy Mind Cookbook. "Yum" is so different, she says, than we expect to respond to healthy food, which we imagine as deprivation on the edge of sorrow and grief for what we are losing.

It can also be a delicious feeling to find new ways of understanding and caring for ourselves.

This next course combines the powers of mindful awareness and research-based brain nutrition.

Each class invites our inner wisdom to taste, perceive, and notice.

In the following week, we learn about the latest research related to the foods we have eaten and their potential impact on anxiety, pain, and sleep.

Eating with the brain in mind references my fascination with the current research on the role of nutrition, the gut organisms in the microbiome, and mental health. Did you know that serotonin is made in the belly?

As we eat many times a day, bringing kind awareness to eating is an opportunity to practice for all of us.

Mindful Nutrition means that instead of letting others decide, or just going by taste, we pay attention to which foods nourish us individually.

Next Class:
Tuesdays 9–11:15 am, 9/22-11/17/15
free orientation for class members and the public, Tuesday 9 am, 9/22/15

Sliding scale.

Early-bird pricing this week until 9/8/15.

Click here to register.

Interested but the class doesn’t work for your schedule?
Click here to learn about the benefits of individual mindful therapy for anxiety, pain, and insomnia and here to learn about weight loss and body acceptance counseling.

#mindfuleating #mindfulness #yum #sba  #mbsr #ibs

You can sign up for the classes here.

May you and all beings be nourished.


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    Author

    Reba Connell teaches Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindful Eating classes in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland.

    She has completed several levels of study in teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, including a professional training program under the direction of Dr. Saki Santorelli and Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn and a training in teaching Mindful Eating, through UCSD.

    She is deeply engaged with science-based and traditional approaches to healing through food and self-care. Her trainings include Food As Medicine; The Gut Brain; and Preventing and Managing Chronic Inflammation: Special Focus: Nutritional Interventions.  She has been practicing meditation and yoga since 1999.

    Finding mindfulness, movement, and food to make big differences in her own healing from chronic pain, she feels called to share what she is learning with others and to help people make their own discoveries. She is committed to a feminist approach that honors all body shapes and sizes while collaborating in radiant wellness.

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Integrative Health Education for Anxiety and Depression,

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