Just For Today...

Ah, a few minutes to sit down and gather my thoughts.  It's been too many days since I've done that!

I've been thinking a lot about the precepts this weekend - perhaps because I had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day at work on Friday and I think I "broke" every one of them! I was projecting into the future, I was very angry, I was worried, I was thinking some very unkind thoughts and not feeling particularly grateful.  I wasn't applying myself to my spiritual work very well either on Friday afternoon and maybe for several days before that.  Maybe if I had sat down sooner to gather my thoughts, they wouldn't have been so all over the place......

Sometimes I think that if Usui Sensei had given us only one precept, Just For Today, we'd still have a pretty good foundation on which to build our spiritual lives and around which to structure even the most mundane tasks that we face each day. 

When I reflect on those three little words, Just For Today, I feel empowered, confident - I can do most anything for 24 hours (not even, because I try to spend at least 7 of those sleeping!).  I'm also reminded that I can't go back and undo yesterday and, as much as I hope that it does, I really have no guarantee that tomorrow is coming, so this day, the one that is unfolding right under my nose, is all I have. 

Does it really matter if one of my superiors was incredibly rude to me? It certainly felt like it at the time and I really wish that I had responded differently than I did but I can learn from the experience and think about a more light and life-giving response for next time, but the experience need not define me and it certainly need not take up any more space in my head than it already has.  If it keeps happening, I may need to revisit the wisdom of staying in that situation, but that is a decision for another moment in time, not this one.

At this moment in time, 8:34 pm on Sunday, September 13, 2009, I am sitting at my desk, typing a blog entry.  My dogs, Smokey and Shadow, are curled up on the floor beside me.  My partner is watching TV downstairs.  I can hear a cricket chirping outside.  All is well and that is all that matters.

What are your thoughts on "Just For Today"? 

Namaste,
Janet

Just Being

This morning as I sat listening to Pamela Miles' superb guided meditation for Week 2 of the Virtual Usui Retreat the following suggestion jumped out at me: "don't try to fix it....just be present with it" and it got me thinking about all of those times in my life that I have felt an uncomfortable sensation, be it emotional, physical or spiritual, and have gone out of my way to try to "fit it" rather than just be still, sit with it and really feel it, really listen to what it was trying to tell me.  More often than not, I made "it" worse with my efforts, rather than better! 

I wonder what would happen if we were all able to just sit with "it" - whatever "it" may be at any given time - and stopped expending so much energy trying to make "it" go away?

I'm nowhere near the expert that I would like to be on just sitting with my stuff but I do know that when I choose to let it, Reiki will ease the discomfort and soothe my senses.

Namaste,
Janet

Reiki As A Spiritual Practice

This is our focus this week at the Usui Virtual Retreat and because it is a topic that is so close to my heart, I wanted to share it here as well.  Our facilitator, Pamela Miles, gives us a working definition of spirituality as follows:  "...that part of us where we sort it all out, where we work out our relationship to ourselves, one another and to life itself...where we cope with uncertainty, where we go beyond the anxiety and the anger that uncertainty can trigger.....our place of inner retreat..."

I couldn't even begin to come up with a better definition of what Reiki is to me other than to add that:

Reiki for me is about stillness, whether I'm doing a self-treatment, treating someone else, meditating on the precepts and/or doing breathwork, it is a slowing down and going within, observing and connecting with what lies there.  Even more than that, though, for me Reiki is about taking that stillness into the world, a world that, for the most part, seems anything but still .

Feeling very grateful today to be taking part in the retreat and to be walking this path.

Namaste,
Janet