Dear Soul-Sibling,
Autumn’s here with change and I believe new colors are possible.
Don’t get distracted by the experience, stay focused on your relationship to it.
A mindful warrior examines her relationship to the experience.
We all feel fear. You’re going to fall down. And sometimes you’ll even fail.
It matters most what you do next.
Fear is universal, nothing personal, and can totally be reframed as excitement, nerves, energy, momentum, strength, and intuition.
Falling hurts and sometimes we get lost down a rabbit hole.
I love to shift elements with a fall. On the ground, or down the hole, belittled and bruised, I pretend I’m suddenly in water.
“Float Alexander! Float like a Jelly Fish.”
The quintessential starting place is your daily practice.
You’ll fight this answer.
You're going to want something extravagant, magical and earth-shattering. You’ll look outside yourself and pay money to professionals expecting they'll have an answer.
The answers are within.
They spontaneously arise in simple, quiet, intentional, and mundane movements of your day.
The place I always start is with my daily practice.
The hour of power.
Do you know what activities connect you to your power?
Can you list compassionate actions to take after shutting down with fear, falling, or failure?
My core practice is early morning time in meditation.
Reading from a spirit filled book waters the soil of my soul.
Exercise and movement are so important for my lovely body. I believe my body is the longest relationship I've had on Planet Earth.
During the first and last hours of the day, I like listening to soothing, repetitive, chanting tracks in the background. This is how I prefer to enter the day and decompress from it.
I’ve found it helpful to turn off music, audibles, podcasts, and videos, for a short period of time every day, and listen to simple, rhythmic, continuous chantings of OM. (Often while I'm doing other things).
Some scholars herald OM as the "cosmic sound" or "mystical syllable" in ancient India; simply as "affirmation to something divine" or as symbolism for abstract spiritual concepts in the Upanishads.
The syllable OM is described with various meanings in the Vedas and different early Upanishads.
The meanings of OM include "the sacred sound, the Yes!, the Vedas, the Udgitha (song of the universe), the infinite, the all encompassing, the whole world, the truth, the ultimate reality, the finest essence, the cause of the Universe, the essence of life, the Brahman, the Atman, the vehicle of deepest knowledge, and Self-knowledge.
I use two different tracks from Spotify. Both focus on OM. Each track is close to 32 minutes.
Friends have asked for the links after we've spent time together in person.
One is for morning and the other for evening.
I’ve created a Viral Mindfulness Spotify Playlist called Daily OM. It features these two tracks, and a few others I really like.
If you're not on Spotify perhaps you can search your streaming services with the word OM, or OM Meditation Tracks.
If you're on Spotify here's access to the playlist I curated just for you.
Yours Bluely,
Alexander Smith
