Hi Folks!
It's been a while since I've posted and I've been aware of it. I cannot put blame on my wrist -- it's healed. (Still in physical therapy with it though!) So why haven't I been posting? Did I stop reading? No. I've read several books since I've last posted. However, I wanted a timeout so I could more fully understand what I was 'thinking' about. Sounds odd, huh?
If you think about it, if you are constantly moving, doing the things that we do in this thing called "LIFE", we get busy. We then stop thinking and just do. I've been doing for several months yet very little real writing is getting done. I am so busy posting, researching, reading and writing reviews, caring for my family and doing 'fun' summer stuff.
It struck me when I had a few days away from my family that I needed quiet time. In our fast paced society, what is that, right? It just so happened that Deepak Chopra had a 21-day meditation challenge around the time I began feeling close to burnout. It started mid July and went until the beginning of August. The meditations were led for the first few and last few days by Deepak and the other days were led by other meditation practitioners with the Chopra Center.
At first the 15-minute, or less, meditations bugged me. In my 'spiritual' past, I used to do marathon meditations that lasted over an hour in many instances. So, the brevity of the meditations irked me. However, by the 6th and 7th days, the depth of the meditation made me wish the meditation was shorter! The theme was Free to Love and there were so many aspects of this theme that were challenging for me but I stuck it out and did not give in to the temptation to stop.
At the end of the 21 days, I learned some things about myself that were a tad frightening. So what to do about it? More meditations, of course. In my travels, I found a wonderful CD, Tibetan Incantations: The Meditative Sound of Buddhist Chants. Playing it now, in fact. The 3 tracks on this soothe me in a way that's indescribable. I tracked down and tried over a dozen different meditations I found on YouTube. I began going back to some of my previous marathon meditation sessions -- all very time-consuming but well worth the effort.
What have I discovered? I need quiet time. I need the ability to roam around in my own head and peek in corners that are filled with spiderwebs and clear them out. I also found out that following your own gut instincts is a wise thing. So, while I may not publish as regularly as I used to when I do post, I will bring something of real interest to the table. Posting just to post is not what I want to do as a writer, or as a person.The next thing I will be posting is a book review of a Native American novel called Restoring Hope. I am thoroughly enjoying this story. Even those someone close to me poo-poohed the book and said it would be a sterotypical Pocahontas story. In some ways, it is. However, in other ways it's not. I look forward to sharing with you.
