This guided meditation was recorded on retreat at Menucha Retreat & Conference Center a few weeks ago. It uses the power of mindfulness and imagination to go "back in time" to your birth and through your lifetime to bring yourself love and compassion as you have always wanted it. The past exists only now, so it is possible to interact with love and compassion with our past, bringing deep love to ourselves. 

I'm looking forward to another weeklong retreat at Menucha next month beginning February 23rd: Mindfulness with Love & Compassion. I'll be guiding nine participants through meditations, Dharma instruction, 1:1 meetings, and other practices. To learn more click HERE, and check out my Retreats page for other opportunities to explore mindfulness with me.

we rise early, silently, in the darkness before dawn
each brush stroke of sound
a meditation on the smallest of life’s tasks:
making the bed
putting on clothes
glasses off, contacts in,
jacket and hat
the rain drums its fingers on the roof impatiently as we move about
but each actions requires attention
its own planting, blooming, and dying
 
we make our way to the dharma hall
the inhospitable nature of the world evident
our houses, our places of comfort
subject to its dominion
it is not cruel, nor kind
it is indifferent
it just is
 
lights in the hall now, brashly against the morning
there is coffee to be made
tea to be poured
the warmth of a mug
pleasant to the hands
 
each moment is a wreath, both solemn and joyful
laid at the altar of awareness
which is always falling, dying with each breath
then rising, born again
 
here we sit silently 
listening, noting, 
drifting and returning
there is love here, great love
the kind of love that soldiers and farmers know
the kinship of sacrifice and fertile soil
loneliness and yearning for refuge
all things converge in the now
we breathe
rising and falling
rising and falling
soon we will join the dance hall of life
the rushing stream
the crowded confusion
the delusion of separation 
but for now
we breathe together
and await the arrival of the newborn sun
 
—Glen Gaidos 

​When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without, or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old; and above all at that last moment when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me; in all these dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is You (provided only my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within Yourself. 
 
Pere Teilhard de Chardin
Le Milieu Divin   1926-27