Lisa Thorpe

This is Pleasing to Me

My word for the week is PLEASING.  Let me back up a bit and explain.  I have been trying to meditate more, trying to create a little quiet space in my mind and body each week if not each day.  A few months ago my friend Julie told me about choosing a word to repeat each time your mind wanders, just a little trick to keep from thinking about the todo list during meditation.  So this Monday I was at yogo and we began the meditation with bhramari breathing, which I have seen referred to as “bee breath”.  The way it works it you breath in and upon breathing out you hum.  The hum can come from deep in your chest, your throat, or high up in your sinuses.  When bhramari breathing happens in a group there is the wonderful overlap of humming that weaves in and out of harmony that is rich and luminous.  So on this particular Monday, as the class began it’s bee breath, a hum from the deep arose and the word PLEASING popped into my head.  And this has been my word all week.  Not just in meditation but in life and all it’s parts.  I have endeavored to find all the parts of my day pleasing.  The brisk dewy morning- pleasing- the savory taste of last weekends leftovers for lunch – pleasing – the fact that no one cried in my kindergarten art classes this week – pleasing – and the overwhelmingly brilliant colors of the fall vineyards – pleasing. This word has danced delighted through my mind all week, reminding me of the great pleasure of ordinary things, and isn’t most of our life made up of ordinary things in the end?  This one life is punctuated by the extraordinary, but the majority is one ordinary act after the other. And so in this ordinary life if we can open our eyes a bit wider, fill our lungs a bit deeper, let flavors linger on our tongues longer, and stop and listen with tenderness- then I think, maybe this ordinary life can be very, very pleasing indeed.