Observations on moving, breathing and being. These are mine.

I’ve been writing them down since 2020.

I took a long pause. I’m back now.

Catherine S. Marquette 1/15/21 Catherine S. Marquette 1/15/21

On what we think

Our thoughts play a huge role with respect to our perspective on events and life in general. Both cognitive therapy and yoga philosophy discuss the impact thoughts have on our behaviour, acknowledging that they generally precede action. This means that often times, we’re more influenced emotionally by our reaction to something than from that “thing” itself.

Said another way, we often act based on our emotional reaction to something rather than the actual thing. Kind of unhelpful, right?

So…why might we interpret events in unhelpful ways?

A reflection on the Earth as medicine

I’ve been learning about koans—paradoxical riddles of sort in Zen Buddhism on which students meditate in order to uncover knowledge, intuition, enlightenment. This morning’s lesson was particularly relevant, as though the koan purposefully presented itself to me. Of note, I happen to be in Vermont for the week to ruminate more deeply on this past year-to-date and what I might (continue to) learn from it moving forward. So…you can likely see how this particular koan being the meditation of the day piqued my interest.

Other translations of the koan include:

Medicine and disease (or sickness) exactly correspond (or correspond to each other).
The whole Earth is medicine.
What is self? (Or what are you?)

There are many types of disease…

A reflection on turning impediments into fortune

I’ve heard that vinyl records have enjoyed a resurgence of late. If you remember them at all, you might recall that they have grooves. Vinyls tend to work until these grooves become scratched or broken such that the result is an endless loop across the same recorded section…over and over again.

We as humans have similar grooves, too. And we also tend to work until these grooves result in repeated patterns of behavior, difficult to resist, that no longer serve us yet which we relive…over and over again…keeping us “stuck” or frozen in the past.

In yoga, we know these grooves to be samskaras…