Posts in Difficulties & Loss
Practices for Dark Days
Practices for Dark Days

Dear Friends,

I hope your holiday has been decent so far and I especially hope that you have had or will have some down time to rest and restore before the new year.

Starting a new year feels to me like a moment of hope. Things can be different! Even if we have struggled and suffered, felt alone, depressed, or like we have messed things up, we can remember that a new year is right around the corner. 

As mindfulness practitioners, we do try to live in the moment as it is, but we don’t need to get stuck in thinking that things will always be this difficult.  

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Self-care, Difficulties & Loss, Family, MindfulnessRachel Switalamindfulness practice, deep suffering, cancer journey Comments
How to Prepare for a Crisis
How to Prepare for a Crisis

Several years ago, I was preparing to teach my Tuesday morning Mindful Yoga class at Circle Yoga in Washington DC. I was sitting at the front of the class as students streamed in, setting up mats, blankets and bolsters.

Four minutes before class was due to begin, one of my regular students walked into class and straight to where I was sitting. She handed me a small newspaper clipping without saying a word. I assumed it was a yoga comic or other funny yoga tidbit. It wasn’t.

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Difficulties & LossAnnie Mahon Comments
Grief and Despair: Don’t Stop Planting
Grief and Despair: Don’t Stop Planting

During a Question & Answer session some years ago, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh was asked, “What is the hardest part of your practice?”

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Difficulties & LossAnnie Mahondespair, Thich Nhat Hanh, privilege, interbieing, nonself, ineterdependence, impermanence, Major Griffin-Gracy, Dr- Martin Luther King, Bhagavad Gita, depression, voter suppression, climate change, immigrants, domestic terrorism Comments
The Sound of Loons

Dear Friends, I recently returned from lovely long weekend at a friend’s cabin on an island off the grid in Canada. Before I left, I was feeling stretched pretty thin with many different activities, travel, guests, and the resurgence of one of our adult child’s life challenges. I looked forward to cabin time, surrounded by beautiful blue lake, the sound of loons...

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Difficulties & Loss, Mindfulness, Self-CareAnnie MahonComment
Many Nests - Some Empty, Some Full

We had the wonderful pleasure of hosting a family of robins on our family room overhang this month. It began when we saw the mother robin frantically putting together nests in four potential sites, scattering a huge pile of sticks and shiny threads on our patio. She apparently decided against someone's old birthday balloon because she left it dangling in front of our window. She did finally settle on the "best" location, the one closest to our kitchen window...

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Difficulties & Loss, Self-Care, RelationshipsAnnie MahonEmpty nest
The Glass is already Broken

Spring has arrived! How wonderful to see the daffodils blooming and to feel the sun on our faces again. And at the same time, we had more tragedy than usual this past month: the terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and, closer to home, the tragedy in our local yoga community at Lululemon in Bethesda. How can we reconcile the beauty and excitement of spring with the horror and suffering of events like these?

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Difficulties & Loss, Mindfulness, Self-CareAnnie Mahon5 Remembrances