Feliz Navidad and Namaste,
Eric
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| It is rewarding to do a photo retrospective, it can bear some interesting fruit.� Looking at your past can cause you to reflect on your life.� It is like your shadow.� You can see it in plain sight, but when you try to grab it, it disappears.� This past year has contained some unexpected personal challenges, but then that is always to be expected.� The essence of life is change.� The Buddha's final words were "All component things in the world are changeable. They are not lasting. Work hard to gain your own salvation". | |||
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| Buddha from the Gyantse Monastery, Tibet | |||
| By salvation, he means confronting life by recognizing the essentially dynamic and impermanent nature of the universe. Recognizing that the only moment in which you can exist is right now.� It is the only moment in which you have ever or will ever exist.� The past is really an just a memory and the future only a fantasy. The Buddha states that ultimate reality and eternity lay within the present moment and beyond the human concept of time. | |||
| I have recently been working with these truths on an experiential level through meditation, yoga and music.� For me, playing music is really another form of meditation, another form of 'energy work'.� Music is an auditory expression of energy in the form of rhythm, texture and melody.� Yoga and meditation are a form of balancing energy and focusing it in the present moment.������ | |||
| So if the past is only an illusion, why bother with my photos at all?� It can be a form of attachment to something that is not real.� Why not just burn them?� The most important thing is to celebrate and learn lessons from the past, while releasing guilt and regret. Also to create a compelling vision of the future, releasing ourselves from anxiety, knowing that we embrace the future, moment by moment. | |||
| Memories of the past can be a heavy weight that we can carry around or a treasure that we keep with us.� Ultimately it is just a story that we tell in thoughts, words and pictures. Toxic people or experiences from our past can linger like dark shadows in the corners of our minds unless we release them. Celebrate the past, but also let it go.� Just like on the computer you can pick out the good stuff and let go of the rest.� We can choose what to learn and what to remember. When you tell your story to yourself or others, let it be magical and inspiring, not a tale of despair and frustration. | |||
| Well that is my Christmas or 'Holiday' message.� The idea that 'special days' like Christmas or your Birthday or the New Year happen once a year is an illusion.� Every day is Christmas, Christmas is Now. Feliz Navidad and Namaste, Eric |
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