The Gift of Self – The Gift of Life
The Gift of Self – The Gift of Life
Category | Pleasure & Healing,As 2015 draws to a close will you give your self the gift of appreciating yourself?
What if you looked back over the year and acknowledged everything you have done, been, given, received and created! And sit down and savor that feast. For me this is part of letting the current year go. I like to gather the harvest of my life and whole-heartedly take it in and give thanks.
As you review the year you might notice things that transpired this year that you might dub as failures, disappointments, losses or hardships – and it’s good to acknowledge those as well. They are part of life too!
What would it be like to wholeheartedly give thanks for these too? No doubt they have taught us a lot about our selves and this complex and messy thing called life. Whither they are a perceived as a gift or not may depend on the story we are telling ourselves about our selves or about life.
Derek Walcott’s Poem – Love after Love fits so well with this theme and is one of my pleasure poems.
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
.
Derek Walcott
Next entry: Don’t think you can do it alone and there’s more pleasure with company!
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“I had signed up for the workshop with a vague idea of validating whether or not beekeeping was something I wanted to get back into, so wanted the real experience and ‘instruction’ around hive life. But I also wanted to spend time in the imaginative life of beekeeping – so the poetry, and your story of bees as a significant part of your healing journey was really important. Sensing into your relationship with them - the calm, the respect, the love – was an important part of witnessing how a relationship with bees teaches those very things. I loved how the different activities dove-tailed so well into one another. The ‘energy meditation’ of approaching the hive taught me well about respect for boundaries, and the deep purposefulness of their lives. We can co-exist beautifully as long as I ‘let them bee.’ “