May you find something to help you on your journey.
Gathas are short practice poems that we can use to bring mindfulness into daily activity.
As I condition my hair,
I feel my heart soften
Through loving myself
I learn to love others
Sometimes I adjust it for a slightly different focus:
As I condition my hair,
I feel my heart soften
The more I care for myself
The more I am can do for others
Flossing is a difficult habit for me. My parents didn’t model good tooth care (my father died with no teeth), and it’s always been a slog for me. Which is why I have developed several different practice poems!
This is the first one I came up with and taught to my young children.
Flossing my teeth
and strengthening my gums
I improve my overall health
I know that even the smallest detail matters
Between each tooth,
space for patience.
By caring for this body,
I care for the Earth.
I deeply want to care for the Earth, and my body is not separate from the Earth, and so it deserves my patient care too.
Gathas are short practice poems. They can help us bring mindfulness, concentration, and insight to daily activities.
The basic form of practice is to: pause before you undertake some action, come back to your breathing, recite the gatha in your mind or out loud, and then initiate the action with mindfulness. Another method is to keep the gatha flowing through your mind while you perform the action, tying one line to an in breath and the next to an out breath.
I find that gathas, especially when practiced regularly, can wake you up to things you take for granted, expose habit energy, and steadily retrain your inner voice. I also find that my days are more beautiful when filled with poetic reminders of the practice and the wonders of life.
Writing your own gathas is a longstanding Zen tradition. I take great inspiration from my teacher in this, using gatha-crafting as a way to personalize and deepen my practice. Writing gathas makes the practices meaningful to me, and it helps me to reclaim areas of my life that I am less present to (for me, flossing is a great example of a rich area of practice.)
Here are some of mine:
Articles about gatha practice:
Breathing, sitting, and walking meditation are wonderful, but in our daily life we can be so busy that we forget our intention to breathe or walk mindfully. One way to help us dwell in the present moment is to practice with gathas. Gathas are short verses that help us practice mindfulness in our daily activities. A gatha can open and deepen our experience of simple acts that we often take for granted. Focusing our mind on a gatha, we return to ourselves and become more aware of each action. When the gatha ends, we continue our activity with heightened awareness.
Sources of gathas from Thich Nhat Hanh:
Other sources of gathas:
I’ve been cleaning up and publishing some of my notes from running The One Ring (2nd edition). This page serves as a place to collect and organize the various posts.
Table of Contents:
I would say the majority of games I’ve played in and observed start at The Prancing Pony in Bree. Nothing wrong with that, of course, it is an iconic location for Lord of the Rings fans and a great meeting place for multiple cultures.
But sometimes we like to mix it up. Here are some suggestions for other starting points:
These are suggested with the idea of being a newly formed mixed-culture party. Other locations might be suitable with a more restricted set of cultures.
I’ve been running a campaign of The One Ring for two players for over a year now. Questions about adjusting TOR for two players seem to come up surprisingly often, so I wanted to share my notes.
In short, I recommend giving 5 extra experience points, adjusting the fellowship pool amount, and playing as you normally would. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be!
Table of Contents:
I do not recommend reducing the attribute TNs (i.e., calculating from a base of 18 instead of 20). While it makes things initially easier, players can ramp up to a power level where it’s difficult to challenge them. Starting with base 18 makes this happen much sooner.
I do recommend adding 5 extra starting experience for each player.
Players need to be aware that in a two player game, not all combinations of cultures and characters will work. I recommend some extra hand holding here to make sure that there’s good coverage of the necessary journey/council/combat/healing skills.
We have not used the Strider distinctive feature in our game, and this hasn’t been a noticeable difficulty for the party. It is an option though.
You could start the characters at Valour and/or Wisdom 2.
DanW uses (8 – player count).
“I sometimes calculate the base pool = 8 less number of heroes, rather than just number of heroes. It boosts small parties and debuffs larger ones, with no impact on a typical party of 4.”
We play 1.5 hr sessions, I gave them with an extra +1 to the baseline (i.e., 3 points per session before cultural and patron bonuses). The end result is effectively the same as DanW’s.
With just two players, we don’t play with fellowship focus. No shadow point when the other takes a wound, only +1d when assisting.
My personal approach was to start with mimimal adjustments, tell the players that we might have to adjust things along the way if we find there’s a balance problem, and then just dive into the game.
I think the big pitfall to avoid in a two player game is making things too easy out of worry about difficulty. I observe my own tendency to pull punches and give extra rewards when playing with two players. And this does help in the beginning, but it’s also easy enough to get yourself into a spot where it’s hard to challenge the players.
I recommend remembering you have the option to offer Success with Woe instead of a Failure in many circumstances. This can allow the players to push the narrative forward instead of getting stuck, while having fun, awful setbacks accompanying it.
Fights are definitely a place where I worry – I don’t want to make every fight easy, but I also don’t want to wipe the party unexpectedly. In the first combat roll of our campaign, one of my players took nasty wound and I thought it was going to be a TPK. But since then, they have gone better than expected.
It’s fine for parties to struggle with combat. My players have gotten wise about recruiting help, using situations to their advantage, and finding alternatives to combat.
Moria warbands are a good way to model help from multiple NPCs.
I recommend giving one of the players the Cleaving quality on a piece of treasure – this helps keep the momentum up in fights.
I’m open to Skirmish stance from Strider mode, they haven’t reached for it yet. But it’s something to consider.
We focus so much on the adjustments needed for smaller parties, I just want to talk about some of the benefits I see from my small group:
Something that has come up in several different games of The One Ring has been the topic of taking someone prisoner and delivering them to justice in some settlement or other. This comes up especially often in relation to a certain published adventure with a despicable dwarf, but has also happened in other situations as well. I wanted to capture my thoughts on this matter, and how I approach this type of situation in my games.
I understand the drive to do this. We are roleplaying Tolkienian heroes, oriented to the good, and non-Orc enemies should be captured and tried by those with more authority. The problem is that the sense of justice and judgment that holds in our world doesn’t really hold in Eriador. We have a “justice system,” and we put punishment and locking people up out-of-sight and into the hands of “qualified people.”
But the towns and villages that remain in Eriador are small, disparate remnants of an emptied, collapsed kingdom. There is no central authority. Each settlement makes their own law. Nobody wants to take prisoners off of your hands. Nobody wants to lock up prisoners for long periods of time, continuing to feed and care for them in the meantime. People certainly would not appreciate you to bringing problems INTO their homes!
In fact, what we think of as “jails” or “prisons” are (mostly) non-existent!
If you bring a prisoner to one of these places, the first question that should arise is what do these people care about the alleged crimes?
In many cases, the people are likely to not be interested, and if they can be persuaded to care, they’re going to offer lesser punishments than what the players are expecting, including the prisoner’s likely freedom.
Because the nature of punishment is not quite the same as what the players are expecting. If you’re not keeping prisoners long-term, you are left with a small set of outcomes. These outcomes are not oriented around an ideal of “justice” as much as maintaining social stability and limiting the possibilities of vendettas and revenge cycles. Execution is extremely unlikely as an outcome, though if crimes were heinous enough it might happen. That means you’re left with:
This judgment is likely to be decided by a local leader, a council of leaders, possibly involving a neutral arbiter to set the terms of settlement among the parties.
So, for the most part, nobody’s going to help you take prisoners off your hands and serve them justice (unless you’ve been asked to do just that). If they do, it’s not going to be the “justice” you’re wishing for. They’re likely to be banished at best, and that means their freedom to do the same elsewhere.
What options are left?
A tough set of choices for the heroic players who wish “justice” to be served in a more “civilized” manner!
I started thinking about this after discussing a matter with other The One Ring loremasters: would Bilbo be able to find his way to Rivendell, or should they all still have to search?
First, there’s the question of what’s Bilbo’s actual familiarity with Rivendell? Because that can strongly impact the question. If he hasn’t been back since, he can’t offer any help!
Table of Contents:
For myself, it seems apparent that Bilbo has to have visited Rivendell more than the several instances we learn about in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. We know that Bilbo remains odd and disappears from the Shire occasionally. But the biggest evidence to me is that he becomes quite proficient in Sindarin and has translated several Elvish poems and songs into the common tongue (or the Hobbit tongue), as we see in the final accounting of his writings at the end of Lord of the Rings.
Together with extracts from Books of Lore translated by Bilbo in Rivendell.
Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Lord Of The Rings: One Volume (p. 1027). (Function). Kindle Edition.
To me, that seems hard to do this well with simply a short number of years spent in Rivendell at the end of his life – a period where the Ring’s preservation powers were no longer affecting him and he became increasingly tired. Is that the most likely time to pick up a new language, rather than continue to translate a language he’s learned well enough in years before? I, personally, do not think that he did most of this learning after giving up the Ring, when old age started setting in on him in earnest. Though it is not out of the question.
It is also noted that he taught younger hobbits songs and stories, and that happened years before he left the Shire for Rivendell.
‘He did not make it up,’ said Strider. ‘It is part of the lay that is called The Fall of Gil-galad, which is in an ancient tongue. Bilbo must have translated it. I never knew that.’
Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Lord Of The Rings: One Volume (p. 186). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Another exchange shows that Frodo has been taught at least enough Elvish to have Bilbo be surprised at Frodo’s ignorance.
Suddenly Bilbo looked up. ‘Ah, there you are at last, Dúnadan!’ he cried.
‘Strider!’ said Frodo. ‘You seem to have a lot of names.’
‘Well, Strider is one that I haven’t heard before, anyway,’ said Bilbo. ‘What do you call him that for?’
‘They call me that in Bree,’ said Strider laughing, ‘and that is how I was introduced to him.’
‘And why do you call him Dúnadan?’ asked Frodo.
‘The Dúnadan,’ said Bilbo. ‘He is often called that here. But I thought you knew enough Elvish at least to know dún-adan: Man of the West, Númenórean. But this is not the time for lessons!’ He turned to Strider. ‘Where have you been, my friend? Why weren’t you at the feast? The Lady Arwen was there.’
Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Lord Of The Rings: One Volume (pp. 232-233). (Function). Kindle Edition.
This passage demonstrates that Bilbo obviously has a relationship with Aragon. That relationship seems connected to Rivendell based on his ignorance of Strider’s Bree-name. We certainly know that Bilbo is the one who composed the All that is Gold lines that are associated with Aragorn.
There’s a strong possibility that this relationship developed in the end of his life. Bilbo settles in Rivendell in 3001, and Aragorn and Gandalf leave to hunt for Gollum in 3008, which does leave enough time for a friendship to develop in that period.
But it is also possible that Bilbo and Aragorn have a much longer relationship. Aragorn would presumably have been present in Rivendell during the stopover on the way to the Lonely Mountain. However, he would have been 10 and called Estel, with no knowledge of his heritage (which is revealed to Aragorn in 2951). There is also the potential that Bilbo visits Rivendell again sometime (or more than once) between 2951-2956, before Aragorn begins his errantry.
Another factor to consider is the change in disposition of the elves, as reflected on in the post Notes on ‘The Coming of Bilbo to Rivendell’ from The Blog of Mazarbul. In The Hobbit, the elves are mostly bemused at Bilbo, but he is a respected figure by The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps even a figure of curiosity. To me, this transformation in opinion speaks to more encounters than those described in The Hobbit.
While not cannon, in TOR 1e, the adventure “Concerning Archers” places Bilbo in Rivendell, too. That’s canon in my game, at least, and colors my thoughts.
All of this musing is set to anchor a question of game mechanics:
My players have decided to travel to Rivendell for the first time with Bilbo. Bilbo’s visit was planned in advance. Would you still have them search for the entrance? Seems like they should have no trouble with Bilbo, but any return visit would require the searching.
Some opinions that I appreciated from the TOR discord:
And a counter-opinion:
I don’t recall any extravagant amount of time he spent trying to learn the path, though. Not even sure why he’d want to put in that kind of work. Even less likely a goal the more he aged.
I see Bilbo more as cheerily blundering along the woods, confident that sooner or later one of the elves will find him and escort directly to a banquet table.
In my game world, Bilbo has certainly been back to Rivendell several times and has an ongoing relationship with the Elves.
This does not eliminate the need to find the stones, though Bilbo would have an easier time of it.
However, I had Bilbo disappear at an inopportune moment, causing the party to search for him and the path. Narratively, I described this as a situational problem: BILBO was invited to Rivendell, but he had extended this invitation to his friends as well, only remembering as he closed in on the valley that his two guests had not actually been invited by the elves… something he needed to sort out with the Rivendell wardens.
The players still executed the search, and they eventually found by Bilbo and the wardens, who then led them into the valley proper.
The earliest moment when Bilbo could have met Aragorn was in The Hobbit when 10-year-old Aragorn was living there with his mother. But Aragorn did not then know his true identity: he was Estel, and I don’t think anyone in Rivendell would have told the truth about the boy to a hobbit passing through.
Aragorn learns his true identity at age 20, in 2951, which is two years after Balin and Gandalf visited Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit. So even if Bilbo had visited Rivendell during those 10 years he is still unlikely to have learned who Estel is.
Aragorn meets Gandalf when he’s 25 (2956) and from age 26-49 he’s wandering Middle-earth, serving in Rohan and Gondor.
Frodo is born in 2968; his parents die in 2980 (same year Aragorn meets Arwen again in Lorien!). If we assume that Bilbo adopts Frodo in 2980/81, it is unlikely that he would have left Frodo for long trips to Rivendell after the adoption.
The Farewell Feast is 3001; that same year Gandalf ‘opens his heart’ to Aragorn and the Ranger guard on the Shire is doubled.
Bilbo settles in Rivendell in 3002.
Gilraen, Aragorn’s mother, dies in 3007. From 3008-3017 Aragorn and Gandalf seriously search for Gollum.
So when did Aragorn tell Bilbo his story? The first option is that Bilbo visited Rivendell sometime between 2951-2956, before young Aragorn goes on his great wanderings. Aragorn, being new to his true identity, might have told Bilbo his story. But his identity was secret for a reason, and would he have revealed that secret to a visitor, even a respected one?
The second option is that Bilbo didn’t hear Aragorn’s story until he settled in Rivendell. This is after Gandalf ‘opened his heart’ to Aragorn, who would then have had good reason to establish a relationship with Bilbo. This leaves only 6 years of regular contact (before Aragorn takes up the hunt for Gollum), but that’s long enough for mortals to become friends.
My head-canon, thean, is that Bilbo composed the All That is Gold poem after Gilraen died in 3007, to comfort his friend and let him know that he, Bilbo, believed that Aragorn would fulfill his destiny and bring Estel back to the world.
Further, I quickly decided that if I was going to attempt something fairly unique, it would be best to consider Bilbo from an outsider’s perspective…and not just any outsider, but the Elves of Rivendell. It may seem a strange choice, for upon Bilbo’s first coming to Rivendell, the Elves seem to think of him (not unjustly) as a fairly banal figure; amusing and good-hearted, but of little consequence.
Yet it struck me that this perspective must have been altered by the time Bilbo returns to Rivendell to dwell there, following his 111st birthday. Not only is Bilbo a character altered by his experience, he is (I would contend) altered to the point of being amazing…even to the Eldest. For now, he is girt with a blade out of their own ancient history, bedecked in mail surpassing that of many of their captains and lords, with tales of dragons and eagles and gollums. Bilbo is not just strange, he is wondrous, even to an Elvish perspective.
And he is ungreyed by age. Half a century and more has passed – a small span of time to an Elf, but not so small as to be wholly unremarkable. The Elves are not unfamiliar with mortals, they know how swiftly they wither and perish…yet Bilbo does not, Bilbo has not.
And, of course, there is the matter of his magic ring. Of course, none truly guessed that it was the One at this time (and how much greater would their wonder have been upon realising what he had truly borne!), but for a mortal to have stumbled across, worn, and willingly given up even a lesser ring, one of the essays in the craft…even that is extraordinary. Even that is a feat.
So not only is Bilbo exceedingly strange, he must be strange to the fairies themselves. It’s a rare thing, I think, for an Elf to truly experience that Faerie wonder…yet I am sure that Bilbo must have inspired it in them. He is extraordinary, quite simply, even to Faerie creatures. And I felt like trying to explore at that and pick at it was a worthwhile attempt.
It seems that he had some knowledge of Elves before LOTR or The Hobbit but had probably not met them personally before his journey unlike Frodo. The Baggins family never did anything unexpected and you probably knew what they would say to a question so usually you didnt bother asking them. Frodo did however most likely taught by Bilbo who became friends with the Elves after the Hobbit.
it was only due to freequent visits to Rivendell that he grew learned in the lore of the elve tongue…
He often visited elves, so one would presume he picked it up, as one would pick up Spanish, if one took a holiday in Spain annually, for instance.
I have had many people describe how much they’ve gotten out of their one-on-one talk therapy sessions and encourage me to go to talk therapy. I have read many complaints (often from women) about how they can get their partners to go to couples counseling, but there’s a wall when it comes to one-on-one talk therapy, and they feel stuck.
So, I just want to flat out say it: I have been to one-on-one talk therapy, I don’t find much help in it. That’s ok for me, I hope it can be ok for you, too. There are other healing modalities to explore!
One-on-one therapy can certainly work well when you have found someone you have a good rapport with. I have tried several therapists, and I did not feel a rapport or really feel like their feedback spoke to me and my challenges at all. So, finding a therapist becomes a monumental task – searching for providers, figuring out insurance, scheduling initial consultations, repeating the same parts of the story over and over again, and perhaps even finding that it wasn’t much help in the end. Maybe your therapist has done a lot of work with their own suffering, maybe they haven’t. Maybe they specialize in your type of struggle, maybe they don’t. Maybe they can speak to you in ways that are impactful, and maybe they just annoy you. There is so much friction. I am very understanding of everyone who resists it, as much as I understand it has helped many people. It is not a universal solution, but one that relies on luck.
I went to therapy after my father tried to commit suicide. I didn’t feel like I got much understanding or tooling out of the process. Several people thought I should try to “get over it” in various ways, and there were many encouragements that I should focus on my studies and my work. Overall, that was a pretty big let down to me in a really difficult time in my life. Repeating the friction-involved process over the years has not encouraged me further.
But I don’t think that means we have an excuse to avoid help. Because there are alternatives – like group work. I have participated in several support and sharing groups. I’ve also offered peer-led support groups. It’s a format I love and have gained so much from, even though it gets much less attention than one-on-one talk therapy (at least in conversations I have).
In group work, I don’t have to find the right person to talk to or develop a rapport with anyone. I am exposed to others, some who I will resonate with and some who I don’t. The group isn’t there to offer advice, but rather to share their own experiences and to listen to others. And there is a great power in that. I find a lot of acceptance, simply by being listened to by others without interruption. I find that I’m not alone, that the struggle I thought was so lonely is shared by others. I am often surprised at how an individual I thought was so put together has many struggles on the inside. I gain insight into my own struggles and patterns by listening to the struggles of others. I can see what it looks like to be further ahead on the path of healing and transformation – and that it is still a path that has its ups and downs. I can appreciate how far I have come, and cultivate compassion for those who are just starting.
In group work, we practice showing up. We practice sitting and listening, without judgment or attempts to fix. We practice speaking about our own experiences only, not speaking for groups or for other people. We practice sharing honestly of our own experience, encouraged by the vulnerability of others. This is all valuable medicine, and I think medicine that is best administered in a group. Sure, you get less time to ventilate your problems than in an hour of talk therapy, but you gain so much more in terms of perspective and acceptance and a shared struggle.
And that’s the right format for me.
Someone asked a wonderful question in a closed community, and it turned out to generate a lot of reflection and thought on my own practice. I wanted to capture that and share my answer more openly.
Speaking as an engineering consultant, a farmer, and a father: I acknowledge that there are so many tasks that must be done with some degree of speed or urgency. We operate on deadlines. We have limited windows in which to accomplish things.
Mindfulness, to me, involves recognizing the appropriate response to the nature of the moment and acting accordingly. “This is a moment that requires urgency.” So I must operate with a sense of speed. But it does not have to be hurried. I can still operate mindfully, with full presence and awareness, while working quickly. I can participate without getting overwhelmed or getting lost in feelings of anxiety and worry.
I often think about a story I heard told by one Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastics – I don’t have a source, unfortunately, but a vague feeling it may have been Br. Phap Huu in an episode of “The Way Out is In” podcast. When traveling, Thay liked to practice mindful walking through the airport. They had done this and arrived at their gate, where they waited to board the flight. Just before time to board, an announcement came on, and their gate had moved to another across the airport. The monastic telling the story recalls that they looked at each other with concern – how would they make it to the gate in time given the slow pace of walking? Thay looked at them and said, “Run!”
In these moments, I can apply mindfulness to the body from time to time. Even in the most urgent of paces, I can afford to pause, to take a break, even if only for 10 seconds, even if only for one breath. I can notice if I have let emotions take control. I can notice if I need a break. I can pause, reconnect, and engage with the wonders around me. This is necessary to avoid getting caught up in the energy of rushing.
I also practice by identifying transition moments: when I am not required to move with speed any longer. Because it is so easy to let that energy carry over into moments that do not require any haste, or to channel it into an interaction with another person.
In my own life, a consistent moment of practice here is the transition from “cooking and plating dinner” to “enjoying dinner.” Often, cooking dinner is a focused, fast-paced event: I’m often making 2-3 dishes, cleaning up after myself as I work, prepping the table, plating food. I like to finish eating dinner with most of the cleanup already done so I get to play time right away. I like to serve and eat hot food. It’s focused, it’s fast, I enjoy it. But it’s easy to let that feeling carry on into dinner. The transition from “chef mode” to “dinner mode” occurs in the moment between when my plate touches the table and I sit down. If I am swept up by a feeling of rushing, it’s easy to scarf down the food before I realize what’s happened, then feeling the horror of realizing I didn’t even taste the food I worked so hard for! Instead, I know that is a moment of mindful practice: to recognize the change of pace, to return to the body with a few breaths. And that’s often enough to shift everything. If I feel the energy has not dissipated, I quietly recite the contemplations or an expression of gratitude, and mindfully eat the first bite.
The practice of mindfulness may also result in recognizing the moments where there is a tendency to rush. Once there is awareness, there is an opportunity to change the conditions and allow ourselves to move slower. Perhaps there’s recognition that some things need to be let go to make more space.
It is also useful to apply mindfulness to the impulse to rush itself. Do we actually need to rush? Are there real benefits in this moment? If I get swept up in a rush to leave the house quickly because I’m late, how much time am I actually saving compared to a normal, or even relaxed-yet-focused, pace? I might find the difference is only a few minutes. But if I get into an accident because the energy of rushing and the anxiety over being late carried into the drive, I have only become more late. If I recovered a few minutes of lateness, but arrived overwhelmed and hurried and anxious, is that a good trade? Or have we only made the situation more challenging?
“Hello, my impulse to rush, to move quickly. Hello, my pressure to get something done by an arbitrary deadline. I know that you are in there. I see you. But I ask, where did you come from? Are you sure we need to rush? Or are you simply the habit energy of my grandmother, raising eight children, trying to get everything done and keep everything in perfect order?”
It helps to look into this and know. Sometimes, I see that I’m simply rushing out of habit or childhood training. Often, I can calm my body with the recognition that this is not an emergency. I do not need to move as quickly or urgently as my body feels the need to.
I find the practice of having periodic or random bells sounding throughout the day, used as a prompt to stop and return to the body, is very helpful for transforming this energy. This practice has revealed many times when I have become swept up by an energy or feeling and not been aware of it. I might even feel the impulse not to stop, to avoid it, because I have to keep going. The bell offers an opportunity recognize and reset.