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. I wrote this for clipping my nails, but really, this could be used for any form of body care. Including trimming my nose hairs and ear hairs, two new activities I find myself having to undertake in middle age.
Clipping my nails,
I am aware that this body
is always changing
Impermanence is the way of the world
For many years, I recited several poems immediately upon waking:
I tried to combine the essence of these three into a single practice poem.
Waking up this morning,
I smile.
I am alive,
I have a precious human life,
and I am not going to waste it.
I will use my energies
to heal myself,
deepen my connection with others,
and build a beautiful continuation.
I will offer peace to others.
I will not lash out or attack others.
I will benefit other life as much as I can.
I have been increasingly practicing being in touch with my ancestors. Whenever I cook – especially when I work with dough – I think about all of my ancestors who have done the same mixing and kneading and baking and nourishing for their own families.
With the hands of my ancestors,
I add the ingredient of love.
May our practice
nourish all beings.
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’ve been in a space of reflection and atonement and forgiveness since Yom Kippur. And over the weekend I had a chance to engage in conversations and reflection related to the wounding and lack of skills that so many men walk around with.
I was so tough on my father during his life. I wanted more connection, more presence, more vulnerability, more ownership. He couldn’t offer me what I wanted so desperately. Hell, the only strong memory I have of him asking how I was feeling, I was 30!
But now, as I am working on my healing and trying to do better for my kids, as I am looking around at others doing the same, I see just how much effort he put in and did not get the credit for. Or, at least, not from me.
My father never even knew his own father. That man walked out on his family. His mother worked several jobs to keep him afloat. He had to take care of himself from a young age. He did not have a parent to make him dinner every night. When his friends had to go home for dinner, he had to go to a lonely apartment and fend for himself. He did not have a role model of how to be a parent. He did not have enough love. He did not have people to connect with in his pain – his friends thought it was cool that he had so much freedom, and even they didn’t recognize until recent years what that freedom really meant. These are not things that he shared with me, but that I learned or rediscovered after his death.
My father has many faults. But he really tried to do something different for his kids, to give them what he did not have. He did it imperfectly. He created a lot of pain. But he also gave us love and great memories and so many valuable skills and a comfortable life.
Thank you, dad. I would like to acknowledge now all the effort you put in to make things better for your children. I would like to acknowledge that you were criticized for your shortcomings and incapacities by me and by many others. I see now that you were doing your absolute best, and nobody acknowledged that for you.
I wish my father was still alive so that I could offer him that. Alas, I can only offer it to the part of my father that lives on in me.
For most of my life, I have carried an identity of “having bad handwriting.” This is somewhat ironic, as I write by hand on a daily basis and fill multiple notebooks in a month. Having stayed in practice with so much writing, one would think that I would maintain a modicum of legibility. Yet even I struggle to read my own writing.
I was reflecting on why I stick to this identity. Why, exactly, do I need to write so small, so cramped, so quickly? What, exactly, is the value of saving space by cramming in my writing? Why does it have to be done in such a hurry?
Ultimately, I realized that at the root of “I have bad handwriting” is simply yet another form of “rushing.” My handwriting is poor because I “have to” write quickly, to get it all down before it’s too late.
But this is not necessary. It is not founded on any real concern of “losing something” if I slow down. It is simply conditioning.
Writing by hand can be another form of meditation. One can flow, engage fully in the physical act of writing, sit with and marinate in the words being written. My writing could be made beautiful and efficient. Ultimately, all of that would be much better than the cramped rush I have been committed to all these years.
There is no rush. I can just enjoy the act of writing. I can treat it, too, as another way to express art, to be fully present.
I shed this identity of having bad handwriting, and my need to be in such a rush while writing.
No matter how many times you go through it, how ready you think you are, how much slack you’re prepared to give yourself: reentry is always challenging.
Reentry is painful, rocky, heated. The symptoms might vary –
You can’t avoid it. At best, you can minimize the impact. But really, the goal is simply to bear it compassionately while you build up momentum as quickly as you can.
Once you’ve picked up the flow, you’ll be good to go.
Percy points out that “the most spectacular problems of reentry seem to be experienced by artists and writers.” Percy then lists a bunch of reentry options, such as anesthesia (drugs), travel, sex, suicide, etc.
One of the reasons I’m such a huge fan of a daily routine and the Groundhog Day approach to working is that it attempts to minimize these exact problems of re-entry that Percy outlines. By scheduling little doses of daily transcendence in which you work on your art, you can pop in and out of your everyday life without becoming a horrible parent or drug addict or total maniac. (Many argue that that’s just the price of Great Art, but I’ve never never bought it.)