I’ve participated in Sharon Salzberg’s 28-Day Real Happiness Meditation Challenge again this year. For this blog series, I wrote a poem or some kind of reflection on each day’s practice. You can find all the responses on the landing page.
On this last day of the meditation challenge and my own blogging series, I feel: Relieved. Reminded. Curious. Peaceful. Anxious. Sad. Connected. Surprised.
Mostly relieved, though. Writing every day, or almost every day, for 28 days, is challenging for me — sitting down for so long, making time on busy days, the act of typing, the space for thinking and synthesising, rummaging around in my heart, head, and body for responses that can be written about, that cohere, that form enough of a whole to communicate.
Sometimes it feels like there’s no discernible response, sometimes there’s just a churn within me that doesn’t resolve into anything legible. Sometimes another event, word, image, memory later in the day pulls a thread and I follow it. Sometimes just sitting down and typing puts unsuspected words on the page. I never know how it will be, and that’s partly fun, especially when words appear as if from nowhere but actually from everywhere.
I tend to treat writing the meditation response much like the meditation itself: my gaze is panoramic and diffuse, aware and lightly focused but not with any force or direction, just an openness to what comes. It’s a little like a séance.
In this final meditation, Sharon talks about dedicating the meditation practice. I’ll close with the Eco-Dharma dedication of the merit, which speaks to me.
Thank you for following along.