Toward Well Healed

October 17

What does it mean to change your life? What does it mean to put into place decisions and well thought out ideas?

I have been thinking about this as I play with times and amounts and poses and self in this new practice of mine…

I’ve heard it takes three months to change a habit. I have heard it takes 18 times to do something and make it your own.

I teach from a project by Robert Pinsky often – the favorite poems project. http://www.favoritepoem.org/videos.html

In one video a young Haitian photographer discusses why he love’s Sylvia Plath’s “Nick and the Candle Stick.” I love his reading because he’s passionate and brave and sometimes seems wrong to me – but that is the beauty of poetry reading…

I am also always caught on and intrigued by his description of Plath – as being from a “well healed existence…”

This is fascinating to me. Well, first, the idea that Plath was anywhere near well or healed… but isn’t in there also the concept that life is born in a way that requires healing…

this feels right to me… and I am intrigued in part because of Plath’s lack of such healing. I think a lot about what it means to come from her type of background… my type of background…

I went to a meditation retreat once – it was about love and kindness – co-taught by a former Tibetan Monk and a Jewish New York author.

We are all healing.

We learned the “Meta Prayer” – a prayer for love and kindness – I still say it most days, five years or so later. You say the prayer for the peace of people easy and close to you and people far away from you too… the scope and the shift allow for the perspective of the world to change.

There are monks in the mountains saying these prayers for all of us every day.

Can you feel it?

But lately I’ve been saying it for my heart. May my heart be safe. May my heart live in ease.

The beginning, perhaps, on the path to well healed…