Curiosity

One of the attitudes we can bring into meditation is open curiosity, with gentleness and care, without judgement.

With each breath, each sensation and thought, embracing nature as each moment unfolds.

What does the breath actually feel like right now?
Where is it most vivid — at the nostrils, the chest, the belly?
What happens when a thought arises — can we notice how it forms, lingers, and dissolves?

This shift softens the mind’s tendency to control, resist or improve.

When Death Arrives, Mary Oliver (extract)

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Guide: Noelle Lim

Image credit: Josh Porterfield, Unsplash