Your Precious Life

You have been given a huge gift and that is the gift of life. Buddha says that to be alive is as rare as if there were only one golden hoop that floats on the seven seas of the Earth and just one turtle that lives in those seas. Only once every hundred years does the turtle surface and it surfaces through the golden hoop.

And yet we all take it for granted. We secretly believe we will live forever and nothing bad will happen to us. This causes us to sleepwalk through our lives, where we rarely know the preciousness of each and every moment that brings us the joy of being alive.

CNN anchor Sara Sidner announced she has stage 3 breast cancer. She said, “I thank cancer for choosing me. I am learning that no matter what hell we go through in life, I am still madly in love with this life, and just being alive feels really different for me now.”

Cancer ripped away the cocoon she had been living in, the cocoon that most of us are imprisoned in, the prison of being asleep to life. She goes on to say “I am happier because I don’t stress about foolish little things that used to annoy me. Every single day I breathe another breath, I can celebrate I am still here with you. And I can love and cry and laugh and hope and that, my dear, is enough.”

Do we have to wait until we get a scary diagnosis or experience a sudden and unexpected loss or a horrific accident before we wake up and celebrate that we are alive? It is my experience that we can cultivate skills that wake us up to the joy of being fully here for life.

One of the ways to keep on reminding ourselves to be present for life rather than always thinking about it is to add moments of remembering throughout your day. You can set a timer that reminds you to pause and be here. You can also commit to pausing around something you do repeatedly throughout the day like going to the bathroom. I have used both of those, but I want to share with you one of my favorites. On my journey, I gathered little stones, which I saved in a sacred bowl. Then, several years ago as a dear friend was dying and the truth of death came close to the surface, I went to my sacred bowl of rocks and counted out 31. Each of them represented a day of the month and I put them in a special bowl, alongside another bowl, on my chest of drawers.

I then found a beautiful little pouch that a friend had given me with tiny bells on it and I put it on a cord so I could wear it around my neck. Every day of the month, I took a rock from the first bowl, which I called the ‘to be lived’ bowl, and put it in the pouch around my neck which reminded me I was being given the precious gift of another day of life. Then, at the end of the day, I took the rock out and put it in the second bowl, the ‘already lived’ bowl. I did this for every day of the month and then when it was done, I poured the ‘already lived’ bowl back into the ‘to be lived’ bowl and began another month.

I did this off and on for several years and it was very powerful to watch the ‘to be lived’ bowl empty as the ‘already lived’ bowl filled. That, along with the little bells on the pouch, kept on reminding me that life is a continually changing process and everything that appears will eventually disappear; everything that begins eventually ends. This includes your next breath, this time where you are reading, this day, this season, this year, and your life. You can either be afraid of this or you can use it to cut through the noise in your life in order to connect with the preciousness of each and every moment.

A meditation master was once asked, “How can we find happiness in a world where everything changes?” The master held up a drinking glass and said, “You see this glass? For me, it is already broken. In the meantime, I drink out of it and sometimes it even reflects the sun in beautiful patterns. But when I knock the glass over and it shatters, I say “Of course. When I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious. Every moment is just as it is, and nothing needs to be otherwise.”

Take a moment and look around the space you are in and realize that one day all of this will dissolve back into the mystery from whence it came. That includes your favorite pet, the pictures of your loved ones, and even the building you are in. See it as if you have never been on Earth before. Even if you have been in this space a thousand, thousand times, it is different than it ever has been before. See it all with fresh eyes so you can keep on reconnecting with the precious gift of life.

If you want to explore this further, I invite you to listen to my radio show available on Feb 1st at 5:00 AM & PM PST. LISTEN HERE. After the 1^st of Feb it will be available at any time on demand HERE.

Offerings:

Being Healed by Our Compulsions online self-paced course, is a good place to discover how to not struggle with life, using your compulsions as your teachers. And because our world is so enmeshed in struggle right now I want to offer you the course for a sliding scale from its regular price of $149 to $50. And if the $50 is beyond you, let us know. This will be available through January 31st. CLICK HERE to learn more about the course. Please email Aja at aja@maryomalley.com for your coupon code. CLICK HERE to see a masterclass video to get a sense of the course.

If you haven’t yet, I invite you to check out the audiobook for Belonging to Life narrated by me. Belonging to Life is an invitation to know again the joy of belonging to Life. It is available now on Audible and Amazon! See it on Amazon.