66
" When you ignore your belly, you become homeless. You spend your life trying to erase your own existence. Apologizing for yourself. Feeling like a ghost. Eating to take up space, eating to give yourself the feeling that you have weight here, you belong here, you are allowed to be yourself -- but never quite believing it because you don't sense yourself directly.
. . . I started teaching a simple belly meditation in which I asked people to become aware of sensations in their belly (numbness and emptiness count as sensations). Every time their mind wandered . . . I asked them to begin counting their breaths so they could anchor their concentration. Starting with the number one and saying it on the out breath, they'd count to seven and begin again. If they were able to stay concentrated on the sensations in their belly centers, they didn't need to use counting as a concentration anchor.
. . . you begin the process of bringing yourself back to your body, to your belly, to your breath because they -- not the mind medleys -- are here now. And it is only here, only now that you can make a decision to eat or not eat. To occupy your own body or to vacate your arms and your legs while still breathing and go through your days as a walking head.
. . . Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity. "
― Geneen Roth , Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
67
" The world would have us fill every space and occupy every corner of the mind. Yoga asks us to become empty; to come to the practice in openness and to allow the practice to remove our notions of good and bad,rich andpoor, health and disease; to sit and simply witness without shame, without guilt, and without judgment. Yoga allows us to let go of everything and hold on to nothing. It allows us to let go of our preconceptions about who or what God is, what it means to live a spiritual life, and how to achieve enlightenment.Whether slowly or in an instant, yoga empties us. What remains is a silence that surpasses understanding,is beyond words, and gives us the eyes to witness the suffering of the world, the ears to hear the world calling out forcompassion, and the heart to answer that call. "
70
" At night, with only the bedside lamp on, I would pretend to sleep and listened to Dad’s muffled crying in the semi-darkness, wishing that I could cry like him, that I could bring Stevan back from the dead by the strength of my tears. But they were regular tears carving the same slicing-hot trails down my cheeks, and in the end, I could not summon a distinct kind of grief for Stevan. Just the same grief that has gripped mankind for centuries, which time would inevitably ebb into a notch in one’s skin or a small limp in the way one walks or a bottled memory that would only resurface some nights. And soon, you’d struggle to remember how that person talked or how that person used to occupy a customized space in your life. And you don’t want to forget, but you don’t want to remember either, and there seemed to be no place where you could just exist. "
― V.J. Campilan , All My Lonely Islands
78
" So that you will hear me
my words
sometimes grow thin
as the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.
Necklace, drunken bell
for your hands smooth as grapes.
And I watch my words from a long way off.
They are more yours than mine.
They climb on my old suffering like ivy.
It climbs the same way on damp walls.
You are to blame for this cruel sport.
They are fleeing from my dark lair.
You fill everything, you fill everything.
Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy,
and they are more used to my sadness than you are.
Now I want them to say what I want to say to you
to make you hear as I want you to hear me.
The wind of anguish still hauls on them as usual.
Sometimes hurricanes of dreams still knock them over.
You listen to other voices in my painful voice.
Lament of old mouths, blood of old supplications.
Love me, companion. Don't forsake me. Follow me.
Follow me, companion, on this wave of anguish.
But my words become stained with your love.
You occupy everything, you occupy everything.
I am making them into an endless necklace
for your white hands, smooth as grapes. "
― Pablo Neruda , Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
79
" Things go backward.
And then, one day, whatever it is we had, it’s gone. It won’t come back. We both know it.
Whatever it is she let me have, she has taken it away. Whatever it is when two people agree to briefly occupy the same space, agree to allow their lives to overlap in some small area, some temporary region of the world, a region they create through love or convenience, or for us, something even more meager, whatever that was, it has collapsed, it has closed. She has closed herself to me. "
― Charles Yu , Sorry Please Thank You