Thoughts

Full moon Image over the Triveni Sangam
a place to bathe and flush away the
old habits and mis takes of the 
intellect. 

Saddhus of the Niranjani Akhara
at a hosted dinner with Swami Kailashanand Giri
photo by Hardy Weaver

Out of the darkness comes Light!

The Triveni Sangam is the confluence of three rivers. 
The Ganges (Ganga), the Yamuna and the sacred Saraswati River.
In Prayagraj. 
The Ganga flows with clear water, while the Yamuna is greenish, The Saraswati has no color. 
Where the two colors flow together there is a myth – 
where the darkness and light meet-
when bathing there, you awaken your consciousness.   

The energy is palpable and the water
has no taste or smell. It actually tastes
like what I imagine chalk would taste like.
As it’s filled with particles, like silica, that leaves 
your skin feeling remarkably soft.  

The last 16 days traveling in India for an Advanced
Teachers retreat, and then going to both Varanasi and Prayagraj
for Maha Kumbh Mela 2025 and watching our Teacher
being inducted as one of 12 Mandaleshwars of our tradition, 
are memories of a lifetime.
All spent with dear friends and cohorts.

Traveling and camping in India takes
a certain amount of perseverance and 
patience.  Both adaptations that this meditation practice
has truly taught me. 
From there, with your meditation twice-a-day practice, 
You begin what can be described as the wringing out 
of old habits of the mistaken intellect and 
making a clearing in your nervous system
for joy in all shapes and sizes to emerge.
You become aware of the “I should do this” and
before you know it, you see the change
of “I don’t want to do that, but feel charmed
to do this”. 
No more dodging bullets, simply Being in the world,
making the decisions that feel right 
for what is necessary and helpful for yourself
and the Collective. 
Learning from other devotees of our tradition
and 
being around the families of India in such Abundance
was truly breathtaking.
Correct inquiry, and knowing
how to decipher what is right and
what is wrong at any given time… 
Q + A 
is the foundation of the teaching.

01.19.2025 Deck Talk available upon request info@fifthfloormeditation.com

Image: Memory Weaving from Dec 22nd, 2024
discarded paint strip samples
a gift

Layers of embedded memory
Get tucked away in our nervous system.
The holiday season is here for us each year
to relive, relieve, reunite and rejoice
in the memories of the year/s past.
And looking forward to the years to come.

Memories for me can come in pairs… like the weaving
of our parents, two green – midwestern fields 
Of our sibling, two blue – blue sky/blue lake
Single red strands – love + strain
White punctuations – memory/stress yet to be released
This is what I love so much about weaving.
It is not a fast notion in any way.
It allows us to think about what we want 
to use as the warp. Memory of what was. And how
we feel about those memories now. 
The weave structure- How will I bind these memories
together? With ease or with intricate complications?
Losing my way in the memories and uprooting
my nervous system. What is.
It’s Easy to get lost in memories. 
Confession: there is a weave mistake
in this 8 1/2″ x 8 1/2″ piece of art.
I was too far ahead of myself when I realized
it was done. (sound familiar?)
I thought to myself, this layered weaving is forgiving. 
There is so much going on in it, my friend won’t mind.
Then I realized, how many mistakes have we all 
made in our lives?
They get forgiven, or not. Forgotten or not. 
It’s a choice we all make.
So here we are now. With the future in the making
of What is Coming.  
Those Red strands and White accents
Get reunited with each other,
and the Joy we feel with the memories of the 
times past gets layered and woven with new
memories in a more peaceful, colorful,
creative way. 
Our Vedic Meditation practice allows us 
to release these memories,
not forget them… to forgive them…
The forgotten embedded layers of our awareness
get released.
Vedic Meditation gives us the ability
to strand each color together, seeing the correlations of
each structure in our lives.
Making way for what we want. 
Filling ourselves with What was, What is and
What is ahead of us, in a layered 
weaving which I would call 
LIFE.

12.29.2024 Deck Talk available upon request info@fifthfloormeditation.com

Image from the cover of : ‘Go See 2011
New York: Louise Bourgeois: “The Fabric Works”
at Cheim & Read Gallery’ 

Bourgeois wrote, “The sewing is my attempt to keep
things together and make things whole.”

The work shown is of textile collages, clothing,
fragments from her childhood, growing up within a
tapestry restoration family business
embedded in her physiology,
all making rhyme or reason of her feelings
to cut, unravel, weave, knot and mend.

She stated that she always had a fear
of being separated/abandoned. 
The 2011 show and narrative
planted a seed for me that I now recognize 
more fully.  

Not only has it held things together, I literally, physically used
the mailer from the show to embody all of my wishes
and dreams from back in 2011.  
It has been part of my pin-up wall collage since then. 
I see how fully, even before 
my meditation practice began, that
“Thoughts become Things”.

Fulfillment comes from those that want to be fulfilled.
Sadness comes from those that want to be sad. 
Fulfillment of human consciousness lies in the
attainment of our understanding
of our abilities to bring together 
our absolute and relative values of life. 

Our matter of what can be. 

Who are we really? 
What is our true state of Being. 
Bullseye 

As we experience tomorrow 
as the darkest day of the year, let’s build
our own collage of wishes of fulfillment, love, desires,
memories we want to hold or forget,
All bound together.
Our true Being.
Make this upcoming year a year of Light and Fulfillment.
 
Happy Winter Solstice
with the smells of cookies baking,
incense burning
Beethoven Blues tickling your ears.

12.22.2024 Deck Talk available upon request info@fifthfloormeditation.com

OLGA DE AMARAL

I had the great good fortune to travel to Paris
to see the Columbian weaver
Olga de Amaral’s – The Texture of Time show at the
Cartier Foundation, there til March 16, 2025. 
The space and the 80 plus weavings were
extraordinary.
Each intricate weaving challenging my perception
of how they were made. 
 
In the show, there’s a description: 
“text” and “textile”
share
the same root, in Latin “Texere”, which means both 
to weave and to tell. 

Each of Olga’s textiles tells a unique story. 
Her connection with nature is felt throughout
the exhibition.  The large slate
boulders on the first floor, communing with
her large woven sculptures, give
way to nature’s textures. 
Color, Technique, Light emanating from inside. 
It was all there.

Connecting explicitly with our meditation practice and studies.
Olga states, 
”The vitality of a rock is its presence.”

How Vedic can you get?

I recall in more than 3/4 of my life, how I would feel
after going to a show like this. Jealousy,
despair, critical of my underachievements.
A persistent drumbeat in my mind that I will
never be good enough. 
“Snap out of it” I would say to myself. “Stop
bullying yourself.”  
Honestly, it wasn’t until I learned this technique of meditation,
to calm my nervous system, to see
what I was doing to myself.
This is what allows us to 
transcend all of these small self
indoctrinations. 
And let go of this discrimination of ourselves and of others. 
Vedic Meditation brilliantly brings the joy and light of life
into focus.  

In this way, I can be fully open to these incredible,
intricate, delightful pieces and be enamored by
Olga’s weaving techniques that could bring 
intrigue, happiness, life and love to 
the craft that I behold.

12.15.2024 Deck Talk available upon request info@fifthfloormeditation.com

Weaving creates a steady state. This particular piece
reminds me of the spine. Vertebra by vertebra. 
Consistent “picks” between each material
holding the structure in place.
All too often, through too much weight strain, 
too much sitting, too much repetitive motion,
we sense damage to the
structural apparatus that holds us upright. 
Or is it muscle memory around the spine? And 
tension we put upon ourselves?
Dr. John Sarno wrote books about the subject of
back pain and how it comes from too much stress.
I’m beginning to realize that there is
something to the books that Sarno wrote
which makes sense. 
Add our awareness of the possibility to
allow ourselves to be in a steady state,
without desires, beyond our self and back pain.

That gives us a path to move forward.

I love this quote from the Bhagavad-Gita:
“When a man completely casts off all desires
that have gone (deep) into the mind… when 
he is satisfied in the Self through the Self alone,
then is he said to be of steady intellect.”

This means then… if we allow ourselves to rest
in the state of blissful Being and realize that this 
steady Self is different from the mind, engaged
with all kinds of desires and activities, then
we can recognize our steady Self is really 
all we need.
And let go of the stresses and to-do’s.
It’s not that we become inactive. 
It’s that we stabilize our body and mind,
with our twice-a-day meditation practice,
to recognize the difference between 
our steady state of Being and an overly fraught,
desire- and object-driven mind. 

Weaving our way into Happiness.

12.08.2024 info@fifthfloormeditation.com