Thoughts

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

Hoping you all had a peaceful day of giving Thanks!

Being with family always gives me a quick check up 
on how my nervous system has evolved. 
Thinking about the concept of “who am I” coming 
into the lives of my brother’s family and reframing 
it to “what am I” feels a lot more like how I want to feel.
 
Who am I feels so separate, almost
defensive;  what am I, feels more contented.
If I can stay in that field of Being 
the observer of all things going around me. 
Then I can be of service to others and 
be of the most help. 

I stepped into my nephew’s room, who was 
home visiting too, and was thrilled to see
the vastness of
his collection of shoes. @samtick_footwear
Some he made — prototypes
that were brought to market, some
never destined to be on the market.
Others, he simply liked and collected. 

I was struck by the vast personalities of each shoe.
Each with their own unique nervous system. 
It sent me looking for a favorite passage in Alistair Shearer’s book: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali 
he writes: 
”According to yoga, we suffer because
we live in ignorance. We are ignorant of our real nature.
Our true nature lies beyond the restrictions of
our careworn and humdrum existence,
ecstatically free and untouched by suffering.
Deep within the mind, beyond the faintest
flicker of thought, it is experienced as an
undying and omnipresent vastness. 
It is absolute consciousness.
Animating everything in creation,
this is the source and goal of all life… 
The more developed the nervous system,
the more it will express the qualities of pure
consciousness—intelligence, creativity, and bliss.”

Recognizing this year feels different than any 
other year of visiting, I am left with 
this quote
by T.S. Elliot
”We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.” 

Giving thanks to all of you that 
are curious and in my life.
Sharing our lives together
growing and expanding
is the absolute best.

12.01.2024 Deck Talk available upon request info@fifthfloormeditation.com