I hear you Mittakali, I hear you

The woman who wrote this lived about 2600 years ago. But she described her practice as though it were mine “I watched my thoughts/ piling themselves up/ all around me/…. Soon it was a whole city.” And now I am sitting here reassured in the knowledge that my situation is normal, probably common. There are all these thoughts. I have mine, Mittakali had hers and you have yours. And they seem so glamorous, so purposeful and so tangible that we build worlds out of them and worry about what will happen to them when we are gone – like they are our children or something.

I think everyone who meditates and practices some mindfulness, believes they are doing it wrong or that there is something wrong with their mind. But here in a poem written two and half millennia ago is someone uncovering the same habits and also being able to “leave those precious little houses” behind her. We are in this together, even if most of the time we don’t know we are. And all there is to do is take that first step which reminds me of of David Whyte’s ‘start close in. “Start close in, don’t take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in, the step you don’t want to take.” Let go. Let go. Let go.

There are many other fabulous poems including this one in this book

And if you want to hear David Whyte read his poem then here that is as well