The mindful Reading Revolution Fgilbert Goldsmiths

Key Points

Meditation

Free or uncensored, focused writing

The benefits of mindfulness

What is mindfulness?

Why Mindful reading? Intention Attention Attitude

The Three-Step Mindfulness Meditation

Reading yourself

Beyond narrow definitions of reading

Mindful reading

Eternity by William Blake He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy;  But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sun rise. 

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer BY JOHN KEATS Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Large Red Man Reading There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases, As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae. They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.   There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life, Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them. They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality, That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly   And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae, The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law: Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines, Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts, Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.

"Important" "We hurry through the so-called boring things  in order to attend to that which we deem more important, interesting. Perhaps the final freedom will be a recognition that everything in every moment is "essential" and that nothing at all is "important." By Helen M. Luke

Embracing Formal Practice: Tasting Mindfulness Have you ever had the experience of stopping so completely? of being in your body so completely, of being in your life so completely that you knew and what you didn’t know that what had been and what was yet to come, and the way things are right now no longer held even the slightest hint of anxiety or discord? It would be a moment of complete presence, beyond striving, beyond mere acceptance, beyond the desire to escape or fix anything or plunge ahead, a moment of pure seeing, pure feeling, a moment in which life simply is, and that “isness” grabs you by all your senses, all your memories, by all your very genes, by your loves, and welcomes you home By: Jon Kabat-Zinn

Mindful reading: devise a mindful plan

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