Week Five: Day 2 – Simply Gaze

One of the exercises that I have engaged in myself, and I have also invited others to engage in, is this practice of focusing one’s attention on an object, any object, something as simple as a table for instance, and actually doing a little mental exercise where you simply gaze at the object without attempting to put any qualifications on it, brown table, black table, nice table, not nice table, table that is in good condition, table that is pockmarked, etc., etc., all the kinds of things that we do. It is also a very powerful exercise to this with a living thing: a tree, an animal, an insect. I just thought what would it be like to do it with a fly [laughs], because I generally impute certain qualities to flies, which may or may not be true. So I think that just simply being with what is and somehow suspending that judgmental voice that is always making qualifications is a very, very powerful thing to do. And I think something that can bring real insight, both into ourselves, into the world we live in, and also a deep sense of peace and centeredness.

– Br. Robert L’Esperance

Question to Journal
To what part of nature do you most feel connected, and why?