Fitness & Mental health

  This weekend, I had the joy of receiving some teachings at a nearby Buddhist center on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. The event happened in perfect synchronicity with a personal milestone , reaching middle age , a time that has surfaced many questions. Or perhaps, those questions were always there, simply waiting for me to give them form. Lately, it feels as if a powerful force is urging me to be real, to be true to myself  and to question what is often left unspoken. I’ve always felt different from others, and I say that without a trace of ego. Even as a child, my deepest fears were never about monsters or being alone at night; they were about death itself. I couldn’t accept that life, seen through this extraordinary and intricate vehicle we call the body, could just end like that. Later, another great fear appeared, the fear of losing my freedom. I responded by choosing a simple way of life: sometimes staying in hotels, sometimes in caves, carrying nothing more ...

  The other day, I was thinking about roses, how beautiful and spooky I find them and why they have thorns. I discovered that, botanically speaking, the “thorns” on roses are actually  prickles : " small, sharp outgrowths from the epidermis (the outer layer) of the stem, not true thorns, which come from deeper tissue." One of the reasons for these prickles is to keep animals from eating them. How smart can a plant be? That’s why I love jumping on my bike, to go somewhere, or sometimes nowhere at all. Even when the weather isn’t on my side, the freedom of moving with the air lets me enter a special space where my entangled thoughts slowly detangle. But this one turned out to be not the most pleasant one, although revealing. It was a very windy day, the kind of wind that comes  before the storm , with a charged, deep grey sky mixed with gentle golden sunset light. Those days when contrasts seem to be everywhere, and the mind allows itself to be seduced into places it d...