You probably already have everything you need RIGHT NOW.

A Notebook for Pessimists

Rock Climbing

I am an enthusiastic (novice) climber and it is brilliant for so many reasons.
These are the main benefits for me...

1. Upper body 'pulling' strength. This is completely lacking in yoga but I get my fix here. Helps my hand balancing skills and shoulder health tremendously.
2. Being present. You have no choice but to be in the moment with this stuff, especially when up high. When i'm focused on exactly what i'm doing as i'm doing it i know i'll be safe. This being present stuff is also a mighy fine trick for beating fear with a stick! 
3. Climbing is a movement puzzle. It requires great body awareness and movement intelligence, again in a very different way to the yoga, besides the obvious physical stuff involved.

I highly recommend giving it ago!!!

The downside (for me anyhow) is it always ruins my manicure. You can't have it all huh... 

(image of Natures rock climbers...they certainly don't look like they have the fear! from erinconsidine via keelsterkeel)

Found here

Time Zone

Time Zone By Yumi Sakugawa
(From  Saturday Rumpus Comic)

too-lateness

Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. It's a relation of self to the moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it's no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it's time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now.

--Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary.
  via evencleveland

"...Everything except the fact that i didn't need to know. That it was enough to trust that what i had done was true...to believe that i didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water was enough. That it was everything. It was my life - like ALL lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. 

How wild it was to let it be."

 -- Cheryl Strayed, Wild

"They glided rapidly along, Stephen rowing, helped by the backward-flowing tide, past the Tofton trees and houses—on between the silent sunny fields and pastures, which seemed filled with a natural joy that had no reproach for theirs. The breath of the young, unwearied day, the delicious rhythmic dip of the oars, the fragmentary song of a passing bird heard now and then, as if it were only the overflowing of brim-full gladness ... They spoke no word; for what could words have been but an inlet to thought? and thought did not belong to that enchanted haze in which they were enveloped—it belonged to the past and the future that lay outside the haze."

-- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.

(Found via evencleveland, image from here)

"Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience. It isn’t more complicated than that. It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it." 

 

—  Sylvia Boorstein

Be present

During practice start to sense the quality and clarity of the movements you make and ask yourself these things...

Are you bringing more effort then required?

Are you adding anything unnecessary to the movement?

Are you really trying to sense how you feel, moment by moment, through the movement?