yogalifeworks

Bees are mysteriously dying by the billions.  Researchers say that in the last 50 years domesticated honey bees have declined by 50%!  Bees pollinate from 15 – 30% of crops eaten by American consumers. Bees pollinate more than 100 crops from lettuce to cranberries, from apples to almonds.  As one researcher put it:  “Bees are the glue of modern agriculture.”

Usually my only thoughts of bees are about avoiding getting stung. Today, I’m seriously loving bees and praying they come back in numbers to resume their role of pollinating and nurturing the plant species to sustain life on this planet.  Why do we tend to see the good in something only after it’s gone, or appears to be on the verge of extinction?   How many precious resources, within us and all around us, fly under our radar screen and are insignificant to us—until we realize their worth?

In our daily lives, each sign of kindness and caring—cooking a meal, doing the wash, showing up at work every day, letting someone go in front of you in the check-out line—is the glue that creates a human crop of understanding and connection.  And a simple “thank you” becomes honey for the heart.

.

The Greek philosopher, Epictetus, (55-135 C.E.) stated that people are not disturbed by the actual things that happen, but by their opinions of the things that happen.

The author of these words, Epictetus, was a former slave who became a renowned philospher in ancient Greece—he went from being treated as property to owning his own thoughts and feelings. What about us— do we choose to remain a slave to our opinions, assumptions and expectations or do we choose to drop our “position” and move on?

The other day, I was driving in a car with a close relative who repeated a story that i’ve heard many times over and over again in the past. Hearing the same recycled story, I became agitated and impatient with the person, with thoughts running through my head like: “oh, no, not this again,” “this is a waste of time.” I began judging the person and the story. I made this person wrong for telling the story and hearing the story was becoming unbearable. The inner fire was building.

Then I managed to catch myself before I boiled over with some fiery reaction. This person wasn’t the cause of my mental impatience; the recycled story wasn’t the culprit either. It was the way that I was reacting to the story. I was creating my own agitation, caught in my personal opinion about the story and having to hear it again.

Once I realized this, I laughed to myself and I heard the rest of the story without judging or reacting. It was just a story. How many times do we lose our perspective, and give something so much power through the workings of our mind that it causes us to lose balance? Perhaps everything is just a story that can’t touch our Inner state, if we choose not to let it.