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    Small Awakenings
    Small Awakenings
    Small Awakenings
    Ebook149 pages1 hour

    Small Awakenings

    By Amber Foxx

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    About this ebook

    Reflections on Mindful Living

    Even commonplace events can have depth and meaning, if we take time to notice. Power outages. Desert rain. Bats in flight. A stranger singing in a park.

    In this collection of essays, Amber Foxx—a former college professor, now a mystery writer and yoga instructor—blends her insights as a teacher with her love of words to chronicle moments of beauty and deep attention.

    Join her on a reflective journey though the small awakenings mindfulness brings into everyday life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAmber Foxx
    Release dateAug 9, 2018
    ISBN9781386072119
    Small Awakenings
    Author

    Amber Foxx

    Amber Foxx, author of the award-winning Mae Martin Psychic Mystery Series, has worked professionally in theater, dance, fitness, yoga and academia. She has lived in both the Southeast and the Southwest, and calls New Mexico home.

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      Small Awakenings - Amber Foxx

      The Fifth Soul

      WINTER 2014/ SPRING 2015, Virginia

      In Charles Hudson’s Conversations with the High Priest of Coosa, a fictionalized ethnography of the early Native people of the American South, the high priest explains the four souls to the Spanish narrator. The Coosa, ancestors of the Creeks, Seminoles and other Southeast tribes, believed that a human had four souls. The life soul, residing in the crown of the head, was the first to depart the body after death and also the one that could linger as a ghost; the liver soul, which lingered for seven days after death, then dissipated; the heart soul, which lingered for a month, subsequently went into the earth; and the bone soul, which stayed for a year, remained connected with the feelings of loved ones. It wasn’t a ghost, but an awareness that could recognize when the living honored its memory. The people who had this belief were my ancestors on my mother’s side.

      In the modern world, I think we have a fifth soul. The word soul. It lives on even longer than the bone soul. It resides in papers, letters and books. A few years after my father’s passing, my sister and I finally sorted through a huge box of family pictures and papers he’d left us, so we could donate them to the state archives. They dated from the Civil War through to the twentieth century. The letters written in World War II were touching and charming, and the vacation pictures from the nineteen-twenties, in those modest swimming costumes, delightful. Among those papers were two short stories I’d written. I’d forgotten about them. One had been published in a teen magazine when I was twelve. The other was one I’d written when I was in high school.

      I felt my father’s word soul with me, not only in his letters that were in the box, but also in the love of words that made him save other people’s letters and my stories. That box was what made me get serious about writing. I had novels in progress and a head full of ideas and characters, but hadn’t thought about trying to get published. In retrospect, I realize I did it in part to honor my father’s word soul. He loved theater, especially Shakespeare, and he also loved a good mystery series. (His favorite was the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters.)

      By writing books and short stories, blogging and reviewing, I’m honoring the word souls of other ancestors as well. My mother was an English professor. She taught mostly freshman English—my sympathies are strong now that I teach freshman health and intro-to-college seminars—but her pet project was a course on the development of the mystery novel. She loved Sherlock Holmes and Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels. I grew up surrounded by mystery books. When we were too young to read them, my sister and I used to pull them off the shelves and look at the scary covers. If I’d kept any of those old paperbacks, I think I’d meet my mother’s word soul in them.

      Her father was also an English professor and a poet. Through some bizarre coincidence, the college where I now teach has his papers. His word soul is in its museum, though he was a professor at another college altogether. I wonder if, like the bone soul, it knows when it’s being honored, and feels the nearness of a descendent.

      Santosha

      HAPPINESS EQUALS REALITY minus expectations.

      Tom Magliozzi, Car Talk

      I am most happy and content when I cease trying to be happy and content.

      Chuang Tzu

      I’ve been busier lately than I like to be. My preference is for open space, both literally and metaphorically. I don’t mean that I like to be lazy, but that the sense of spaciousness is freeing. The feeling that I don’t have to be fast, and that everything can take as long as it naturally takes. A couple of summers ago, I took a workshop with yoga teacher and physical therapist Judith Hanson Lasater. It was about yoga and the shoulder joint and rotator cuff, but one of the lessons that stayed with me was when she said no rushing. She explained it this way: even when you have to be in a hurry, you can take a mental stance of no rushing.

      One of the philosophical principles of yoga is santosha—contentment. If I object to being busy or having deadlines, those are my expectations getting in the way of happiness. My striving to be happy. So be it. I’m busy. But I’m not rushing.

      Time, Space, Connection

      WHEN I TEACH MY COLLEGE classes on health and wellness, I usually introduce some meditation techniques to give students a taste of managing stress through mindfulness rather than distraction. A few weeks ago, a student stopped to talk with me after class with a question about meditation. This student was an experienced meditator, and something she didn’t understand had begun to happen. I don’t understand it, either—I’m not sure anyone really does—but I assured her that it happens to other people, and that it happened to me when I first started practicing meditation regularly. She had begun to have psychic experiences.

      In yoga, these effects are called the siddhis, the extraordinary powers. In most meditation practices, these aren’t so much a goal as a side effect of deeper and higher awareness, though in shamanic cultures they’re considered a gift.

      My student wasn’t troubled by her side effects at first. Her boyfriend found it amusing when she could tell time precisely without looking at a clock or knew when her phone was about to ring and who would be calling. But then she had a vision of a car crash so vivid she could see the color and make of the car as well as the way it spun and flipped. The next day she was driving on a major highway and saw that car ahead of her—and it had the accident she’d foreseen. She found it both terrifying and bewildering, to be able to know something like that and yet be unable to do anything about it.

      About ten years ago in a stress management class, I mentioned the tendency for shared dreams, foreknowledge, or other psychic phenomena to occur as a side effect of meditation, and a student who had initially thought this wasn’t possible later contacted me privately with a story that still moves and stuns me. She dreamed that her best friend was shot, and on the same night, he had the same dream. It was so vivid and frightening, they called each other and she went to his house. They spent hours together and shared how much they meant to each other. The next day, he was shot and killed.

      Why one person foresaw a stranger’s car accident and another foresaw the last moment of a friend’s life—and he foresaw it, too—I don’t know. I’ve had precognitive dreams and visions of important events, and also of incredibly trivial but strange ones. I can’t explain it. Time reshapes itself. Sometimes our losses, loves and dangers reach out to us. At other times, we slip through the boundaries for no known reason, foreseeing oddities that grab our attention the next day, as if to remind us that the mind or soul isn’t confined to the linear progress of time. It lives where everything is happening at once—the past, the future, the present, and the possible.

      Random Unearned Happiness

      A RANDOM COLLECTION of encounters that have made me smile:

      Smile 1: Today, the college where I teach had a special event for which the faculty was required to wear full academic regalia. We lined up outside one of the buildings in our black robes and caps,

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