Spirituality in a glass of wine (yup!)

I am reading the most wonderful book on wine, Terry Theise's Reading Between the Wines. As I mentioned earlier in a recent post, spirituality, when you look out for it, pops up in the most unexpected places.

My intention is not to do a book review but just to share with you some of the ideas that have come to mind since starting to read the book. Terry talks about connectedness, of listening to what the wine has to say or is trying to express, of the way wine will make anyone who tries to tame the subject quite modest, of the links between nature and wine, and more...

Reading this got me thinking about how wine is also a vessel for a lot of "here and now" type meditation. When you taste a glass of wine, or rather when you stop to taste a glass of wine, you put everything else aside and concentrate all of your senses on the task at hand. One-pointedness, total concentration, listening to what messages your senses are sending you... sounds a bit like zen meditation to me.

The book is just wonderful and anyone who even slightly enjoys wine would love to read it. I learned a lot and have enjoyed it quite a bit on a lot of different levels (personal anecdotes, language, travel stories, ...).

Plus anyone that quotes Ouspensky's Tertium Organum in a book on wine can't be all bad : )

Who has time to be spiritual?

Well it has been a while since I have posted to this site. And it has been some time since I have had time to take stock of anything spiritual, except to notice that I really haven't had time "to be spiritual" of late.

Even worse, I would say that any illusion of spirituality or of thinking/acting a bit differently flies out of the window when I am tired, under work stress, lacking sleep. Exactly when you need spirituality most it seems to be most elusive.

After the heat of the moments I remember some of the spiritual lessons and kick myself for not being able to apply them during the moment of truth. Reading the different spiritual books and sources has given me many tools to deal with stress and I think I do ok for the most part managing stress, but there are still too many slip-ups for me to look myself in the mirror and say 'you done ok kiddo'. Maybe one day. In any case, I just wanted to share with you some of my favorite 'stop and reframe' tricks. If you can call it a trick. In any case, it is something that I hope you can use more efficiently than I have in recent months, but that when I have used them have helped me quite a bit to diffuse otherwise delicate situations.

Two of my favorites are as follows:

•  The first, "What would love do now?" when in a confrontatational situation with someone. Taking a deep breath and saying to myself "ok, if I acted from a place of love and caring for this person how would I act in this situation, how could I react more positively?" This has helped me rewrite quite a large number of emails that otherwise would have been more ballistic and less constructive...
• A second, "This is not being done to me" which is kind of a mind set in which I remind myself that even though the person involved in some friction is not behaving as I would prefer, they are not doing it "to me" rather that is just something they are acting out with me. I got this one from the Course in Miracles and I am explaining it poorly, but it is very powerful reframing approach which helps me especially in 'altercations' with strangers when someone acts meanly or spitefully without provocation. 

Anyway, short but I am now being kicked out of the cafe that I am writing this from. I hope this helps a little bit and in any case I am happy to be back : )