Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Small Awakenings
    Small Awakenings
    Small Awakenings
    Ebook152 pages1 hour

    Small Awakenings

    By Amber Foxx

    ()

    Read preview

    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.

    Read more from Amber Foxx

    Related to Small Awakenings

    Related ebooks

    Meditation and Stress Management For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Ada Limón and Erika Sánchez Discuss Self-Care and a Life of Words

      Jan 9, 2019

      It can be healthy to purge dark things, but it can also excavate old and new suffering that needs to be attended to. The body can't always keep up. The post Ada Limón and Erika Sánchez Discuss Self-Care and a Life of Words appeared first on The Milli

      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Searching for Home: The Millions Interviews Aimee Nezhukumatathil

      Aug 26, 2020

      My mother and father were my first environmental teachers, and watching them hold their heads up high while they experienced racism and still maintained their sense of wonder absolutely informs how I shaped this book. The post Searching for Home: The

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Then Who Am I? The Millions Interviews Kathleen Hill

      Oct 19, 2017

      It’s sometimes when we’re most at sea, even desperate, that novels speak to us most strongly, as if our lives depend on learning something from them essential to our own survival. The post Then Who Am I? The Millions Interviews Kathleen Hill appeared

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Book That Changed How I Think

      Oct 25, 2023

      The right book read at the right time can alter not just what you think, but how. The effect can feel like putting on a new set of glasses: Everything remains the same, but you view reality with sudden clarity. It can also be more unsettling—great wr

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      My First Year as a Mother, I Only Read Women Authors. Here’s What I Learned.

      Aug 7, 2020

      I wanted to find inspiration and understanding in the voices of other women. It was reductive, I knew, to imagine other women were the solution, but at the same time I craved reductive thinking. I just wanted things to be simple, and to work. The pos

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Clearly, God Loves Me: The Millions Interviews Nada Alic

      Sep 21, 2022

      "The whole point of art is to ask, 'Are you seeing what I’m seeing?'" The post Clearly, God Loves Me: The Millions Interviews Nada Alic appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Apply Aesthetic Pressure to the Language: An Interview with Paul Harding

      Jun 18, 2018

      This interview first appeared in Chinese at the Shanghai Review of Books on June 3, 2018. I spent my first Iowan winter day at home reading Tinkers, the 2010 Pulitzer Fiction Prize winner. Outside, snow began to fall. I poured myself a cup of hot tea

      19 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Up-to-date Dharma

      Jul 19, 2022

      Up-to-date Dharma
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Reading Through Grief

      Jun 25, 2024

      Reading Through Grief
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Over the Brink of Disaster: The Millions Interviews Elisa Gabbert

      Aug 14, 2020

      The only way to get through time alive is to spend a lot of it pretending that everything’s fine. The post Over the Brink of Disaster: The Millions Interviews Elisa Gabbert appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Arinze Ifeakandu

      Jun 15, 2022

      Arinze Ifeakandu
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Amy Tan's Lonely, ‘Pixel-by-Pixel’ Writing Method

      Dec 10, 2013

      Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” helps remind the Joy Luck Club author to capture the “microscopic” details that make her characters unique.

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Writing to Heal: The Millions Interviews Elissa Washuta

      Apr 28, 2021

      At some point, I got it into my head that I wanted to write a book as long as a Franzen novel, because I know he’s allowed to and the conventional wisdom said I wasn’t. The post Writing to Heal: The Millions Interviews Elissa Washuta appeared first o

      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Art of Fiction No. 246

      Mar 3, 2020

      The Art of Fiction No. 246
      30 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Framing Life

      Aug 31, 2020

      As nonfiction writers, we know that framing this amorphous mess called reality is incredibly hard. What do we include? What do we leave out? Where do we begin? Where do we end? What goes in the middle, and in what order? These are key questions when

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Art of Fiction No. 239

      Mar 15, 2018

      The Art of Fiction No. 239
      26 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Not Writing Right Now

      Apr 14, 2021

      NOT long ago I wrote a piece published in this magazine identifying different species of so-called writer’s block and offering curative suggestions for each one. This “not long ago” time, however, was pre-pandemic time and, as such, feels eons away.

      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Tommy Orange

      Feb 12, 2024

      Tommy Orange
      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      THE WD INTERVIEW Dani Shapiro

      Oct 30, 2019

      THE WD INTERVIEW Dani Shapiro
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Present Tense

      May 21, 2024

      The Present Tense
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Exploring The Boundaries

      Oct 2, 2018

      I have been babysitting my student’s two-year-old boy for the last three hours, while my student and his wife go out for the night. The boy is bubbly. He has the habit of bouncing on his toes when he is excited, and he is excited about everything. He

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Goodnight Mom: The Millions Interviews Julia Fine

      May 17, 2021

      It’s so important that we not romanticize new motherhood. It’s hard enough to be a new parent with without the added guilt that you aren’t doing it right, or the loneliness of thinking no one else has had these feelings. The post Goodnight Mom: The M

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      How Solitude Feeds the Brain

      Oct 31, 2019

      How Solitude Feeds the Brain
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Lynn Steger Strong

      Dec 2, 2020

      Maybe because of how much I miss human interaction, maybe because I’ve lost my faith in so much else: I believe in books, at least the ones that feel like primal screams, in ways I never have before. The post A Year in Reading: Lynn Steger Strong app

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Pained Intuition and a Palpable Longing: Katie Ford on Theology, Poetry, and the Unknowable

      Sep 13, 2018

      If You Have to Go, the new collection of poems by Katie Ford, is a book that conjures powers of possession. I feel that way about all of her books: Her poems bring me to a mystical plane somewhere between language and life. I’m left shaken. Her willi

      17 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      THE WD INTERVIEW Alice Hoffman

      Jul 31, 2019

      THE WD INTERVIEW Alice Hoffman
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Our Staff Picks

      Nov 20, 2018

      Associate Art Director of Lion’s Roar The subtitle of Sallie Tisdale’s book, Advice for Future Corpses and Those Who Love Them (Touchstone), is A Practical Perspective on Death and Dying, and she really is not kidding about it being practical. Tisdal

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Small Awakenings

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      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, assembling for the formal procession. On the railing

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1