I love haiku. For more than twenty years, I’ve had a meditative practice that has always been able to calm and center me amid incredible emotional stress or turmoil. I will close my eyes, and I will describe the current situation in the form of a haiku.
That’s it. That’s all it takes.
Just the momentary clarity surrounding the mental exercise of taking everything currently happening and reducing it to seventeen syllables has a marvelous effect on me. It creates serenity. It makes problems seem small and contained. It reminds me that I can create order out of anything.
There’s a similar practice that I’ve always enjoyed, which is creating acronyms as mnemonic devices. I’ve always thought of acronyms as clever, and I enjoy finding good ones. If I can take a process and embed it in one, I will once again feel firmly in charge of my destiny.
I hope that you give this technique a try, and I hope – quite sincerely – that it does for you some of what it does for me. That’s why I write, after all: to share the little things that have helped me along the way. It is regenerative to me in the extreme to think that I may be releasing into the world something that will truly help others as well.
Healing Activity Is Kindness Unleased.
The Opportunity Machine 