Daily Reflections 2025 Archives - Madhu Bazaz Wangu
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Daily Reflections 2025

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Posted on November 17, 2025
in Being in Nature, Daily Reflections 2025, Nonverbal Activities, Sharper Brain after Retirement, Well Being
0 Comments

Here’s to enhancing our six senses! Seeing: To sharpen your sense of sight observe art and witness nature. Begin to appreciate the world around you as if you are seeing it for the first time. When you encounter beauty in nature or view a great work of art, it excites not only your sense of sight but also all other senses. However, it takes time and self-training to be able to derive this level of sensory delight from viewing. Seeing Hearing:Enhance your sense of hearing. Listening to a favorite piece of music is the highest kind of hearing. Music restores order and reduces mental atrophy. A music lover absorbed in listening can feel one with the music. The two become one. The feeling of oneness stops time.  Similar to practicing solo, listening to...

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025

Posted on October 27, 2025
in Daily Reflections 2025, Death and Dying, Last Quarter of Our Lives, Meditation & Journaling at Ashby Ponds, Old Age and Death, Spirituality
4 Comments

The text of today's post is addressed to the folks 65+ who live at Ashby Ponds. I've the feeling that most of you who read this blog may not be even 65 yet, but see no harm in your reading and remembering the thoughts I write about. So here it goes: Witnessing sickness, old age and death for the first time can be deeply unsettling—especially for someone who has never encountered these human conditions before. That’s exactly what happened to the prince Siddharatha Gautama, now known to the world as the Buddha.  From the time he was born, Siddhartha was sheltered from all human suffering. In the palace where he lived, physically and mentally disabled, sick and old people were not allowed to enter. He had never seen a dead person. One...

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Posted on October 20, 2025
in Awareness, Daily Reflections 2025, Spirituality
4 Comments

When I write “to go deep within and become one with my Authentic Self” in meditation, what do I mean? What I mean is that when all my mental sediments have settled down, when I have moved beyond thoughts, sensations, feelings, and when I am observing myself being aware of my inner world, when I am conscious of myself I am one with my AS. This means I’m aware of this present moment, and this, and this. Not thinking of past or future but just being aware of Awareness. This doesn’t happen naturally. But when we try over and over again to become conscious of our awareness and succeed to do so we sense the presence; we feel contentment, peace, and joy. This knowing is awakening and experiential. I was introduced...

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Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Posted on July 1, 2025
in Daily Reflections 2025, Meditation & Journaling at Ashby Ponds
6 Comments

Though this post feels like it is meant only for seniors (Mindful Creators Group at Ashby Ponds), go ahead and read it anyway. I feel it would be beneficial for younger, middle-age generation (Mindful Writers Groups) as well, albeit in future. Different phases in life bring different transitions. It just so happens that we all are in the final stage of our lives. Some of us living here at Ashby Ponds are comfortable and at peace. But some others with a major health issue or death of a spouse may feel thwarted or terribly lonely. Some may experience sadness/relief after years of caregiving to a spouse with dementia who passes away. Yet some others may dislike being dependent as they are no longer physically fit and thus unable to live on...

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Tuesday, April 8, 2025

Posted on April 7, 2025
in Creativity, Daily Reflections 2025, Imagination, Reading
4 Comments

Whether reading for pleasure or personal growth, what you enjoy depends on your interests and experiences. What you choose to read is as unique as what you enjoy eating or wearing. When you select a book to read, what are you seeking? Pleasure, growth, transformation? It is not what you choose to read but what happens to you when you are absorbed in reading – that pleasurable feeling of forgetting who and where you are, temporarily experiencing life through someone else’s perspective! I read to be entertained, to learn, to adventure into unknown worlds where my heart is slashed, where my guts are punched, or a brick falls on my head. With each book I read, my emotional and intellectual sensibilities emerge and deepen. In 2003, a group of doctors in Wales...

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Thursday, February 27, 2025

Posted on February 26, 2025
in Daily Reflections 2025, Nonverbal Activities, Reading, Spirituality, Writing
4 Comments

In The Happiness Project: Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun, bestselling author Gretchen Rubin writes that she had an epiphany one rainy afternoon in the unlikeliest of places – a city bus. “The days are long, but the years are short,” she thought. “Time is passing, and I’m not focusing enough on the things that really matter.” In that moment, she decided to dedicate a year to her own happiness. Reading her musings, I remembered how many decades ago it occurred to me that I could not change the world but I could change myself. But how? I reread the world wisdom books, researched new scientific literature on meditation and mindfulness, and read tons of...

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Thursday, February 20, 2025

Posted on February 19, 2025
in Daily Reflections 2025, Journaling, Meditation, Meditation & Journaling at Ashby Ponds, Spirituality
4 Comments

Can we do something, anything about the happenings going on in our country and around the world—wars, fires, famines, floods? Darkness everywhere!  Or as the activist Valarie Kaur says, “What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country still waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor?” And what is going to birth is something wonderful.  “The place to start is within ourselves,” writes Bhante Gunaratana in his book Mindfulness in Plain English. He goes on to say, “Look carefully inside yourself, truthfully and objectively and see what role I have to play in all this. If you do this and as soon as you make such a change within yourself, change will...

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