Take a few moments as you sit in meditation to express appreciation for your body. Your hands, feet, and knees, all keep you going all day. Julie Potiker completes the meditation with the poem, "Improvement", by Danusha Lameris.

Improvement, by Danusha Lameris

The optometrist says my eyes

are getting better each year.

Soon he’ll have to lower my prescription.

What’s next? The light step I had at six?

All the gray hairs back to brown?

Skin taut as a drum?

My improved eyes and I

walked around town and celebrated.

We took in the letters

of the marquee, the individual leaves

filling out the branches of the sycamore,

an early moon.

So much goes downhill: our joints

wearing out with every mile,

the delicate folds of the eardrum

exhausted from years of listening.

I’m grateful for small victories.

The way the heart still beats time

in the cathedral of the ribs.

And the mind, watching its parade of thoughts

enter and leave, begins to see them

for what they are: jugglers, fire swallowers, acrobats

tossing their batons in the air.

-Improvement, by Danusha Lameris.

Find out more about using mindfulness in everyday life through Julie's books, "SNAP: From Calm to Chaos", and "Life Falls Apart, But You Don't have To: Mindful Methods for Staying Calm in the Midst of Chaos". Both are available on Amazon.com.

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