Bloomseeing is a new name. The way of seeing it describes is very old.
For centuries, the poets and mystics of Kashmir have pointed us towards the sacred in the ordinary. Lal Ded, the fourteenth-century mystic poet, wandered the valley teaching that what we search for outside is already within us. Sheikh Noor-ud-Din, the beloved Nund Rishi, taught a life of simplicity, compassion for all living things and deep attention to the natural world.
Seeing as devotion
What strikes me in their words is how much they looked. At rivers, at forests, at the changing seasons, at the human heart. Their wisdom did not come from escaping the world. It came from seeing it so clearly that the eternal shone through.
That is what I mean when I talk about informed attention. It is not a technique I invented. It is a way of being that our land has been teaching for a very long time.
The land as teacher
Kashmir itself invites this kind of seeing. The light on Dal Lake changes every hour. The mountains are never the same two mornings in a row. Saffron blooms in Pampore for only a few weeks each autumn, purple across the fields, and then is gone.
Living in a place like this, you either learn to notice or you miss almost everything.
Carrying it forward
When I teach Bloomseeing to students in Srinagar, to professionals in Delhi or to readers far away, I am trying to carry something of this inheritance into modern life. Our phones and schedules are new. The need to see clearly is not.
We do not need to travel far to find what we are looking for. We need to learn to look where we already stand.