The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored what it means to take Refuge: I we are drawn into relationship in which we offer our presence, care and support. We reflected on the many ways life becomes pilgrimage: a spiritual journey of transformation.

We considered how conflict can be an opportunity to restore relationships and build community building.

We drew on Kazu Haga’s book, Healing Resistance:  A Radically Different Response to Harm. Kazu is a longtime practitioner and trainer in nonviolence and restorative justice.  He described his very troubled adolescence and the profound experience of joining the 1998 Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage.  This pilgrimage lead to his commitment  to nonviolence through restoring relationships and building Beloved Community.

You can view the PBS Documentary: This Far by Faith (Segment: Rise Up and Call Their Names) and hear the pilgrims share their transformational journey.  It shows the hard work of community building and healing.

We heard Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem, Sacred Ground.  This poem is a reminder that we are pilgrims on life’s journey and every step we take is holy.

We heard Bhavya’s poem, A Sense of Belonging.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We explored the insights of life’s inescapable impermanence and uncertainty.  They can invite us into a relationship with the world beyond the self.  In realizing inter-being we can know that to heal the world is to heal the self.  We can love what we know we will lose.

Today’s class was inspired by the work of Zen teacher and writer Susan Murphy.  Susan was part of the 2025 Tricycle Magazine’s Buddhism & Ecology Summit.  She shared her experience of living through the 2019 Australian mega-fires.   As you might remember the Currawon fire went on for months devouring forests, towns, people and billions of creatures.  The smoke and ash were visible around the world, impacting air quality and weather patterns.

In her Tricycle Magazine article, Why Love What You Will Lose, she finds meaning in the Zen teachings on impermanence.  Impermanence and loss offer us the direct experience of our inter-being.  Life’s many losses can yield insights about loving life however brief or fragile.  We express our love through caring actions which live beyond our knowing or imagining.

You can find Emergence Magazine’s excellent interview with Susan on-line: Earth as Koan, Earth as Self.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  In this week’s class we explored spiritual cross training:  waking up and growing up.  We can wake up to the expanded state of pure awareness through meditation.  We can nurture emotional maturity through feeling emotions in the body and learning what they have to teach us.  We can restore a sense of coherence in body and mind through conscious breathing.

We can find commonalities and connect through difference by strengthening communication skills.

We heard Diana Musho Hamilton’s teachings on how the expanded states we cultivate in meditation can be applied in the world through developing interpersonal skills.  She calls this waking up and growing up.  You can see last week’s interview, Cross Training for the Mind, with podcast journalist, Dan Harris at Cross Training for the Mind.  You can find her breathing with strong emotions practice in her book, Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen From the Heart.

We heard from To Begin With, the Sweet Grass by  Mary Oliver. This poem is from the collection,  Evidence: Poems.  Mary paints pictures in words that land in our heart, flesh and bones. They move us beyond the edges of our skin, to “become a child of the clouds,” to love ourselves and to love the world.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  In today’s class we explored the vital importance of how we find meaning:  our stories and our attention. We gather around the “kitchen table” of our practice to share stories and also practicing present moment awareness.  Words are fundamental to the stories we share.  Present moment awareness is fundamental to our felt sense of being.  Our miraculous consciousness enables us to communicate and promote flourishing for all in our web of being.

We heard poet Deena Metzger’s alert to the 250 banned words the administration is disappearing.  You can read Deena’s moving newsletter at her April 8th Substack post. She added the following encouragement to begin reading banned books:

Here is the beautiful contradiction: PEN America found 10,046 instances of individual books banned, affecting 4,231 unique titles. We could spend a lifetime reading all of them. Similarly, the 381 books just removed from the library of the Naval Academy, include as I browsed them, books about Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Anais Nin, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. We now have a reading list of a minimum of 10,046 + 381 books. The banned words create a field of awareness and intelligence that guide us in ethical behavior and toward developing a future for all beings. Many of those whom the administration want to ban may well be soul companions in these difficult times.

We drew from PEN America’s list of 250 banned words the administration is scrubbing from government web-sites.

We heard neurologist philosopher Sam Harris’ Big Think interview, Breaking the Spell of Propaganda.  Sam spoke to the two ways we humans find meaning:  our stories and our attention.

We heard Joy Harjo’s poem Perhaps the World Ends Here. The poem is about the kitchen table a place where we as family and friends gather to celebrate our joys and mourn our sorrows.

We heard some of poet Jane Hirshfield’s comments on compassion.  These words were drawn from her 2015 Tricycle Magazine interview:  Felt in Its Fullness.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. In today’s class we explored the ways our inter-being can help us to respond to the world.  Dancing joyfully under the cherry trees and demonstrating our truth on city streets are expressions of deep caring and aliveness.  They are both ways of bringing our practice alive in the world.

We drew inspiration from Annaka Harris’ new audio documentary, Lights On. In Lights On, neuroscience writer Annaka Harris draws on conversations with neuroscientists, physicists and meditators to explore consciousness.  These fascinating conversations explore the nature of consciousness.  How do we perceive ourselves and the world?  How do these queries relate to human flourishing?  As a listener, I came away with a deeper appreciation of the miracle of awareness and the mystery of consciousness.

We heard Maria Popova’s poem inspired by the Field Bunting drawn from her exquisite Almanac of Birds:  Divinations from Uncertain Days. She introduces this work with these affirming words:

As we enter each other’s worlds in love — whatever its shape or species — we double our way of seeing, broaden our way of being, magnify our sense of wonder, and wonder is our best means of loving the world more deeply.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. In today’s class we explored the felt sense of being.  Slowing time we can touch the Sacred and realize ourselves as inseparable from the universe.   In realizing our selves as mystery, we open the door to awe and wonder.

We drew inspiration from  the end of  Frank Ostaseski’s wonderful book the Five Invitations.

The 5th invitation to cultivate “don’t know mind” explores the mystery being and the Sacred.

We heard Anne Hillman’s poem, We Look with Uncertainty. The poem, from her collection Awakening the Energies of Love: Discovering Fire for the Second Time.  The poem is a “dare” to be human in our vulnerability and openness.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We explored what it is like to be a grieving body.  Bringing loving awareness can help us attune to grief’s suffering. Consistent loving attention can help us to integrate our body’s response to loss.  We slowly develop new experience while navigating the myriad changes of life after loss.

We drew from Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor’s latest book:  The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing.  The book explores the toll that loss takes on our bodies.  Caring for our bodies can help us to resources ourselves.  Feeling both the protest and despair of loss can make grief a learning process.  We can find meaning through  loving awareness and kindness.  You an hear Tricycle Magazine’s helpful discussion with Mary-Frances at:  The Slow Upward Spiral Through Grief.

We heard Rosemerry Whatola Trommer’s poem, Safety Net.  The poem affirms the collective safety net we weave through acts of kindness and support.  While it feels like the world is falling apart, practicing loving awareness can help us to cultivate the inner resources that help us engage the world with kindness.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We contemplated our inner strengths:  clarity of mind, openness of heart, being peace.  We can respond to the troubles of our time by not giving up.  We persevere with acts of loving kindness.  We remember we are not alone.

Ellen, one of our group members, shared a practice she has adopted to get through the night.  In Ellen’s “blessing bathing” practice she recalls the blessings she receives that day.   And to get through a rainy day:  tromping through forest puddles in her rubber boots!  Beautiful ways to savor the goodness in life!

We drew inspiration from Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde. In her book, How We Learn to Be Brave, Reverend Budde reminds us that “When we choose love as our response to what we wish we could change but can’t, when we choose love as our response to the world as it is, not as what we wish it were; the we choose love over denial, or anger, or cynicism and withdrawal we share in God’s redeeming of our world.”

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We reflected on the heart breaking times we are living through. In our advocacy for social justice we can appeal to the light in others. When our own light falters may we seek out the lights of friends, gardeners, potters, politicians, marchers and faith leaders.  May we remember the many caring hands that continue to shape the world in healing and loving ways.

We drew inspiration from the many hands that brought the Portland Japanese Garden into being.  You can check the cherry blossom status with their 2025 Cherry Blossom Tracker.  Learn more about it through Celebrate the Garden’s History.

We heard Czech poet Miroslav Holub’s poem Wings.  American poet Jane Hirshfield cited the poem in her recent essay Two “Minor Planets”: A Post for Stand Up for Science Day.

We heard Bishop William Barber’s reflections on the 60th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama.  You can hear about last week’s gathering in which hundreds of faith leaders gathered to protest the proposed Medicaid cuts affecting millions of people.  You can hear more about the findings of a new report Wednesday called “The High Moral Stake: Our Budget, Our Future,”In Friday’s interview with Democracy Now.

James Baldwin’s book, Nothing Personal, inspired us with the invitation to know the “inner light within oneself.”   Cultural curator, essayist and poet Maria Popova followed his words with her own encouragement to magnify each other’s light in times of darkness.

We heard Thich Nhat Hanh’s answer to the question:  How to Fight Justice Without Being Consumed by Anger?

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