The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored how stories shape our lives. When we sit down to meditate, we reclaim our attention perhaps our most precious resource.  Our awareness empowers us. It enables us to experience our shared humanity. Our circle of caring inspires me to go deeper, reach further.  I’m breathing thank you’s now.

During our relaxed reflection we drew on essayist Rebecca Solnit’s book, Call Them by Their True Names.  Rebecca describes how stories come to live inside us.  To be fully conscious, we need to see them, question them and often transform them to co-create a more just world.

We heard from writer and social activist, Parker Palmer’s book, Healing the Heart of Democracy.  He asks us to be guided by what we know in our hearts, to hear and speak “heart-talk” so that we can “act humanely on what we know.”

In his On Being interview, Fortifying Imagination, we heard Jason Reynolds‘ urgent call for loving and supporting our young people as they strive to create a better world.  Jason’s written a new companion to Ibram X. Kendi’s history of racism, Stamped From the Beginning, for young readers: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix.

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The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  Looking into digital faces feels so strangely intimate.  Thank you all for giving me your face.  This vulnerability we share conveys an open heartedness that relates to our exploration of communication.  Perhaps we are all making these explorations as we live through a time that is calling for our action.  One of our most powerful human resources is our voice.  We learned some fundamental communication principles from meditation teacher and Nonviolent Communication trainer, Oren Jay Sofer.  Oren is author of Say What You Mean.  He offers on-line classes, retreats and workshops on Mindful Communication.

We drew inspiration from In poet and writer, Ursula Le Guin.  Her book of essays, The Wave in the Mind, extolls the magic and power of words. In her essay, Listening is Telling, writer and social commentator Maria Popova writes about the courage it takes to step into the speaking and listening dance of vulnerability.  Finally we heard writer Neil Gaiman’s poetic tribute to “marine biologist and poet laureate of science”  Rachel Carson, After Silence.

We practiced a present body centering practice “coming home to our bodies.”  We then spent some time in relaxed reflection.

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The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  I am so deeply grateful that we are able to come together in practice.  We’ve been living with the constant awareness of a physical and social pandemic.  Some of us are involved with illness in some way – either  being sick or caring about someone who is sick.  Some of us are involved with social justice activism – either being on the street or supporting those on the street.  We are taking in a steady stream of suffering.   We are adapting; we are learning; and we are taking action.  This day to day, hour by hour awareness of pain and suffering creates stress.  When stress becomes chronic it comes to live in our bodies.   

We explored a grounding present body awareness practice from therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem.  In his book, My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa includes a series of body practices for healing the effects of chronic stress and trauma.

We reflected on the writing of poet, gardener, college professor, Ross Gay and his On Being interview Tending Joy and Practicing Delight.  In his work Ross invites us to find and amplify the ordinary and wondrous beauty in life.  He encourages us to cultivate tenderness in our lives even while struggling for racial justice.

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The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. Our hearts have been deeply touched by the struggles that are going on around us.  Lives are being lost in violence, in illness and in the poverty that makes it difficult for people to get the food, healthcare and security they need.  

George Floyd was murdered on May 25th.  The following day marked the beginning of a wave of daily protests taking place in large and small cities throughout our country.  Policy brutality, particularly against African Americans, has been with us a long time.  Many Americans are taking to the streets to protest racial injustice chanting the names of black men and women killed in recent years, including Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor and many others.

I have to take a deep breath here to remember each of these names is a life filled with other lives unimaginably changed by loss.

Our reflections included the STOP practice created by Rhonda Magee, a law professor and meditation instructor. Rhonda is a facilitator of trauma-sensitive, restorative Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) interventions. She explained how her work helps to minimize the effects of social-identity-based bias in her Tricycle Magazine article,  Making the Invisible Visible.  We also heard the moving words of poet and writer Maya Angelou.  You can hear her complete poem, A Brave and Startling Truth, read aloud by astrophysicist Janna Levin as part of the Universe in Verse project.  (Scroll down the page and you will find a SoundCloud box for the audio.)

I mentioned a beautiful talk, Courageous Presence with Racism, given by meditation instructor and author Tara Brach.  This talk moved me deeply.  I plan to listen to it every day this week as a support for my personal practice of understanding my personal biases and conditioning as the relate to race.

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