The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We practiced settling and exploring our deep experience of being.  Being aware and receptive to what arises  are conditions for attunement to ourselves and others. Attunement is an expansion of listening to and with our whole being.  With attunement we can appreciate the beauty, complexity, joy and suffering of others. May our practice support our ability to live compassion.    

We heard Mark Nepo’s short essay Unadorned. Mark’s words convey the precious and fleeting nature of life. He writes that “this clearing of awareness is where we stop and put everything down, accepting there is nowhere to go. It is there that we begin to flower slowly, one color at a time, letting everything we’ve kept hidden rise with the fragrance we were born with.”

We ended with Zen Earthlyn Manuel’s prayer For All Beings.  Zenju’s tender prayer of loving kindness conveys the peril and vulnerability that many people in the world experience today.  Her prayer names the essential needs we require to flourish in this world.  Care.  Love.  Safety.  Freedom.   “To be fed, clothed. To be treated as if their life is precious. To be held in the eyes of each other as family.”

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  In today’s class we explored the way we view things.  We can inform our view with the knowledge that everything is constantly changing.  We can find our way by trusting our capacity to allow what emerges in the space of awareness.

In this space of awareness we can be touched by life experience directly.  In this still space, we can be moved to caring, empathy and compassion.

Our meditation practice was informed by Insight Meditation teacher, Gil Fronsdal’s teaching.  Gil and his fellow teachers offer a library of talks, guided meditations and courses through AudioDharma.  You can experience his guided meditation,  Trust Emergence, in this archive.

We heard Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem Directions.  You can find more of Rosemerry’s writings and poems on her web-site A hundred Falling Veils.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  I believe heart breaking world events are calling for care, compassion and understanding.  I am grateful to share a practice that can help to foster these life-affirming qualities.  Today’s class centered around our goodness and listening deeply from that place. We can do the inner and outer work of peace making.

We heard William Stafford’s poem, Being a Person.   You can learn about this remarkable poet by reading Steve Paul’s LitHub essay, On the Enduring Memory of One of America’s Greatest Contemporary Poets.  Steve’s been working on William Stafford’s biography.  In the essay he observes:

Looking back on his life, as I’ve been doing in recent years, unearths not only a wealth of poetic charms but a sense that Stafford projected a moral force that can be useful if not essential today. His work threaded through concerns about the environment, race relations, politics, history, spirituality, and the depths and limitations of the human heart.  . . . 

In life as in his poetry he rejected loud conflict and social and political aggression. Let’s be reasonable and gentle with each other. Let’s greet the world with awe and an impish sense of humor. Let’s be honest with one another.

Stafford reveled in imagery from the natural world. Streams, rocks, trees, and prairie winds make recurring appearances as touchstones, inspiration, solid and fluid realities that guide our way. Contemplating the influence of those who love or hurt, Stafford offers solace in the stillness and hidden force of nature: “What the river says, that is what I say.”

To read Stafford today is to appreciate the richness and diversity of modern and contemporary poetry and to understand how he managed to make human connections, as if that were the absolute mission of his work. 

Stafford died at his Oregon home on August 28, 1993. The morning of his death he had written a poem containing the lines, “‘You don’t have to / prove anything,’ my mother said. ‘Just be ready / for what God sends.'” I find today’s poem and the testimony of William Stafford’s life to be helpful inspirations for navigating today’s troubled waters.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We immersed ourselves in the contemplation of the wild salmon’s journey from their freshwater birthing waters out into to the vast ocean waters. They return pushing against tides and currents back to their birthing waters to spawn new life and then die.  They are nourished and in return nourish hundreds of other species along the way.  Their bodies’ nutrients are taken up by trees.  The out-breath of trees becomes the in-breath of many other creatures including us.  This web of inter-being is at the heart of our mindfulness practice.  May we all realize our inter-being and be moved to compassionate action in the world.

We were inspired by Alexandra Morton’s TEDx Seattle talk, What Humans Can Learn from the Wisdom of Salmon. Alexandra shares some of her moving experiences of studying whales, dolphins and salmon. She describes the inter-relationships between salmon and their greater habitat, including humans and more than humans.  In 1980  she witnessed wild salmon migratory returns were crashing. She began studying their immune systems and discovered a virus transmitted by the farm raised Atlantic salmon.  She and her team of researchers learned that by sampling the salmon along their migratory route back out into the Pacific ocean they could learn about the condition of ocean waters.  Alexandra’s story is an inspirational call to care and to act to protect the lives of our more than human kin.

We heard from poet Jane Hirshfield’s On Being interview, The Fullness of Things.  The fullness she refers to relates to the Buddhist perspective of accepting the suffering and perfection in life.  The practice is a journey of feeling life’s joys and sorrows.  She hopes that everyone’s journey includes a moment when “they stood in the world, undone by awe and radiance, and the small self vanishes, and you understand the world as immense and yours, and not yours. . . . The great gate to abundance is simply to feel yourself able to be porous, to be open to whatever is put in the bowl that is yours to hold with your 10 fingers and 54 bones. And that is abundance.”

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