The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored relational presence in our practice. In relational presence we can stay aware of our inner state while engaging with another.  Imagining what we love about a person – even in challenging relationships – can help us recognize how we belong to each other.  This awareness is all the more important knowing that the only time we really have is the present moment.

We drew on Oren Jay Sofer’s Speak Your Truth With Love and Listen Deeply:  A Training in Mindfulness Based Nonviolent Communication. This course is a beautiful and thoughtful training in how to bring our embodied presence to the world.  It can support our relationships and help us to grow as compassionate actors in the world.  Today we focused on relational presence:  How we can stay  present and grounded and in touch while we’re engaged with another person.

We heard poet David Whyte’s beautiful words on belonging.  You can find more on this in David’s book, The House of Belonging.

We heard Bernadette Miller’s poem, An Invitation.  You can find more of Bernadette’s poetry on Grate Living.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. Including everything in mindfulness draws us more intimately into the reality of our lives.  Touching uncertainty and vulnerability can open our hearts to our shared human condition.  We can develop the inner resources we can draw on and that we can offer others in times of difficulty.  Our embodied presence makes so much possible.  We can create the conditions for our inner truths and deeper wisdom to arise.

We practiced a guided meditation inspired by Oren Jay Sofer.  Oren is author of the Sounds True Audio course, Speak Your Truth With Love and Listen Deeply:  A Training in Mindfulness Based Nonviolent Communication.  I’ve studied with Oren for a number of years.  This course is a beautiful and thoughtful training in how to bring our embodied presence to the world can support our relationships and help us to grow as compassionate actors in the world.

We heard Padraig O Tauma’s poem The Facts of Life. Padraig is an Irish poet and theologian.  He presents Poetry Unbound a program produced by On Being Studios. This poem encourages us to bring our hearts to live and love in the world.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  This week we explored how our minds are so much more than our brains.  We use the world to think.  We include feelings and movements of our bodies, the minds of others and our environments in our extended minds.  Mindfulness can help us to appreciate this inter-related network of which we are a part.  Mindful awareness can guide us to an experience of wholeness.  It can helps us accept ourselves and each other unconditionally.

We drew from Annie Murphy Paul’s book, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Annie explains that “thought happens not only inside the skull but out in the world, too; it’s an act of continuous assembly and reassembly that draws on resources external to the brain. . . .  the capacity to think well — that is, to be intelligent — is not a fixed property of the individual but rather a shifting state that is dependent on access to extra-neural resources and the knowledge of how to use them.”   I think we can develop our thinking minds with mindfulness.

We heard John Welwood’s poem about our basic goodness.  John was an  transpersonal psychologist.  His work integrated Eastern spiritual wisdom with Western psychology.  His teachings and writings centered around relationship as a spiritual path.  You can find his writings and some of his teachings on his web-site.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We reflected on memories, how we create them, store them and retrieve them.  Our mindful awareness enables us to witness how memories change and how we are changed by them.  Mindful awareness can help us to live in the present moment, truly the only moment we have.  Learning difficult and wondrous truths about mind and memory evokes compassion.

May we remember life’s impermanence and extend compassion to ourselves and others.

We heard Jane Hirshfield’s poem When Your Life Looks Back. The poem is an invitation to enter life more fully, moment by moment.  It’s about the fragility or our shared human condition.  In her wonderful interview with Lion’s Roar writer Noelle Oxenhandler, Jane comments:

Who is the “I” of this poem? It is all of us, called to the thresholds of our own lives, invited to go on through whatever sorrows and difficulties we may encounter, and to make our home in the happiness that can come to us only when—realizing how far we extend beyond our own skins –

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