The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  This week we explored courage.  Courage, in its many forms, is an expression of heart wisdom.  It enables us to feel the most difficult moments in life.  It sparks the willingness to stay with good trouble.  It illuminates the moment to let go.  It matures as a loving presence we can offer ourselves and others.

We continued to draw from Oren Jay Sofer’s book: Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love.  Oren believes “it takes courage to be with things as they are, to turn toward and be with the truth of each moment.  Courage begins with one moment of awareness and the possibility of taking a pause.”  A deep breath and a sigh feels good too.

We heard John O’Donohue’s Blessing for Courage. from his collection, Benedictus. John’s work  offers comfort and encouragement for the milestones and transitions of life. It reminds us that our relationships with one another are crucial to our emotional and spiritual well-being.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored the transformative energy of curiosity.  Offering ourselves and other curiosity can be liberating.  We have the possibility of experiencing what it is like to be undefended and all that brings.  Think about that.

We continued to draw from Oren Jay Sofer’s  book: Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love.  Oren believes:  “True curiosity allows us to see beyond structures, messages and roles we have been handed by society and history – roles that can feel so innate we may have never examined them.  Curiosity holds a mirror up to nature, questioning what we believe and why, how we behave and why.  . . . This curiosity is radical.”  This is a liberating invitation!

We drew from the tenth chapter of Kathleen Dowling Singh’s book, The Grace in Aging: Awaken As You Grow Older.  Kathleen observes:  “Even if most of the moments of our lives were lost in the dream of self, of form only, we’ve all spent some time in presence – the experience of formless awareness. . . . To forget the self and its pettiness, even for a moment, is liberation from tension, from the perpetual stress of maintaining the self’s boundaries.  To forget the self . . . is to actually show up, open and embracing, in the present moment’s play of form and formlessness. . . . our hunger for awareness greater than this small self, bound by birth and death, can still be ours to fulfill and to experience and to abide in.”

We heard Padraig O’Tuama’s poem, How to Be Alone.   You can hear Padraig reading his poem in Leo G. Franchi’s Poetry Film.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We reflected on the different causes for wisdom to arise.  It can develop by bringing mindfulness to our inner lives and by deeply engaging with others.   Both touch on an essential vulnerability that David Whyte describes as “that first vulnerability of being found, of being heard and of being seen.”  Our own careful attention and input from others can be causes for wisdom.

We continued to draw from Oren Jay Sofer’s  book: Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love. Oren writes:  “Wisdom understands . . .  how suffering arises and ceases.  . . . it understands the natural laws of the heart and world and sensing what’s needed, expresses itself as compassionate engagement.”

We heard David Brooks’ thoughts on wisdom.  David writes about how to be a wise person in the ending chapter of How to Know a Person the Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.  He values the wisdom we develop and practice in relationship.  A wise person “looks with the eyes of compassion and understanding, will see complex souls, suffering and soaring, navigating life as best they can. . . . [A wise person will] give those around around them the sense that they are right there with them . . . sharing what they are going through. , , ,  {They] will maintain this capacious loving attention even as the callousness of the world rises around them.”

We heard David Whyte’s poem, A Seeming Stillness.  The poem can be found in the Essentials collection published in 2020.

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