The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We reflected on our love for the natural world.  We contemplated the vulnerability that arises upon feeling the precarity of climate change.  Practice allows us to feel difficult truths.  Uncertainty can be fertile ground from which  compassionate action can arise.

We heard an excerpt from Sophie Strand’s latest newsletter, A Generous Uncertainty.  Sophie writes delightfully about the generative ground of uncertainty and making mistakes:

The only thing I am certain of right now is that I am constituted by a generous uncertainty. An uncertainty that gestates miracles I could never have expected or authored. I am certain that I am not the most reliable narrator. I have found that the space I hold for being wrong acts like a freshly mulched garden. Relationships sprout there, in the connective tissue between opposing ideas, that would never have grown in the relationally sterile bounds of a well-defended belief.

We drew on Lama Willa Blythe Baker’s essay, Five Practices for Working with the Immense Challenge of Climate Change.  Lama Baker, Ph.D. is the Founder of Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston.  She is the author of four books including The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom.  You can hear her fascinating interview, How to Get Out of Your Head with Dan Harris on the Ten Percent Happier podcast.

We drew inspiration from Roshi Joan Halifax’s view that every human is a river of life.

We ended with Rebecca del Rio’s Prescription for the Disillusioned. The poem is drawn from her eponymous collection which:

is an invitation to enter into a world of the magical mundane, a meditation on the curious and unique life given to everyone. . . . The poems are a response to the human condition, a conversation with life and loss, as well as an uncovering of the mystical in the day-to-day walk that we call our lives.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We focused on what it means to incline our hearts to forgive.  We can begin our journey of forgiveness by cultivating loving kindness by wishing for the well being of ourselves or others.  We can examine our habits of thinking about others who we find difficult.  Our hearts are always at the center of forgiveness.  They express themselves in the language of the body.  We can listen and feel to find our forgiving direction.

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’s final chapter is a beautiful exposition of the many dimensions of forgiveness.  One of the book’s gifts to me came in a final footnote to this chapter.  It lead me to Love and Will, psychologist, counselor and researcher, Catherine Anne Lombard’s beautiful writings which explore a psychosynthesis approach to living.  Catherine is an old college friend of mine.  Her essay, Birthing Forgiveness, arises from her own journey of forgiveness.

We drew inspiration from meditation teacher and writer Larry Yang’s book, Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community.  Larry reminds us that “the restorative work of love most be done with love.”

We drew on meditation instructor Tara Brach’s book, Radical Compassion.  Tara’s book offers guidance for working with strong emotions.  You can visit Tara’s Resources on Forgiveness page for more of her excellent guidance and courses on forgiveness.

We heard Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s beautiful poem, December 31.  While the poem references the end of the year, it speaks to the ongoing work of forgiveness.  I find hope in her suggestion that our individual acts of forgiveness can illuminate our collective capacity to love each other.

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