The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We explored the insights of life’s inescapable impermanence and uncertainty.  They can invite us into a relationship with the world beyond the self.  In realizing inter-being we can know that to heal the world is to heal the self.  We can love what we know we will lose.

Today’s class was inspired by the work of Zen teacher and writer Susan Murphy.  Susan was part of the 2025 Tricycle Magazine’s Buddhism & Ecology Summit.  She shared her experience of living through the 2019 Australian mega-fires.   As you might remember the Currawon fire went on for months devouring forests, towns, people and billions of creatures.  The smoke and ash were visible around the world, impacting air quality and weather patterns.

In her Tricycle Magazine article, Why Love What You Will Lose, she finds meaning in the Zen teachings on impermanence.  Impermanence and loss offer us the direct experience of our inter-being.  Life’s many losses can yield insights about loving life however brief or fragile.  We express our love through caring actions which live beyond our knowing or imagining.

You can find Emergence Magazine’s excellent interview with Susan on-line: Earth as Koan, Earth as Self.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  In this week’s class we explored spiritual cross training:  waking up and growing up.  We can wake up to the expanded state of pure awareness through meditation.  We can nurture emotional maturity through feeling emotions in the body and learning what they have to teach us.  We can restore a sense of coherence in body and mind through conscious breathing.

We can find commonalities and connect through difference by strengthening communication skills.

We heard Diana Musho Hamilton’s teachings on how the expanded states we cultivate in meditation can be applied in the world through developing interpersonal skills.  She calls this waking up and growing up.  You can see last week’s interview, Cross Training for the Mind, with podcast journalist, Dan Harris at Cross Training for the Mind.  You can find her breathing with strong emotions practice in her book, Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen From the Heart.

We heard from To Begin With, the Sweet Grass by  Mary Oliver. This poem is from the collection,  Evidence: Poems.  Mary paints pictures in words that land in our heart, flesh and bones. They move us beyond the edges of our skin, to “become a child of the clouds,” to love ourselves and to love the world.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  In today’s class we explored the vital importance of how we find meaning:  our stories and our attention. We gather around the “kitchen table” of our practice to share stories and also practicing present moment awareness.  Words are fundamental to the stories we share.  Present moment awareness is fundamental to our felt sense of being.  Our miraculous consciousness enables us to communicate and promote flourishing for all in our web of being.

We heard poet Deena Metzger’s alert to the 250 banned words the administration is disappearing.  You can read Deena’s moving newsletter at her April 8th Substack post. She added the following encouragement to begin reading banned books:

Here is the beautiful contradiction: PEN America found 10,046 instances of individual books banned, affecting 4,231 unique titles. We could spend a lifetime reading all of them. Similarly, the 381 books just removed from the library of the Naval Academy, include as I browsed them, books about Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Anais Nin, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. We now have a reading list of a minimum of 10,046 + 381 books. The banned words create a field of awareness and intelligence that guide us in ethical behavior and toward developing a future for all beings. Many of those whom the administration want to ban may well be soul companions in these difficult times.

We drew from PEN America’s list of 250 banned words the administration is scrubbing from government web-sites.

We heard neurologist philosopher Sam Harris’ Big Think interview, Breaking the Spell of Propaganda.  Sam spoke to the two ways we humans find meaning:  our stories and our attention.

We heard Joy Harjo’s poem Perhaps the World Ends Here. The poem is about the kitchen table a place where we as family and friends gather to celebrate our joys and mourn our sorrows.

We heard some of poet Jane Hirshfield’s comments on compassion.  These words were drawn from her 2015 Tricycle Magazine interview:  Felt in Its Fullness.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. In today’s class we explored the ways our inter-being can help us to respond to the world.  Dancing joyfully under the cherry trees and demonstrating our truth on city streets are expressions of deep caring and aliveness.  They are both ways of bringing our practice alive in the world.

We drew inspiration from Annaka Harris’ new audio documentary, Lights On. In Lights On, neuroscience writer Annaka Harris draws on conversations with neuroscientists, physicists and meditators to explore consciousness.  These fascinating conversations explore the nature of consciousness.  How do we perceive ourselves and the world?  How do these queries relate to human flourishing?  As a listener, I came away with a deeper appreciation of the miracle of awareness and the mystery of consciousness.

We heard Maria Popova’s poem inspired by the Field Bunting drawn from her exquisite Almanac of Birds:  Divinations from Uncertain Days. She introduces this work with these affirming words:

As we enter each other’s worlds in love — whatever its shape or species — we double our way of seeing, broaden our way of being, magnify our sense of wonder, and wonder is our best means of loving the world more deeply.

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