The Yogabliss, Your Heart Life on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning. We explored the practice of silence.  We began, continued and ended with relaxation.  We cultivated an open receptivity while venturing deeper into silence.  The poets and teachers use words to point toward no words.  Awareness points toward our true nature and is our true nature.

We heard Kerry O’Brien’s poem Core from her collection Illuminate.  Kerry is an Irish poet who explores literature as a form of activism.  You can see and hear Kerry read her poem Dublin at her web-site.

We drew on Chan Dharma Master Hsin Tao’s teachings on silence.  You can read more about the practice of silence he teaches in his Tricycle Magazine article, Listening to Silence.  Master Tao invites students to: “Hear the silence in the mountains and rivers, the great wide earth, the sky. Eventually, the whole universe will fall into deep silence.”

We heard Still the Body by Sufi poet Kabir. The poem is from Beloved May I Enter: Kabir Dohas and Other Poems translated by Sushil Rao.  I love this poem because of the influence it has had on my favorite poet, Jane Hirshfield.  You can hear how the 15th century Sufi poet is alive in her poem:  Standing Deer.

We drew from the ninth chapter of Kathleen Dowling Singh’s book, The Grace in Aging: Awaken As You Grow Older. In this section, Silence: Liberation from Illusions, Kathleen explores the practice of inner and outer silence. She encourages students to “become silence by being silence [as one] becomes love by being love.”

Relaxed Reflection

Relax. I invite you to sense each passing moment.  Can you be present with the experience of being just as it is?  Noticing any mind states.  Thoughts.  Feelings.  Sensations. If it’s comfortable let your mind land on breathing or stay with the experience of being.  Becoming aware of currents, pulses, glimmerings, expanding, relaxing.  What is it like for you to abide with being?

Poet Kerry O’Brien describes the depth of being in her poem: 

Core
you need to be very still
to hear the concert of your body
to think about what you contain
salt and water
knows what it’s doing
renewing itself
back to earth
it is a quiet thing
this is where our riches are
we are all red inside
brimming with love
all fluid and quiet and fire.

I invite you to enter stillness, to listen to the concert of your body.  In the depths of stillness, reflect on the salt and water you contain. Sense this knowing salt and water renewing itself within you.  Hear the quiet of salt and water renewing itself back to Earth.  Imagine your quiet riches:  their inner colors.  The fluid of love brimming.  The quiet of fire warming.  

What is it like to experience the elemental silence of being?  Notice where your awareness is drawn.  I invite you to move your attention to your eyes.  Relax your eyes.  Then move to the area under your nose where you feel breathing in, breathing out.  Finally move your attention to your heart.  See if you can release any thought, image or story about your experience.  Relax.  As you’re ready, move awareness back to your eyes.  Relax your eyes.  Then move to the area under your nose.  Let the breath be easy.  Finally, rest your awareness with your heart.  

If awareness drifts, I invite you to find a place to feel breathing – a place where you feel at ease, relaxed.  If it’s not possible to be at ease with breathing, find a place to rest awareness that’s easy, enjoyable.  Notice the quality of awareness.  Can it be gentle and clear?  I invite you to relax your ears, head and neck, upper back and shoulders.  Let this relaxation permeate your body.  Feel body quieting.  Listen to the silence.  Any sound that registers – let that be a sound of silence.  Keep listening to the sound of silence in everything, staying completely relaxed.

Chan Dharma Master Hsin Tao invites us to: 

Hear the silence in the mountains and rivers, the great wide earth, the sky. Eventually, the whole universe will fall into deep silence. Perceive that same deep silence in yourself. . . . [W]hen you listen, you listen to the sound of no sound. Every thought returns into silence and becomes still. . . . It is our enlightened nature that is aware and sees. . . . [T]he practice is to dwell in the clarity of silence . . . enlighten your own mind by seeing your true nature. 

Allow awareness to rest with body sensations.  Feeling settling or releasing.  Know that “salt and water knows what it’s doing renewing itself back to earth. It is a quiet thing.”   You might notice the quality of awareness.  Can it be gentle and clear?  Can you relax awareness as you would relax your ears, head and neck, upper back and shoulders.  Let this relaxation permeate your body.  Feel body quieting.  Rest on Earth’s body and listen to the silence.
Let it be a solace.  

Sufi poet, Kabir, writes:

still the body
still the mind
still the voice inside
in silence
feel the stillness move
friends
this feeling
cannot be imagined

Still the body, still the mind, still the voice inside   Can you allow yourself to be suspended and supported?  Kathleen Dowling Singh asks:

Can you let go of all the tension and energy required to hold up both ourselves and our stories?

Notice your response to quietude.  Kathleen describes our conflicting urges:

[W]e find that we both love silence and that we’re afraid of it.  . . . Restlessness kicks in.  The desire for a little drama, entertainment, kicks in and we follow the urge. . . . To sit with the internal monologue, in equanimity and with patience . . .  allows the inner noise to quiet . . . to still.. . . [In] time . . . we can still the noisiness of selfing.

I invite you to reflect on the time and space in which you experience silence in your life.  Perhaps watched the snow fall or the sun rise.  Perhaps you relaxed while holding a sleeping baby or pet.  

Kathleen writes about inner and outer silence:

We learn to be silent by being silent.  We create inner silence when we practice outer silence.  With the practice of outer silence, we are able to sit longer and longer in inner silence. Interior silence allows us to be receptive to insight and allows us to remain mindful of intention.  It empties the mind and, in that emptying allows us the experience of grace. Silence is not just the absence of noise.  It is an affirming presence of our essential nature, beyond words.  

I invite you to reflect on your experience of inner silence.  Can recall when you experienced moments of receptivity?  An open awareness in which you received grace?

Kathleen reminds us how:

We enter the mind of wordless prayer.  . . . In . . . this mind of inner silence, we encounter reality directly – the humming of life, of being, silently resounding.  . . . Just as we enter love by being love, we enter silence by being silence.  A warm, embracing, very present silence, A refuge.

This may be the silence in which we answer Dharma Master Hsin Tao’s invitation to:

Hear the silence in the mountains and rivers, the great wide earth, the sky.

We might experience a silence in which we “listen to the sound of no sound.”

Our enlightened nature is aware and sees every thought returning to silence becoming still.