The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored the ways we meet life transitions.  Mindfulness can help us to create time and space in which to be with life’s difficult and joyful moments.  We can meet them as an expression of the many of causes and conditions of which we are inextricably entangled.  This space of loving awareness can help us to bring “care and conscious attention” to ourselves and those around us.

This week’s meditation was greatly inspired by the talk Edoardo Eusepi’s gave to Upaya Zen Center’s community: Taking Time to Transition.  Edoardo, formerly a resident monk, shared the transitions he experienced during the life he shared with his long time canine-companion, Hercules.  He shared how the years of Zen training helped him during the difficult transition of Hercules’ illness and death.  I resonate with his encouragement to “take care of yourself, be gentle with yourself and others undergoing a transition.” You can hear Edoardo’s talk at this link to the Upaya Zen Center podcast episode.

We also heard from James Bridle’s book, Ways of Being.  The book is “a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence – plant, animal, human, artificial – and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos.”  This wonderful book encourages us to embrace the more than human world and meet it with the open minded, open hearted curiosity of a beginner. You can hear James discuss their book with Krista Tippett in the On Being interview, The Intelligence Is Singing All Around Us.

Guided Reflection

Last week we explored how we can offer care and support to others on life’s sacred journey.  We were inspired by the example of trail angels – the many folks who give aid to through hikers.  With mindfulness, we can “leave the light on” in our hearts and homes.  Traveling through life as a sacred journey is a challenge and an invitation. We are challenged to enter the unknown and to let go of our habitual ways of being. We are invited to learn more about ourselves and to be changed by our experiences. Our journeys take us out into the world and also move us more deeply and meaningfully into self understanding. We are transformed.

I think we are beings in the process of becoming. We are beings embedded in an ever changing web of inter-relatedness. This week, I listened to Edoardo Eusepi,’s talk called Taking Time to Transition.  Edoardo once lived as a monk at Upaya Zen Center. He spoke gratefully and tenderly about attending to his dog Hercules in the last years of failing health and dying. Hercules was Edoardo’s intimate companion from the time Edoardo was thirteen until he was twenty four. These were years of being and becoming for both of them. Edoardo described how caring for Hercules, giving him the time he needed, was a period of transition. He also talked about how the years of Zen training helped him. He said:

 . . . Dropping away preconceived notions . . . teaches me to surrender my expectations to the causes and conditions of the moment as they arise. I believe this is so important and it has supported me right now in my life. As we all undergo . . . transition, how can we be totally with that moment as causes and conditions arise? With each moment we lean into our lives.

. . . You might take care of yourself, be gentle with yourself and others undergoing a transition, like a death of a loved one, a major surgery months and years in quarantine, a new job or home. . . .

I think when we experience difficult times there is often a tendency to try to push through or to fix or to control our circumstances. And then there are those times where we can clearly see there isn’t anything we can do or fix – like being with Hercules as he gradually lost function first with his legs and finally with his breath. Edoardo said of these moments:

 . . . You are not who you think you are. There is nothing to do, nowhere to go and no one to be. So who am I? What is this? The answer depends on each passing moment’s causes and conditions. When we respond from the past or future . . .

During our transitory moments in life, our big ones, it’s important not to hold on to any one specific view or perspective, but to stay open because everything is . . . always fresh and new. It is always fresh in you. . . . To live in this way by not putting anything in front of us as an object of pursuit is a wonderful teaching . . . We can only understand our life’s purpose in the arising of the particular causes and conditions at the moment.

Our brains often make predictions that our hearts believe. I think Edoardo is encouraging us to slow down before leaping into a belief – especially one that creates suffering for ourselves or others. He reminded listeners of Thich Nhat Hanh’s beautiful observations about the impermanence and unfolding nature of a rose. Edoardo observed that a rose does not have to be or do anything.

. . . the purpose of rose is to be a rose. Your purpose is to be yourself. [As] Thich Nhat Hanh says we are already a Buddha. Why not just take the hand of another Buddha and practice walking meditation?

Let’s take time in mindfulness as we surrender our expectations to the causes and conditions that arise in these moments of our journey. We can realize ourselves as becoming beings through small changes in which the breath comes easy and through great transitions in which we struggle, let go and begin again. Perhaps we can learn to appreciate the struggles as we appreciate a rose in all the pain and all the beauty. We can learn about ourselves and the world.

You might take a few deep breaths in and out through the nose. Try breathing out through the mouth for the next few breaths. You might sense the soft muscles of your face and relax whatever you can. See if you can bring a sense of ease over your shoulders and upper back. Feel along the muscles of your arms and hands. Let them be easy. Notice where sensation draws your awareness. See if you can be curious and present with what arises and changes. Moment by moment, here, this now, this feeling. Attuning and being with this experience of being.

If you your mind wanders you can always come back to feeling this breath, this sensation. There’s no hurry. Let curiosity displace control. Notice what surfaces in awareness. Can it simply be an expression of being? Being is entangled with the many causes and conditions of life. Can you learn what is revealed in this quiet still space of loving awareness? Feel breathing, sensation and the strong or subtle emotions that may be present. There’s no need to figure or fix. You can explore how these emotions are present in the body. This might be a moment calling for your gentle care. Can you lean in? Can you give yourself time to acknowledge tender feelings?

Feel breathing, sensation, emotion moving, changing. Taking in and letting go; each moment creating causes and conditions for the next moment. Can you give yourself space in which being stretches, making more room to be, like a rose quietly, imperceptibly being itself, perfectly a rose? Room for you to be, perfectly your being. You, like the rose, arise from the myriad causes and conditions expressing your being. Our being is inextricably related to the seen and unseen of the world. We are, as James Bride writes in Ways of Being, “entangled, relational, and of the world.” He reminds us that we live in a world where “everything is intelligent and . . . worthy of our care and conscious attention.” You are worthy of care and conscious attention.