The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We explored how “to attend to what is while stretching to what can be.”  How we attend is vital to responding to with compassionate action.  We can come alongside each other in courage and en-couragement. We begin with this moment: a pause to breathe and feel.

We heard from John Paul Lederach’s recent Upaya Dharma talk:  A Call to Hearten:  Let Tender Tenacity Walk with Fierce Compassion.  John Paul is professor emeritus of International Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame. He is a pioneer in conflict transformation.  He’s been involved in conciliation work in Columbia, the Philippines, Nepal and various African countries.

We drew 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.

Guided Reflection

Welcome.  Thank you for being here.  Last week we were sitting with the truth of our experience.  We contemplated what it is to expand our view in space and time. We are, each of us, part of the fabric of being.  Each thread makes the whole.  This week I’ve been riding waves of frightening change.  I’ve been pondering how to set my course.  What is a compassionate response to our collective turmoil?

Many spiritual leaders have been commenting on how to meet conflict and change with compassion, courage and wisdom.  Peacemaker John Paul Lederach gave a talk that he titled with a Haiku: 

a call to hearten
let tender tenacity
walk with fierce patience. 

John Paul shared an inspiring story of his Nepali friend Mahendra Pandey.  Like so many people from rural Nepal, Mahendra’s father left home and family to take up migrant work in the Middle East.  Many years passed and the family lost contact.  Mahendra decided to follow the path of migration while searching for his father.  

[The family has reason for concern.  After hearing this story, I learned that about 3.5 million Nepalese, 14% of the population, migrate for work and send their remittances home.   Many of them experience abuse during recruitment and employment and have little or no safety or personal rights guarantees.]

During the long years of searching, Mahendra’s fellow migrant workers became a family of wisdom and support.  Eventually this solidarity inspired Mahendra to start a global movement called Shamrik Sanjal one of the largest networks of migrant workers in the world.  Mahendra has worked in worker organizing, human rights advocacy, anti-trafficking activism, and survivor support.  John Paul recalled:

I once asked Mahendra about his theory of change.  He thought a long time before he answered.  I think it is encouragement.  Mahendra learned to turn hardened into heartened. . . .

John Paul spoke about being heartened:  to have courage and to en-courage.  He said:

to hearten is not simply to cheer up or uplift.  It is to be along side another in a way that replenishes the courage to walk into the uncertainty, into the unfolding mystery.  To hearten.  . . . To grow with and from our hardened wounds into the healing care of courage.  And the courage to care enough to hold fast to deeper purpose.  . . . Hold fast.  Those famous words from Langston Hughes:  Hold fast to dreams for when dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.  .  . .  Hold fast, persistence, stick with-it-ness, tenacity, a tender tenacity.  

 How can we  support one another in finding the courage to walk into the great uncertainty?    What does it mean to grow with our hardened wounds into the healing care of courage?  What deeper purpose do we hold fast?  These are living questions we can pause to consider right now.  

John Paul suggests we might find answers to these questions in how we attend to each extraordinary moment.  How we inhabit this “ceaseless now.”   He suggests we:

stretch the mind until until [we] can listen with a soft heart.  . . . To attend to what is while stretching to what can be.  Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. referenced this as holding the urgent now with the long arc of history that bends toward justice.  How do we attend to this now and the long arc?

We are called to hearten, to let tender tenacity walk with fierce patience.  John Paul suggests this is the practice of “humanizing habits:”

that require us to travel far into ourselves and far beyond our bubbles of relational comfort.  Precisely because enduring change always requires enduring yet improbable relationships. 

So what do we practice? 

Curiosity.  . . .   This stillness of pausing to attend and be curious about your life and the lived experience of others.  . . .

Dignity.  This commitment to uphold the dignity of every person. 

Courage.  This audacity to speak to and share your deepest conviction without retreat or blame while choosing reflection over reaction in the face of difference.  

Love.  To cultivate compassion as action offered to the many faces of suffering within and around you.  

Persistence.  The tenacity to stick with people.  And stick with the long work for justice and healing.  Those five words seem a balm for our days.

Curiosity.  Dignity.  Courage.  Love.  Persistence.  

We begin our own courageous journeys right where we are. 

We can answer this call to heartening our practice today.  We begin as a steady loving presence for ourselves and others.  We can become that presence in our practice today.   Let’s begin by bringing awareness to the body.  You might take a deep breath and let it go.  Notice how your body settles on Earth’s body.  Feel the points of contact where the firmness of your bones feel grounded:  the bottoms of your feet and pelvis.  Sense how the length of your spine holds you up. Can you sense Earth’s abiding presence?  Can you sense her steady support?  Your body’s steady inner strength?   

Feel the in-breath.  Know that you are breathing in.  Feel the out-breath.  Aware that you are breathing out.  Each moment can be a pause to breathe and feel.  Present.  Here.  Now.   Sense your heart center.  Breathe and feel the front of your heart.  In and out.  Breathe and feel the sides of your heart.  Breathe and feel the back of your heart.  Breathe and feel the wholeness of your heart.  Observe your response to this now with a tender tenacity.  Hold fast, be faithful to this moment.  And this one.  And this one.  Sometimes it takes courage to feel what is true.   To explore the willingness to stay.  Stay with embodied experience.  Open.  Curious.  Present with this unending stream of experience.

Here we are, together, attending to this moment.  And this moment becoming the next becoming the long arc of history.  Sensations, feeling, thoughts come and go.  In this stillness of pausing and attending can there be a curiosity?  Can there be an allowing this experience to be?   Feel breathing and let there be space around this experience.  Can you meet this experience with patient loving kindness?

Some feelings and thoughts may spring from fear.  And below the band of fear may be currents of deep caring and love.  What is revealed in this time of steady loving presence? Steady yourself and see.   Breathe and allow.  Feel what is true.  Stretch the mind until you can see and listen with a soft heart.  There may be a call to hearten.  To offer yourself tender en-couragement to be with what is.  

We can recall the words of meditation and mindful speech instructor and author, Oren Jay Sofer:

Each of us belongs here, deeply and intimately, just by virtue of our being part of the human family, and that alongside all of the good we can do in the world, one of the most valuable things we can offer is our capacity to keep feeling.  We can give the gift of walking through the world with a courageous heart.