The Yogabliss, Two Rivers/RiverTree Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning. Today we explored the experience of inter-being. The magic and miracle of our senses develop in relationship to the world around us. In slowing down our practice enables us to deeply appreciate this truth and our kinship with all life. I am so deeply grateful. The sharing after class affirmed the beauty of our inter-being.
Our practice was informed by the third principle and practice of Rhonda Fabian’s article, Engaged Ecology: Seven Practices to Restore Our Harmony with Nature. The third principle: Nature expresses innate potential. The third practice is developing empathy for all forms of life.
We drew inspiration from Kim Stafford’s poem, All My Relations. Kim Stafford is author of many books of poetry and prose. He was named Oregon’s poet laureate in 2018. He “teaches and travels to raise the human spirit.”
We heard from eco-philosopher David Abram’s book, Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, David’s writings remind us that our very development depends on our relations with human and more than human life. He urges us to reflect on the impact we have on the world and to care for all that we can. David is Creative Director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics. His work “engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, poetics, and wonder inform the relation between the human body and the breathing earth.”
We ended with Daniel Landinsky’s translation of Sufi poet, Hafiz’ poem, Today.
Relaxed Reflection
There is so much unseen and yet embodied. You can feel. You can breathe. Together we experience ordinary miracles. You can feel the weightiness of your bones meeting Earth. You can sense the quiet aliveness of bone and Earth: how they inter-are. Bone is living, growing tissue: collagen protein, calcium phosphate. Earth is living, growing tissue; her soil is a mix minerals, living organisms, air and water.
We can stretch time and wonder in the continuous stream of changes in our bodies. How does your body make itself known to you? Can your mind agree to hold sensations long enough to create a true relationship? Feel your feet long enough to come to know them. Explore sensation in your legs and thighs, the pelvic bowl and what it holds. Travel the riverbed of your spine. Enter the deep liveliness of your belly. Feel life pulsing in your chest: the subtle movements of heart and lungs. Move awareness through shoulders along arms. Sense the intelligence of your hands. Explore how you sense your brain: how somehow you know that it interrelates and orchestrates your whole body. Sense your whole body. Reflect on its history, your life lived, Its future unfolding with each breath, your present becoming your past.
Nature expresses innate potential. This is the third of Rhonda Fabian’s Seven Principles and Practices for Engaged Ecology. The practice is developing empathy for all forms of life. Rhonda believes that:
All life has value in itself, and this value is not dependent on usefulness to humans. . . . All living things are engaged in the process of unfolding their innate potential.
Rhonda sets forth intentions of this practice in the form of vows:
We vow to recognize and encourage the potential of all beings, from the smallest multicellular life-forms, to people, ecosystems, and the Earth as a whole. We will not support acts that kill or destroy life, in our thinking or in our actions and way of life. We will examine the impact we have on non-human animals and make an effort to reduce their suffering. . . .
Let these intentions land in your heart and mind like seeds. All life has value. All living things are unfolding their innate potential. We are part of a more than human world: a world that nurtures and sustains us, a world we share. We can be because we inter-are. We are nested in an elegant web of inter-relationships.
Kim Stafford’s poem, All My Relations, affirms and celebrates our inter-being:
I want to thank all my relations
for this chance to be on Earth
in her time of flourishing; to thank
the First People of this place,
to honor their sovereignty in long
and continuing relation, still teaching us
how we might be here together; to thank
my mother and father, moon and sun,
for setting me forth before their own
passing on; to thank my grandmother
who listened to me so eloquently I learned
to listen to my own heart and mind, to find
stories and songs there; to thank my family
and friends, and all citizens and travelers
who study and work for deeper kinship
in this place, with one another, and with
all creatures, one Earth, visible, palpable,
fragile, intricate, resonant, in need of our
better stories. I want to thank you
who have gathered to receive what I have
carried here—in hope that something
I have may meet something you need,
so all our relations may be strengthened
for this life we live together.
Amen
May we work for deeper kinship with one another, and “with all creatures, one Earth, visible, palpable, fragile, intricate, resonant, in need of our better stories.”
Right now we experience our sensing awareness. We can appreciate our sensitivities: the many magical ways we perceive and respond to our inner and outer world. Feel the river bed of your spine, the firm bones of pelvis and head. Sense the soft muscles cushioning bones, protecting organs. Imagine the many fluids coursing through your body, carrying oxygen, nutrients, surrounding the electric light of neurons. Explore the many ways the outer world enters your inner world.
In his book, Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, eco-philosopher, David Abram, writes about this ordinary magic that we share with all beings. He writes:
Magic… in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives — from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself — is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own.
We have magic. Right now we can reflect on how we relate to these multiple intelligences: the swallows overhead, the forest paths, the waving grasses. Consider how you recognize them as beings unfolding their innate potential. We can imagine who, what and where we hold most dear and what makes them worthy of our care.
Looking deeply into our relationship of inter-being we realize we are who we are because of many expressions of life that have touched us. David Abrams writes:
Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth — our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.
We become who we are in relation to the world around us. The first thing we do is entrain with the eyes of our mothers who interpret the world for us and teach us how to speak. We can recall the many eyes that have held our gaze: a deer in the woods, a dog or cat we live with or encounter on the street. We can recreate the echoes of voices made by the faint call of an owl in the woods, the bleating of a sheep or neigh of a horse. We have scent and taste memories of flowers and fruits. Our hands know the soft and hard sensations of skin and fur. Our being is enriched by all of these relationships; our brains develop with them.
All we have may meet something that’s needed so all our relations may be sustained in this life share. We can offer ourselves to the world: with our vision, hearing, touching, feeling and actions. In his poem, Today, the Sufi poet Hafiz writes:
I
Do not
Want to step so quickly
Over a beautiful line on God’s palm
As I move through the earth’s
Marketplace
Today.
I do not want to touch any object in this world
Without my eyes testifying to the truth
That everything is
My Beloved.
Something has happened
To my understanding of existence
That now makes my heart always full of wonder
And kindness.
I do not
Want to step so quickly
Over this sacred place on God’s body
That is right beneath your
Own foot
As I
Dance with
Precious life
Today.