The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We practiced settling and exploring our deep experience of being.  Being aware and receptive to what arises  are conditions for attunement to ourselves and others. Attunement is an expansion of listening to and with our whole being.  With attunement we can appreciate the beauty, complexity, joy and suffering of others. May our practice support our ability to live compassion.    

We heard Mark Nepo’s short essay Unadorned. Mark’s words convey the precious and fleeting nature of life. He writes that “this clearing of awareness is where we stop and put everything down, accepting there is nowhere to go. It is there that we begin to flower slowly, one color at a time, letting everything we’ve kept hidden rise with the fragrance we were born with.”

We ended with Zen Earthlyn Manuel’s prayer For All Beings.  Zenju’s tender prayer of loving kindness conveys the peril and vulnerability that many people in the world experience today.  Her prayer names the essential needs we require to flourish in this world.  Care.  Love.  Safety.  Freedom.   “To be fed, clothed. To be treated as if their life is precious. To be held in the eyes of each other as family.”

Guided Reflection

Thank you for coming to practice today.  Last week we explored trusting what emerges with each in breath and letting go of everything with each out breath.  This can be a powerful way to mindfully enter each moment of our lives.  We can allow ourselves to be touched.  We can be moved to compassionate action.

I’ve been thinking about what makes compassionate action possible.  In our practice we are working with our hearts and minds so that we can be with suffering in a healthy, useful way.   We begin by attuning to ourselves – including the suffering in ourselves – so that we can be with the suffering in the world.

Many of us are skimming over the surface of our lives so quickly that we don’t have time to feel what we feel.  We are bypassing embodied, experiential being in our hurry.  We are urgently looking for answers instead of contemplating questions.  The invitation is to reduce the unnecessary and often unwholesome  ways we move through the world.  As we embody loving kindness in how we move and how we pay attention, we may offer a more kind hearted presence to the world.  

Poet Mark Nepo writes:

There is a small corridor of aliveness, unadorned and painfully bare, that weaves life and death. Sometimes, it appears like a halo of consciousness between our heart and what we lose. Sometimes, it shimmers, drawing us through the rain toward all that we love that is still here. There is no choosing between the shimmer and the weight, only to take each other by the hand and enter. The aliveness is there between the appearance of light and the absorbing of light, between the wave of life and the instant it covers us, between the love, which is everywhere, and the instant it soothes us. This clearing of awareness is where we stop and put everything down, accepting there is nowhere to go. It is there that we begin to flower slowly, one color at a time, letting everything we’ve kept hidden rise with the fragrance we were born with.

Perhaps “this clearing of awareness” can help us to enter our “aliveness, unadorned and painfully bare, that weaves life and death.”  We can attune ourselves to “the aliveness . . . between the appearance of light and the absorbing of light, between the wave of life and the instant it covers us, between the love, which is everywhere, and the instant it soothes us.”  

In practice today I invite you to be present in a harmonious way without efforting or straining.  See if you can allow mindfulness to flow with your experience, to support it.  We’re tuning into moments of life.  We are present with ourselves by attuning to what’s going on for us.  I invite you to be aware and receptive, to be in harmony with what you’re aware of.  To be in harmony is to be without judgment.  We’re receptive to all of who we are.  In harmony we’re not interfering or getting involved.  We are not pushing experience away.   We aspire to be in harmony with the natural world – inside and outside of ourselves.  We are receptive to what may be joyful and what may be sorrowful.  

I invite you to adjust your posture so that it feels harmonious.  Perhaps you can cultivate greater alignment or offer yourself more support.  Find a position in which you can allow aliveness within to flow.  Attune to a sense of free harmonious flow of vitality.  

Let your eyes rest easy.  They can be open or closed.  You might take a few deeper breaths.  Feel the body more fully on the inhale.  You might draw out longer exhales as you settle into the body more fully.  Relax as you are able.

Allow the breath to return to its own rhythm.  Be aware and receptive of how the body may be subtly responding to be with what is.  You might bring greater sensitivity as you attune to this experience of being embodied.  

If there is contraction or strain can you be present as if you were with a good friend who’s having a hard time.  As you are present and open you may be a calm presence with your friend.  There may be a way of relating to what is arising that can harmonize with receptive awareness.  Attuning to how it is right now.  Perhaps an attunement that allows for care emerges.

Being attuned to ourselves just as we are is like a kind of deep listening.  Deep sensitivity.  No need to change anything.  There may be an availability of awareness to know and sense experience just as it is.  

As you are aware and receptive you might appreciate whatever degree of harmony you have, here in the middle of your lived life. Notice if there’s any joy or well being found in the attunement that may be happening.

We are attuning to ourselves with sensitive care.  We  are growing our capacity to be aware, receptive and sensitive to others.  We may find a way of attuning to how they are.  We may aspire to understand them just as they are.  No need to add assertions or interpretations.  

Attunement is an expansion of listening to and with our whole being.  May we find ways of attuning to others with our whole being.  So they feel respected and cared for.  So they too can experience “the aliveness . . . the appearance of light . . . the love, which is everywhere and the instant it soothes us.”  May our practice be a support for promoting the welfare and benefit for this world.  Here is Zen Earthlyn Manuel’s prayer For All Beings:

May all beings be cared for and loved,
Be listened to, understood and acknowledged despite different views,
Be accepted for who they are in this moment,
Be afforded patience,
Be allowed to live without fear of having their lives taken away or their bodies violated.
May all beings,
Be well in its broadest sense,
Be fed,
Be clothed,
Be treated as if their life is precious,
Be held in the eyes of each other as family.
May all beings,
Be appreciated,
Feel welcomed anywhere on the planet,
Be freed from acts of hatred and desperation including war, poverty, slavery, and street crimes,
Live on the planet, housed and protected from harm,
Be given what is needed to live fully, without scarcity,
Enjoy life, living without fear of one another,
Be able to speak freely in a voice and mind of undeniable love.
May all beings,
Receive and share the gifts of life,
Be given time to rest, be still, and experience silence.
May all beings,
Be awake.