The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We explored the transformative energy of curiosity. Offering ourselves and other curiosity can be liberating. We have the possibility of experiencing what it is like to be undefended and all that brings. Think about that.
We continued to draw 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. Oren believes: “True curiosity allows us to see beyond structures, messages and roles we have been handed by society and history – roles that can feel so innate we may have never examined them. Curiosity holds a mirror up to nature, questioning what we believe and why, how we behave and why. . . . This curiosity is radical.” This is a liberating invitation!
We drew from the tenth chapter of Kathleen Dowling Singh’s book, The Grace in Aging: Awaken As You Grow Older. Kathleen observes: “Even if most of the moments of our lives were lost in the dream of self, of form only, we’ve all spent some time in presence – the experience of formless awareness. . . . To forget the self and its pettiness, even for a moment, is liberation from tension, from the perpetual stress of maintaining the self’s boundaries. To forget the self . . . is to actually show up, open and embracing, in the present moment’s play of form and formlessness. . . . our hunger for awareness greater than this small self, bound by birth and death, can still be ours to fulfill and to experience and to abide in.”
We heard Padraig O’Tuama’s poem, How to Be Alone. You can hear Padraig reading his poem in Leo G. Franchi’s Poetry Film.