The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We continued exploring life as a sacred journey.  Today our breath was our companion and guide.  We explored oscillating patterns of breathing and movement.  The underwater world of seaweed was a metaphor for how we can remain rooted and also give ourselves over to undulation, flow and a deep sense of allowing – even that which is painful.  In saying yes to life we value and revere the lives we’ve loved and lost.

This week’s meditation was greatly inspired by Valerie Brown’s Kosmos Journal essay, Hope Leans Forward | The Body as Grounded Wisdom,  The essay was reprinted from Valerie’s book, Hope Leans Forward:  Braving Your Way Toward Simplicity, Awakening and Peace. Valerie is a meditation teacher ordained in the order of Thich Nhat Hanh.   She leads an annual pilgrimage to El Camino de Santiago, Spain to celebrate the power of sacred place.  You can find her essays, guided meditations and videos on her web-site. Valerie Brown studied Donna Farhi’s teaching on how to free the breath and the mind.

We also heard insights from meditation and yoga instructor, Donna Farsi. Her Yoga International article How Breath Awareness Will Change Your Life. Donna has been teaching yoga informed movement for over forty years.  She is author of several books including the Breathing Book.  This essay is a beautiful example of her skill in bringing meditation and movement together.  Valerie Brown studied Donna’s teaching on how to free the breath and the mind.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class tried to meet this morning. Unfortunately my internet connectivity failed.  Ironically, today’s class focused on ways our mindfulness practice can help us to live with uncertainty.  I am finding this more and more important as a number of my friends and family members are experiencing health challenges.  I’ve been struggling with the impulse to control situations.  I want to do something to fix that which is a difficult and natural part of life.  Trusting my own loving awareness helps me to accept what I can’t control.  Practicing loving kindness – to include myself as well as others – helps me to find inner peace and rest.

We drew guidance from Kristi Nelson’s Grateful Living essay, Deepening Our Comfort with Uncertainty. Kristi suggests trusting life can help us to find a wider perspective in our relationship to the unknown.  She shares a lovely “self-care” practice she uses to ease into the solace of sleep.  What a beautiful way to transform a tormenting mind into an ally in well-being. Kristi Is author of Wake Up Grateful.  She was Ambassador for Grateful Living and Executive Director from 2014 – 2022.  You can find many of her essays and talks at her Grateful Living page.

We were inspired by poet philosopher John O’Donohue’s words about our wholeness.  He made his observations in the Inner Landscape of Beauty, a conversation with Krista Tippett.  It was one of the last interviews he gave before his unexpected death in 2008. He suggests that we all have a place inside that has not been wounded.  After sitting with this idea for a while it began to make sense.   John counsels that we rest in the inner sanctuary of our wholeness.  I think he may have been referring to the soul. For me, this dimension of being is loving awareness.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We cultivated wonder and gratefulness. We imagined living our lives as a sacred pilgrimage.  We considered what our inner compass would look like:  how we might navigate the rest of our days with intention, letting go of what we no longer need and letting in the guidance and resources we will need to make the journey.  A pilgrimage often involves solitude and silence, contemplative states that enable us to hear our hearts speak.  May our heart’s wisdom can support us through the sorrows and wonders along the path.

We drew inspiration from Grateful Living’s Live Your Life As a Sacred Pilgrimage: A 5-Day Practice.   The program is a gratefulness practice that offers a guided pilgrimage of the heart.

We heard John O’Donohue’s poem, For the Traveler. The poem is an encouragement and a blessing.  When we travel we experience a new aloneness and a new silence.  In the silence we can hear our heart speak.   We are encouraged to venture into the unknown and to allow ourselves to be changed by the experience.  He blesses us with a homecoming in which we will live our lives to the fullest.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We cultivated wonder and gratefulness.  We practiced mindfulness and explored Anu Gupta’s encouragement to be mindful of everyday wonder.  We practiced mindfulness and appreciation for the body.  We reflected on the human and more-than-human ancestors that create the causes and conditions that made our lives possible.

We drew inspiration from poet and author Mark Nepo’s beautiful essay, The One Life We Are Given.  He experiences finding heart wisdom while caring  for his dying father. This wisdom arises when we recognize the preciousness and wonder of life.  He urges readers to cultivate wonder by affirming the “unseeable thread” that holds all life together. 

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored perspective taking as a way of practicing radical compassion.  Our intention was to truly be present with a marginalized person, a person subject to stereotyping. Imagining the rich complexity of their lives helps to connect with the wholeness of their lives and our shared humanity.

We practiced mindfulness and explored Anu Gupta’s perspective taking practice.   We thought of a marginalized person subject to stereo-typing.  We imagined their life’s journey from the time of their birth, through their life’s transitional moments, to the dreams and aspirations they held for themselves. Our intention was to appreciate the wholeness of their humanity.

We drew inspiration from writer Richard Powers, author of many books including the Pulitzer prize winning book, The Overstory.  In his magical interview with Sam Fragoso on the Talk Easy program, Richard shared some of his ideas about the qualities we cultivate when reading a novel: stillness, focus, concentration, presence, empathy and compassion.  Reading is an exercise of imagination.  We are alone and also inside an unknown person’s life as we follow their story.  This is also what we bring to the practice of perspective taking, when we imagine the life story of another.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We continued the practice of building beloved community by exploring the pain of bias.  We used our imagination as an ally to help look beneath the surface of others.  We cultivated empathy and offered loving kindness to ourselves and others.  This is something we can practice informally as we go about our day.  We can slow down, pause and imagine the wholeness of a person we may see behind the wheel, mowing their lawn, shopping for groceries.  We can wish them well.

We practiced mindfulness and explored Anu Gupta’s loving kindness practice around the pain of bias.  This practice engages imagination to call people who have experienced the pain of bias into our hearts.  We visualize and sense their presence and the goodwill and love we share for one another.  In this way our individual separate practice becomes relational in a sense.  We cultivate prosocial qualities that can incline our minds toward beloved community.

We drew insight from Zen teacher and poet Norman Fischer.  His fascinating Tricycle Magazine article, Saved from Freezing, is an exploration of how our imagination can be our ally in experiencing life beyond the limitations of the beliefs, ideas, assumptions, even worries.

He gives examples of how music and poetry can transport us to a “different mind” that is more open to life.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We continued the practice of building beloved community.  We considered how identity enables us to flourish and how it can also divide us.  We explored Anu Gupta’s Individuation inquiry in which we imagined being subject to bias – someone’s mistake beliefs about who are.  We also imagined the counterposing experience of being recognized as who we really are. I hope these inquiries will help us to be more mindful and present with one another and ourselves.

We drew inspiration from Sharon Salzberg’s conversation with Dr. Simran Jeet Singh. Simran is the Executive Director of the Inclusive  America Project.  We also drew from his book, The Light We Give. This book is part memoir, spiritual journey and a call for greater acceptance and love.

We practiced mindfulness and explored Anu Gupta’s Individuation exercise.  This inquiry recreates the experience of being subject to stereotyping and then imagining the experience of being truly recognized without bias.

We heard the prosaic lines of Omid Safi’s On Being essay, May We Cherish a Love That Is Raw, Gritty and Real.  Omid is a professor of Islamic Studies specializing in mysticism and the liberationist traditions of Dr. Martin Luther King among others. He teaches in the Sufi tradition of Radical love.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We continued the practice of building beloved community.  We brought mindful inquiry to the human habit of stereotyping.  We often make assumptions about others.  We don’t often know what difficulties a person might be carrying.  The practice of awareness and intention, presence and persistence, can help us to think and feel beyond our assumptions to recognize a person’s humanity.  Love inspired short moments many times can move us toward beloved community.

We drew inspiration from Iranian American playwright Sanaz Toossi.  Her play, English, won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  It portrays the difficulties faced by immigrants.  It explores how we construct and adapt identity considering complexities including: sex, ethnicity, nationality, age, socioeconomic status and language.  As a first generation English speaker it reminded me of my immigrant mother and grandmother.  I feel so much empathy for the struggles to communicate and to be recognized.

We heard Micky Scottbey Jones’ inspirational poem: Invitation to Brave Space:  The poem is an invitation to “call each other to more truth and love.”

Our mindfulness inquiry was based on Anu Gupta’s inspiring Breaking Bias work.  He explains that stereotype replacement involves “a conscious act of replacing our mind’s habit to stereotype another human being with positive real life counter examples.”  We borrowed his teaching to help reveal implicit bias and then practice imagining another person’s full humanity.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We explored how mindfulness can help us to build beloved community.  We all need connection to flourish.  We can expand our circles of relationships by examining the obstacles to connection.  We can become aware of the implicit bias that we all learn as developing humans.  Awareness is the first step in relearning more life-affirming habits of connection.

In a lively and moving conversation with On Being’s Krista Tippett ,we heard Professor john a. powell’s observations about how we approach belonging.  In exploring race he focuses on our shared human needs.  He offers many examples of how we can learn to resolve many of our race related social problems.  He shares personal memories of learning what is most important in relationship from his father’s example.  He is professor of Law, African American, and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.

We heard about mindfulness approaches to building beloved community from the Boundless Love Project.  You can access many resources including their tenets of building beloved community.

We heard Anu Gupta’s approach to mindfully “breaking bias,” a habit that we learn and can unlearn.  You can watch Anu’s TEDtalk, What We Can Save by Breaking Unconscious Bias.

We heard part of poet and author Mark Nepo’s inspirational essay, More Together Than Alone.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning.  Today we explored ourselves as nature.  We reflected on the intimate relationships between breath, body and the natural world around us.  We sustain each other.  We breathe and live.  We drink in the world through magical senses. We sleep and dream.

Our love for Earth inspires us to bring our caring to her preservation. In his talk, A Primordial Covenant of Relationship, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee writes:

At the heart of that ancient primordial relationship that existed, there was love. Not the Hallmark variety of love, not even the human variety of love, but a much vaster, more ancient, and simpler form of love. A covenant of love between the human and the living Earth.

We heard Robinson Jeffers invitation to “uncenter our minds from ourselves.”  In his poem Carmel Point he juxtaposes Earth time with modern man’s time and its devastating effects on Earth.

We were inspired by Ben Bushill’s beautiful prayer that we “may we save ourselves and our world – love by love.”  Ben is a poet and spoken word performer.  You can find more of his words, films and music at BenBushill.com.

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