Our Moving into Meditation class continues to draw inspiration from  Frank Ostaseski’s wonderful book about living with the awareness that we’re going to die.  His book distills what he’s learned into Five Invitations we can answer in living a conscious life.  In today’s class we continued working with the fourth invitation.  Frank encourages us to create the inner safety we need in order to feel our fears.  In his beautiful poem Everything is Waiting for You, poet David Whyte challenges us to open ourselves up to the world.  We explored the following guided meditation to feel the abiding support of the earth as if we were held in loving arms.

Guided Relaxation

Welcome to this moment . . . feel yourself arriving . . . awareness permeating your body . . . resting in areas of sensation . . . letting the breath be easy . . . natural . . . calming your body with every passing moment . . . calm body gradually calming mind  . . . being curious about the natural expressions of breath . . . sometimes there are pauses between the exhalation and the inhalation . . . can you let yourself be curious about the utter stillness between breaths . . . and then the breath hunger that urges the body to breathe again . . . 

Sensing your heart’s response to this emptiness . . . feeling the earth calmly abiding . . . supporting you in silence . . . in the next in coming breath . . . exploring a gradual letting go into the arms of the earth . . . feeling all the sensations of being held . . . the ongoing support vast enough to hold all experience . . . even fear . . . what we know and what we don’t know . . . 

Frank Ostaseski writes:

In getting to know our fear . . . To transform fear into courageous presence, we need love.  . . . love and fear are two sides of the same coin.  Fear is the contraction side;  love the expansive side. . . . 

Can we befriend fear?  Can we meet it with mindfulness?  Can we touch the suffering it causes with deep compassion?  Can we cultivate the loving equanimity that will allow us to stay with it?   Can we let ourselves go and feel ourselves being held by the abiding presence of the earth?  

To embrace our fear, we need to feel safe.  When we are held in loving arms we learn to trust . . .  Loving arms become the holding environment from which we can venture out into the world . . . trusting . . . 

Can we think of awareness itself as this holding environment?  When we sit and attend to our bodies, our breathing we can evoke a loving attention as a way to foster trust.  Frank suggests we can:

 . . . evoke the warm presence of an archetypal mother or grandmother.  . . . when we feel the safe holding environment of awareness embracing us, it allows our fear, pain, and ugliness to come out and show themselves and to be gently held without judgment so that they can be healed.  We feel the support and courage to go beyond our previously limiting beliefs. . . .

We can feel ourselves as a strand in the web of life.  Right now you can feel that sense of being held by the earth below you  . . . Feel the safety in this space where you can breathe in and out with ease . . . .

Feel how you are held . . . There is nothing more you need to do, nowhere you have to go, and no one you have to be.  Just being held in the heart of kindness and letting be.

Bring to mind someone you would hold this way. Reflect on your loved ones being held —with safety and ease of body and mind. Reflect on how the earth holds all beings, whether they are acquaintances, strangers, or difficult ones—with no bias, no discrimination, no separation.

Reflect on how this earth holds all beings, forsaking no one—whether they be small or large. Reflect on how this earth is connected to a solar system and vast universe. We all are interconnected. Our bodies and the earth, the sun and the stars, are composed of the same matter—the same basic particles, joined in different ways. Feeling into that sense of connection and interconnection that we are all made of stardust. Feeling that sense of being home in your body and mind with a true sense of belonging and connection.

Just breathing in and out, feeling the grace of this universe—no isolation nor separation, feeling that sense of connection and interconnection and being at home in your being. Nothing more you need to do, go, get, or push away. Imperfectly perfect as you are, resting in the heart of this universe.

Everything Is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you. ~ David Whyte

The weight of aloneness is too heavy.  Let’s join the rest of creation in being unutterably ourselves . . .