The Yogabliss, Two Rivers/River Tree Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning.  I am drawn to our meditation circles like a moth to the light.  We are living through so much darkness even the smallest glimmers of hope mean so much.  We bring our lights together and hope grows stronger.  In the “brave” space we create the long view emerges.  The view which helps us appreciate the change and transformation that continues despite the darkness.  If we know how and where to look it’s easy to find the many, many whole-hearted – brave people working to make the world a better place.

We heard an “Invitation to Brave Space” from poet and justice doula, Mickey Scottbey Jones. 

In her book, The Wisdom of No Escape, meditation teacher and author, Pema Chodron, described how meditation can illuminate our well-being and suffering as two sides of our human condition.  She encourages us to meet our own minds with honesty and wholeheartedly – meeting everything – thoughts, emotions and sensations.  This includes “the smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff” and the “creative energy of life.”

In his book, Becoming Animal, ecologist and philosopher, David Abram talks about the magic of seeing all beings – humans and more than humans – as having perspectives, feelings and longings just like we do.  This relational awareness is one of the inner resources we can tap into to experience our inter-relatedness and our wholeness.

Relaxed Reflection

Come back to earth . . . to rest in relaxed awareness . . . together . . . to Micky ScottBey Jone’s “Invitation to Brave Space:”

Listen
Together we will create brave space.
Because there is no such thing as a “safe space” —
We exist in the real world.
We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds.
In this space
We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world,
We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,
We call each other to more truth and love.
We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.
We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.
We will not be perfect.
This space will not be perfect.
It will not always be what we wish it to be.
But
It will be our brave space together,
and
We will work on it side by side.

So together we are creating a brave space. We bring our whole selves . . . our soft and tender places and those scars that formed ever so slowly . . . We bring our knowledge and compassion for the wounds we have caused others . . . We offer our listening and willingness, our curiosity and caring. Together we grow toward the light of truth and love . . .

In her book, The Wisdom of No Escape, meditation teacher, Pema Chodron, describes our well being and suffering as two sides of our human condition. She believes meditation can illuminate these sides of being:

We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness.

This is what we are here to see for ourselves. Both the brilliance and the suffering are here all the time; they interpenetrate each other. . . . The basic creative energy of life … bubbles up and courses through all of existence. It can be experienced as open, free, unburdened, full of possibility, energizing. Or this very same energy can be experienced as petty, narrow, stuck, caught… The basic point of it all is just to learn to be extremely honest and also wholehearted about what exists in your mind — thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, the whole thing that adds up to what we call “me” or “I.”

In our practice we meet our human nature . . . including “the smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff.” This is the earthy ground from which our deeper truths emerge. We create the conditions in which our awareness grows. We learn what matters most to us. We learn our sense of wholeness depends on others – others who sometimes delight and at other times disappoint. In our brave space we have room for the difficult emotions that arise – the daily reminders of life’s uncertainty and change.

We can learn to tap into what Pema describes as “the basic creative energy of life … bubbling and coursing through all of existence.” It can be experienced as open, free, living with curiosity and caring action. We can enter these possibilities with our magical imagination. This inner resource can take us outside ourselves in meeting the world. Ecologist David Abram writes:

Magic . . . 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 . . . that are very different from our own. . . .

. . . 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. . . . We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

We have the intuition that every form perceives . . . others – not like us – have their own perceptions, sensations and needs . . . We are fully human in relation to all beings . . . .

We are free in the ways we relate to what life brings us. We are free to conjure the magic of resilience – to cultivate the inner resources we can draw on and offer one another. What resonates with your heart as I list these resources: compassion . . . courage . . . gratitude . . . motivation . . . openness . . . . . . caring . . . imagination? What inner resources speak to your heart? These are gifts we can bring to the world. They might enable us to meet a tree or a see a bird . . hear the honking of geese and care for their needs. They might enable us take the caring steps as simple and profound as voting.

We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,
We call each other to more truth and love.
We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.