The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We explored the practice of being mindful of difficult emotions focusing on anxiety. We’re living with great uncertainty: a global pandemic and an intense social struggle for racial justice. Our personal sharing about illness, loss, connection and joy evokes our vulnerability and our deep caring.
Our emotions arise to help us survive. Bringing mindfulness to our anxiety can help us recognize it and relate to it and to let it be. We can experience how the feeling expresses in physical sensations that move and change or transform altogether. We can grow our tolerance for being with the unpleasant experience. We can tap into our inner resources and offer ourselves tender caring and compassion. We did a guided meditation developed by mediation teacher and Nonviolent Communication trainer, Oren Jay Sofer. You can find his guided meditation, Meeting Anxiety, in the text of his article Handling Anxiety.
In our relaxed reflection we drew on a talk given by Mark Nunberg, the guiding teacher of Common Ground Meditation Center. You can find the talk, The Teachings in Brief for Troubled Hearts in Troubled Times, at the Dharma Seed podcast.
In closing we spoke a bit about the Dalai Lama. You can find his live webcasts at his web-site. You can also hear The Dalai Lama’s Advice for Right Now, in his interview with the Ten Percent Happier correspondent, Dan Harris and Richard Davidson, the founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin.
Relaxed Reflection
Bring your awareness back to feeling your body . . . and let expand to fill the whole field of your body . . . Notice where your awareness lands . . . Pausing to feel and to listen . . .
We just had the experience of taking care of our own heart . . . which is not so different than taking care of an other heart . . . even the heart of the world. . . . Life experiences make deep impressions on our hearts . . . and our responding words and actions make impressions on the world . . . Sometimes our hearts grow heavier and heavier as we live through conflict and injustice . . . We can feel so overwhelmed . . . We don’t know what to do . . .
When we’re hurting, when we are overwhelmed, when we feel identified with being burdened in life, we sometimes have an instinct to retreat from the world . . . to put others out of our heart . . . Yet knowing that we don’t know what to do . . . we don’t know how to alleviate suffering can actually kindle a sense of willingness . . . a willingness to listen and to learn . . . Meditation teacher, Mark Nunberg, encourages us to start from a place of humility and ask simple questions:
Am I deserving of love? Is this heart this wounded or numb or angry or whatever kind of heart . . . : Is it deserving of love? Does this heart deserve to belong here in life? . . . Does it seem right . . . to do my best to uncover love, to discover love, to discover a sense of belonging? To discover or uncover a deeper healing? We need at least that little thread that little window – Yes I’m deserving of this. We want to expand the question . . . are we all deserving of love? Are we all deserving the deepest healing that’s possible? Do we all deserve some rights to belong . . . in this moment in this messy world?
[ . . . ]
This changes how we approach the work of taking care of our suffering and the world’s suffering when we realize that I’m deserving of love, healing and belonging . . . You are deserving of real love, safety, healing belonging . . . confident that this is how it should be that we should be moving in this direction . . . humility and being grounded in what we do know. I have some clarity, some conviction, some certainty that we’re deserving of love and healing; that it’s a real possibiilty for this heart and this world. . . .
[ . . . ]
This is that work of realizing that I care – I care about this heart. I care about your heart. I care about this exposure to suffering I am willing to be in . . . the wildness of the present moment this world, my body, my heart, my life because I sense what might be possible. . . . The world is a mess in so many ways and we contribute to that every moment in our lives either in our silence or our engagement.
Right now we can tune into the kind of caring that can hold us all . . . start with your own heart . . . feeling it open . . . with curiosity . . . tenderness . . . with acceptance . . . mercy . . . How can we live in a way that’s healing? Can our desire to heal flow over to help the healing of everyone’s heart? Can we kindle a willingness to be present with our discomfort, our pain? Can we uncover the roots of our suffering? How am I part of the roots of suffering in the world? Can we work to bring our conflicts into a shared dilemma that we can work to solve together?
Mark goes on to say
. . . It really matters what we pay attention to . . . You can go to place where someting terrible has happened . . . injustice . . . The mind can get obsessed with how unworkable or how bad it is or the mind can start to sense the seeds of healing, the seeds of transformation the seeds of resiliency in those spaces. The functional question is what is helpful to pay attention to . . . Does the heart feel more enlivened to walk this path of liberation moving in the direction of greater wisdom and compassion?
We are all fettered by “inherent biases . . . around race, gender any fixed idea” and mostly unconscious tendencies. Our hearts have been conditioned . . . Mark suggests we can free our hearts when we allow everthing to move, to be seen . . .
when we’re not looking for a way out, we’re looking to be free with . . . looking how to be free with what’s moving in the moment with the uncertainty . . with the humiliation with the guilt but not gripping not fixing on anything because it stops the healing process the awakening process . . .
This is an independence we can celebrate. We can celebrate our freedom, our right to enter the stream of life fully . . . to belong in the flow . . . of caring . . . of humility and curiousity . . . learning to be free in learning . . . discovering together the way for us to live together. Right now we can tend to the heart beating in our own chest . . . this heart that was once held by a mother, whose hurts were once soothed by a caring other. In connecting with that lived truth we can help eachother find our way . . . to build trust and seek connection . . .
We can remember Tara Brach’s beautiful invocation:
May we each remember the loving awarness that’s our very essence
May we trust that loving awareness
May we be open to the many ways it can unfold and express through our life
May all beings awaken to the loving awareness that is our shared essence
May we collectively remember our caring and trust in our caring
May we act from our caring and create a world of peace a world of justice a world where all beings can express themselves creatively and freely
May we create the world we believe in