The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. In this week’s class we explored spiritual cross training: waking up and growing up. We can wake up to the expanded state of pure awareness through meditation. We can nurture emotional maturity through feeling emotions in the body and learning what they have to teach us. We can restore a sense of coherence in body and mind through conscious breathing.
We can find commonalities and connect through difference by strengthening communication skills.
We heard Diana Musho Hamilton’s teachings on how the expanded states we cultivate in meditation can be applied in the world through developing interpersonal skills. She calls this waking up and growing up. You can see last week’s interview, Cross Training for the Mind, with podcast journalist, Dan Harris at Cross Training for the Mind. You can find her breathing with strong emotions practice in her book, Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen From the Heart.
We heard from To Begin With, the Sweet Grass by Mary Oliver. This poem is from the collection, Evidence: Poems. Mary paints pictures in words that land in our heart, flesh and bones. They move us beyond the edges of our skin, to “become a child of the clouds,” to love ourselves and to love the world.