The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  Hearing one another’s stories can help to tenderize the heart.  When we recognize our shared joys and sorrows compassion arises.  The space of loving awareness offers us the possibility of feeling deeply and opening the heart. To work for a better future,  poet Jane Hirshfield suggests: “people turn to one another for shared witness, for shared restoration, shared beauty.”

We heard from poet Jane Hirshfield’s essay, Poems in a Time of Crisis, Part Two: Tenderness.   Jane points to art and poetry to help – in her words – “undo fixity and despair, [to] increase possibility-sense and enlarge a person’s condition of being: tenderness, humility, courage, and resilience.”  Creativity and imagination can help to broaden our perspective and choose hope.

We heard  Maria Popova’s poem, The Purple Martin, from The Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days.  In this lovely poem Maria describes hope as “a motion of the heart.”  Given imagination and time we can choose hope over despair.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored the meaning of spiritual friendship and the many relational ways we find supportive kinship.  We drew inspiration and insight from:  nature lovers, philosophers, poets, teachers and writers.  We embodied friendliness in breathing, feeling and moving.

We drew inspiration from Maria Popova’s essay, The Wisdom of Trees:  Walt Whitman on What Our Silent Friends Teach Us About Being Rather than Seeming.  You can also view The Silent Friends: A Beautiful Short Film Celebrating Our Abiding Bond with Trees.

We heard meditation teacher Kate Johnson’s teachings on spiritual friendship.  You can find more at her Tricycle Magazine retreat, Admirable Friendship.  Kate share’s her intention to cultivate friendliness toward her loneliness as well as others.  She affirms the relational center of spiritual practice.

We heard from David Whyte’s essay, Friends, from his book
Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.

We heard from May Lee-Yang, Minnesota-based Hmong American writer, performance artist, and teacher.  Her poem To All My Friends affirms the powerful gift of life sustaining friendships.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored how our practice can help us to see and think clearly.

We can recognize and experience our intimacy with our human and more-than-human relations.  We can become intimate with life.  This intimacy can free our imaginations and open our hearts to include the more-than-human world.

We heard from nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s new book, Is a River Alive?  Robert invites readers on a journey to three rivers across the world. In Ecuador, India and Canada, local people introduced Robert to their endangered rivers and the work they are doing to protect them.  Their efforts center around a recognition of rivers as living beings worthy of our respect and even reverence.

We also heard some of Robert’s conversation with Emergence Magazine editor Emanuel Vaughan-Lee.  Together they explore humans’ relationship with rivers and more-than-human earthlings.  Robert’s living questions reveal how “our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.”

We heard William Martin’s poem, We Are a River, drawn from Martin’s book, The Sage’s Tao Te Ching:  Ancient Advice for the Second Half of Life.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We were inspired by naturalists, scientists, Zen teachers and poets all pointing to our embodied creatureliness.  It is through our bodies, hearts and minds we perceive ourselves and the world around us; time and life’s unfolding mystery.

We drew on the wondrous work of David George Haskell:   Sounds Wild and Broken.  We head from the Emergence Magazine interview:  Listening and the Crisis of Inattention.    This is a conversation that  “touches on the legacies of kinship that are present when we listen, and how deep experiences of beauty can serve as a moral guide for the future. ”

We heard cognitive neuroscientist Irena Arslanova’s descriptions of how   our brain perceives time and how our body shapes how we experience it. She shares how our heartbeat influences whether we experience time moving fast or slow.  Slowing down, moving mindfully, meditating are all ways we can access the insights Irena describes.  This was from part 3 of a 4 part series How We Experience Time.  You can hear the full show and journey through the senses.

We heard from Jane Hirshfield’s Emergence Magazine interview, On Time, Mystery, and Kinship. In this endlessly fascinating discussion Jane and host Emanuel Vaughan-Lee explore time, attention, human need and kinship.  Jane shares her personal experience of monastic life, householder practice, relational life and art making.

We heard Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem, In a Dangerous Time.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored what it means to take Refuge: we are drawn into relationship, we offer our presence, care and support. We reflected on the many ways life becomes pilgrimage: a spiritual journey of transformation.

We considered how conflict can be an opportunity to restore relationships and build community building.

We drew on Kazu Haga’s book, Healing Resistance:  A Radically Different Response to Harm. Kazu is a longtime practitioner and trainer in nonviolence and restorative justice.  He described his very troubled adolescence and the profound experience of joining the 1998 Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage.  This pilgrimage lead to his commitment  to nonviolence through restoring relationships and building Beloved Community.

You can view the PBS Documentary: This Far by Faith (Segment: Rise Up and Call Their Names) and hear the pilgrims share their transformational journey.  It shows the hard work of community building and healing.

We heard Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem, Sacred Ground.  This poem is a reminder that we are pilgrims on life’s journey and every step we take is holy.

We heard Bhavya’s poem, A Sense of Belonging.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We explored the insights of life’s inescapable impermanence and uncertainty.  They can invite us into a relationship with the world beyond the self.  In realizing inter-being we can know that to heal the world is to heal the self.  We can love what we know we will lose.

Today’s class was inspired by the work of Zen teacher and writer Susan Murphy.  Susan was part of the 2025 Tricycle Magazine’s Buddhism & Ecology Summit.  She shared her experience of living through the 2019 Australian mega-fires.   As you might remember the Currawon fire went on for months devouring forests, towns, people and billions of creatures.  The smoke and ash were visible around the world, impacting air quality and weather patterns.

In her Tricycle Magazine article, Why Love What You Will Lose, she finds meaning in the Zen teachings on impermanence.  Impermanence and loss offer us the direct experience of our inter-being.  Life’s many losses can yield insights about loving life however brief or fragile.  We express our love through caring actions which live beyond our knowing or imagining.

You can find Emergence Magazine’s excellent interview with Susan on-line: Earth as Koan, Earth as Self.

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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.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  In today’s class we explored the vital importance of how we find meaning:  our stories and our attention. We gather around the “kitchen table” of our practice to share stories and also practicing present moment awareness.  Words are fundamental to the stories we share.  Present moment awareness is fundamental to our felt sense of being.  Our miraculous consciousness enables us to communicate and promote flourishing for all in our web of being.

We heard poet Deena Metzger’s alert to the 250 banned words the administration is disappearing.  You can read Deena’s moving newsletter at her April 8th Substack post. She added the following encouragement to begin reading banned books:

Here is the beautiful contradiction: PEN America found 10,046 instances of individual books banned, affecting 4,231 unique titles. We could spend a lifetime reading all of them. Similarly, the 381 books just removed from the library of the Naval Academy, include as I browsed them, books about Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Anais Nin, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. We now have a reading list of a minimum of 10,046 + 381 books. The banned words create a field of awareness and intelligence that guide us in ethical behavior and toward developing a future for all beings. Many of those whom the administration want to ban may well be soul companions in these difficult times.

We drew from PEN America’s list of 250 banned words the administration is scrubbing from government web-sites.

We heard neurologist philosopher Sam Harris’ Big Think interview, Breaking the Spell of Propaganda.  Sam spoke to the two ways we humans find meaning:  our stories and our attention.

We heard Joy Harjo’s poem Perhaps the World Ends Here. The poem is about the kitchen table a place where we as family and friends gather to celebrate our joys and mourn our sorrows.

We heard some of poet Jane Hirshfield’s comments on compassion.  These words were drawn from her 2015 Tricycle Magazine interview:  Felt in Its Fullness.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. In today’s class we explored the ways our inter-being can help us to respond to the world.  Dancing joyfully under the cherry trees and demonstrating our truth on city streets are expressions of deep caring and aliveness.  They are both ways of bringing our practice alive in the world.

We drew inspiration from Annaka Harris’ new audio documentary, Lights On. In Lights On, neuroscience writer Annaka Harris draws on conversations with neuroscientists, physicists and meditators to explore consciousness.  These fascinating conversations explore the nature of consciousness.  How do we perceive ourselves and the world?  How do these queries relate to human flourishing?  As a listener, I came away with a deeper appreciation of the miracle of awareness and the mystery of consciousness.

We heard Maria Popova’s poem inspired by the Field Bunting drawn from her exquisite Almanac of Birds:  Divinations from Uncertain Days. She introduces this work with these affirming words:

As we enter each other’s worlds in love — whatever its shape or species — we double our way of seeing, broaden our way of being, magnify our sense of wonder, and wonder is our best means of loving the world more deeply.

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