The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. Today’s practice was about our connections – the way we relate to ourselves and one another.   We explored ways of “presencing” that is, staying with what surfaces in our bodies, hearts and minds.  This prepares us to be fully present in our relating – even with feelings of disconnection and loneliness. Spiritual teachings tell us that we are all interconnected, interdependent.  Yet in today’s social separation and society’s fragmentation I – like many of my friends – often feel alone.

We drew on Irish poet and philosopher’s inspiration from his book: Eternal Echoes:  Celtic Reflections of Our Yearning to Belong.  He beautifully describes how our need to belong is at the center of our hearts.  Our practice gives us the opportunity to become aware of and recognize the sensations, emotions and thoughts as signals.  They often signal our unmet needs – needs that are universally human.  Truly they can help us understand and connect with one another.  Belonging is in the loving care we give and receive from each other.

Meditation teacher and author Sebene Selassie describes belonging as a paradox. True belonging includes our longing for connection and the challenge we have in accepting ourselves and each other – it doesn’t always feel good.

Finally we enjoyed Jean Valentine’s whimsical poem about relating:  Sanctuary.  Jean served as the State Poet of New York from 2008 to 2010. She has authored over a dozen books of poetry and taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, New York University.

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The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored ways of bringing our practice to our every day lives.  We do this by bringing four fundamental meditation skills to what every we are doing:  concentration, clarity, caring and equanimity.  We drew on the work of mediation teacher and author, Jeff Warren.  You can find his article, Finding the Right Practice, on his web-site along with many resources aimed to empower you to find the practice that works for you.  You can also listen to a fascinating discussion, Crisis Advice from Meditation MacGyver, between Jeff and Ten Percent Happier podcast host, Dan Harris.  It’s about “democratizing” meditation practice and teaching and the various activities we value in life can be done as a meditation.

We ended practice with poet Mary Oliver’s beautiful poem, Invitation which you will find below.

Many of us want to keep our friend Mike in our hearts this week.  Mike is living with a serious illness.  Some of us plan to do Metta Meditation as we hold Mike in our hearts.    You can explore Sharon Salzberg’s Guided Loving Kindness Meditation.  You can also make up the phrases that resonate with your heart.  Here are the ones I practiced with this week:

May you be safe,
May you be well,
May you love and be loved,
May you be free from suffering,
May you know peace.

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The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We shared the practice of cultivating compassion.  All of us have been deeply touched by the pain and suffering we witness every day.  Sometimes it’s really hard not to look away or shut down.  The mindfulness practice of cultivating compassion or loving kindness is a way of responding by staying present with what is difficult and also tapping into the love and kindness that truly is our super power.

We started with a short loving kindness practice inspired by Diana Winston. Diana is  Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center.  You can practice at home by going to her podcast, Getting Out of Your Head.

We drew on meditation instructor, Oren Jay Sofer including his recent talk,  Introduction to Loving Kindness.  His very worthwhile talk offers context, instructions and helpful suggestions including a guided meditation.

Next time you need a little breathing break you might check out meditation and author, Sharon Salzberg’s delightful short animation, Where Does Compassion Really Come From?

Explore giving your heart’s attention to Corinna Luyken’s children’s book, My Heart.  You’ll find it toward the end of Maria Popova’s post on Favorite Children’s Books of 2019,

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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.

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The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored how stories shape our lives. When we sit down to meditate, we reclaim our attention perhaps our most precious resource.  Our awareness empowers us. It enables us to experience our shared humanity. Our circle of caring inspires me to go deeper, reach further.  I’m breathing thank you’s now.

During our relaxed reflection we drew on essayist Rebecca Solnit’s book, Call Them by Their True Names.  Rebecca describes how stories come to live inside us.  To be fully conscious, we need to see them, question them and often transform them to co-create a more just world.

We heard from writer and social activist, Parker Palmer’s book, Healing the Heart of Democracy.  He asks us to be guided by what we know in our hearts, to hear and speak “heart-talk” so that we can “act humanely on what we know.”

In his On Being interview, Fortifying Imagination, we heard Jason Reynolds‘ urgent call for loving and supporting our young people as they strive to create a better world.  Jason’s written a new companion to Ibram X. Kendi’s history of racism, Stamped From the Beginning, for young readers: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix.

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The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  Looking into digital faces feels so strangely intimate.  Thank you all for giving me your face.  This vulnerability we share conveys an open heartedness that relates to our exploration of communication.  Perhaps we are all making these explorations as we live through a time that is calling for our action.  One of our most powerful human resources is our voice.  We learned some fundamental communication principles from meditation teacher and Nonviolent Communication trainer, Oren Jay Sofer.  Oren is author of Say What You Mean.  He offers on-line classes, retreats and workshops on Mindful Communication.

We drew inspiration from In poet and writer, Ursula Le Guin.  Her book of essays, The Wave in the Mind, extolls the magic and power of words. In her essay, Listening is Telling, writer and social commentator Maria Popova writes about the courage it takes to step into the speaking and listening dance of vulnerability.  Finally we heard writer Neil Gaiman’s poetic tribute to “marine biologist and poet laureate of science”  Rachel Carson, After Silence.

We practiced a present body centering practice “coming home to our bodies.”  We then spent some time in relaxed reflection.

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The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  I am so deeply grateful that we are able to come together in practice.  We’ve been living with the constant awareness of a physical and social pandemic.  Some of us are involved with illness in some way – either  being sick or caring about someone who is sick.  Some of us are involved with social justice activism – either being on the street or supporting those on the street.  We are taking in a steady stream of suffering.   We are adapting; we are learning; and we are taking action.  This day to day, hour by hour awareness of pain and suffering creates stress.  When stress becomes chronic it comes to live in our bodies.   

We explored a grounding present body awareness practice from therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem.  In his book, My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa includes a series of body practices for healing the effects of chronic stress and trauma.

We reflected on the writing of poet, gardener, college professor, Ross Gay and his On Being interview Tending Joy and Practicing Delight.  In his work Ross invites us to find and amplify the ordinary and wondrous beauty in life.  He encourages us to cultivate tenderness in our lives even while struggling for racial justice.

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The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. Our hearts have been deeply touched by the struggles that are going on around us.  Lives are being lost in violence, in illness and in the poverty that makes it difficult for people to get the food, healthcare and security they need.  

George Floyd was murdered on May 25th.  The following day marked the beginning of a wave of daily protests taking place in large and small cities throughout our country.  Policy brutality, particularly against African Americans, has been with us a long time.  Many Americans are taking to the streets to protest racial injustice chanting the names of black men and women killed in recent years, including Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor and many others.

I have to take a deep breath here to remember each of these names is a life filled with other lives unimaginably changed by loss.

Our reflections included the STOP practice created by Rhonda Magee, a law professor and meditation instructor. Rhonda is a facilitator of trauma-sensitive, restorative Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) interventions. She explained how her work helps to minimize the effects of social-identity-based bias in her Tricycle Magazine article,  Making the Invisible Visible.  We also heard the moving words of poet and writer Maya Angelou.  You can hear her complete poem, A Brave and Startling Truth, read aloud by astrophysicist Janna Levin as part of the Universe in Verse project.  (Scroll down the page and you will find a SoundCloud box for the audio.)

I mentioned a beautiful talk, Courageous Presence with Racism, given by meditation instructor and author Tara Brach.  This talk moved me deeply.  I plan to listen to it every day this week as a support for my personal practice of understanding my personal biases and conditioning as the relate to race.

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The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. I think we gather for many reasons which, for me, include connection, caring, inspiration, meaning and solace. This week we witnessed the needless death of George Floyd.  We watched the responding protests and civil unrest mounting intensity.  Each of us brought our grieving hearts to practice.  We drew inspiration from lyric poet Gregory Orr. In an NPR story about his work, Gregory states, “I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions, and traumatic events that come with being alive.”

Gregory found his way to poetry four years after accidentally killing his brother in a hunting accident when he was twelve years old.  He found a way of expressing his deeper story about the event his family was never able to talk about.  As a young man he nearly died during the civil rights movement when as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) he was jailed and severely beaten.  His work contains a sense of urgency about finding meaning and voice. You can hear Gregory talk about his story in this On Being interview, Shaping Grief with Language.

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The Yogabliss on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  I look forward to our class all week.  I love the feeling of belonging.  I take courage knowing that we share very simple and powerful intentions.  We are learning about ourselves in an intimate way and an expansive way.  We’re intimate with sensations, emotions and thoughts.  We expand our hearts to allow our human experiences to belong.  We draw inspiration from each other.  It is a joy to see your faces even on a screen.

Our practice and reflection were based on Tara Brach’s new book, Radical Compassion and a reading from novelist, playwright, essayist, poet and civil rights activist James Baldwin. You can find out more about his work from the American Masters program Take This Hammer.  I quoted from an essay from his book, Nothing Personal.  This beautiful prose was set to heart felt music by Morley and Friends as, Nothing is Fixed, part of the  2020 Universe in Verse program.  I hope you have time to give it a listen.

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