The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. We focused on how we experience attention.  Our experience of how we attend determines our aliveness.  Tuning into our natural vitality as a source of support can release us from the tension of trying too hard.

Our inner aliveness can buoy us up like a boat on water.

We drew inspiration and guidance from Oren Jay Sofer’s new book: Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love.  We continued our focus on attention – specifically how we pay attention.

We also drew inspiration from Insight Meditation teacher, Gil Fronsdal’s teaching.  Gil and his fellow teachers offer a library of talks, guided meditations and courses through AudioDharma.  You can experience his guided meditation, Vitality, in this archive.

We heard Anne Hillman’s poem, We Look with Uncertainty. The poem, from her collection Awakening the Energies of Love: Discovering Fire for the Second Time.  The poem is a “dare” to be human in our vulnerability and openness.

We drew from the tenth chapter of Kathleen Dowling Singh’s book, The Grace in Aging: Awaken As You Grow Older. In this section, Commitment:  Liberation from Deception, Kathleen focuses on the precious gift of our attention.  She reminds us  that “we’re here to learn from each other. . . . We’re here to share with each other, to comfort and be comforted, to be present with each other.”

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We considered how we shape the world and are, in turn, shaped by the world.  We cultivated attention.  Attention is one of our most precious inner resources.  Attention makes love and connection possible.  Like flowers opening we can open our hearts to what we pay attention to.  Attention can help us feel all of life and move us to care for the world.

Attention can help us consider what our hearts are made for.

We drew inspiration and guidance from Oren Jay Sofer’s new book: Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love.  The book is a wonderful collection of twenty six precious human qualities we can cultivate over the weeks to come.  We began with attention because we make the world with our attention.  You can find more about the book, including a number of short guided meditations, at Oren’s web-site.

We heard Miriam Teichner’s beautiful prayer-poem, Awareness. Miriam was a journalist and poet. In 1915, she served as a a correspondent on the peace ship Oscar II that took Henry Ford to Europe on his ill-fated peace mission before World War I. I deeply appreciate the poem’s fierceness and humility.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored relational presence in our practice. In relational presence we can stay aware of our inner state while engaging with another.  Imagining what we love about a person – even in challenging relationships – can help us recognize how we belong to each other.  This awareness is all the more important knowing that the only time we really have is the present moment.

We drew on Oren Jay Sofer’s Speak Your Truth With Love and Listen Deeply:  A Training in Mindfulness Based Nonviolent Communication. This course is a beautiful and thoughtful training in how to bring our embodied presence to the world.  It can support our relationships and help us to grow as compassionate actors in the world.  Today we focused on relational presence:  How we can stay  present and grounded and in touch while we’re engaged with another person.

We heard poet David Whyte’s beautiful words on belonging.  You can find more on this in David’s book, The House of Belonging.

We heard Bernadette Miller’s poem, An Invitation.  You can find more of Bernadette’s poetry on Grate Living.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning. Including everything in mindfulness draws us more intimately into the reality of our lives.  Touching uncertainty and vulnerability can open our hearts to our shared human condition.  We can develop the inner resources we can draw on and that we can offer others in times of difficulty.  Our embodied presence makes so much possible.  We can create the conditions for our inner truths and deeper wisdom to arise.

We practiced a guided meditation inspired by Oren Jay Sofer.  Oren is author of the Sounds True Audio course, Speak Your Truth With Love and Listen Deeply:  A Training in Mindfulness Based Nonviolent Communication.  I’ve studied with Oren for a number of years.  This course is a beautiful and thoughtful training in how to bring our embodied presence to the world can support our relationships and help us to grow as compassionate actors in the world.

We heard Padraig O Tauma’s poem The Facts of Life. Padraig is an Irish poet and theologian.  He presents Poetry Unbound a program produced by On Being Studios. This poem encourages us to bring our hearts to live and love in the world.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  This week we explored how our minds are so much more than our brains.  We use the world to think.  We include feelings and movements of our bodies, the minds of others and our environments in our extended minds.  Mindfulness can help us to appreciate this inter-related network of which we are a part.  Mindful awareness can guide us to an experience of wholeness.  It can helps us accept ourselves and each other unconditionally.

We drew from Annie Murphy Paul’s book, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Annie explains that “thought happens not only inside the skull but out in the world, too; it’s an act of continuous assembly and reassembly that draws on resources external to the brain. . . .  the capacity to think well — that is, to be intelligent — is not a fixed property of the individual but rather a shifting state that is dependent on access to extra-neural resources and the knowledge of how to use them.”   I think we can develop our thinking minds with mindfulness.

We heard John Welwood’s poem about our basic goodness.  John was an  transpersonal psychologist.  His work integrated Eastern spiritual wisdom with Western psychology.  His teachings and writings centered around relationship as a spiritual path.  You can find his writings and some of his teachings on his web-site.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We reflected on memories, how we create them, store them and retrieve them.  Our mindful awareness enables us to witness how memories change and how we are changed by them.  Mindful awareness can help us to live in the present moment, truly the only moment we have.  Learning difficult and wondrous truths about mind and memory evokes compassion.

May we remember life’s impermanence and extend compassion to ourselves and others.

We heard Jane Hirshfield’s poem When Your Life Looks Back. The poem is an invitation to enter life more fully, moment by moment.  It’s about the fragility or our shared human condition.  In her wonderful interview with Lion’s Roar writer Noelle Oxenhandler, Jane comments:

Who is the “I” of this poem? It is all of us, called to the thresholds of our own lives, invited to go on through whatever sorrows and difficulties we may encounter, and to make our home in the happiness that can come to us only when—realizing how far we extend beyond our own skins –

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We practiced settling and exploring our deep experience of being.  Being aware and receptive to what arises  are conditions for attunement to ourselves and others. Attunement is an expansion of listening to and with our whole being.  With attunement we can appreciate the beauty, complexity, joy and suffering of others. May our practice support our ability to live compassion.    

We heard Mark Nepo’s short essay Unadorned. Mark’s words convey the precious and fleeting nature of life. He writes that “this clearing of awareness is where we stop and put everything down, accepting there is nowhere to go. It is there that we begin to flower slowly, one color at a time, letting everything we’ve kept hidden rise with the fragrance we were born with.”

We ended with Zen Earthlyn Manuel’s prayer For All Beings.  Zenju’s tender prayer of loving kindness conveys the peril and vulnerability that many people in the world experience today.  Her prayer names the essential needs we require to flourish in this world.  Care.  Love.  Safety.  Freedom.   “To be fed, clothed. To be treated as if their life is precious. To be held in the eyes of each other as family.”

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  In today’s class we explored the way we view things.  We can inform our view with the knowledge that everything is constantly changing.  We can find our way by trusting our capacity to allow what emerges in the space of awareness.

In this space of awareness we can be touched by life experience directly.  In this still space, we can be moved to caring, empathy and compassion.

Our meditation practice was informed by Insight Meditation teacher, Gil Fronsdal’s teaching.  Gil and his fellow teachers offer a library of talks, guided meditations and courses through AudioDharma.  You can experience his guided meditation,  Trust Emergence, in this archive.

We heard Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem Directions.  You can find more of Rosemerry’s writings and poems on her web-site A hundred Falling Veils.

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The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  I believe heart breaking world events are calling for care, compassion and understanding.  I am grateful to share a practice that can help to foster these life-affirming qualities.  Today’s class centered around our goodness and listening deeply from that place. We can do the inner and outer work of peace making.

We heard William Stafford’s poem, Being a Person.   You can learn about this remarkable poet by reading Steve Paul’s LitHub essay, On the Enduring Memory of One of America’s Greatest Contemporary Poets.  Steve’s been working on William Stafford’s biography.  In the essay he observes:

Looking back on his life, as I’ve been doing in recent years, unearths not only a wealth of poetic charms but a sense that Stafford projected a moral force that can be useful if not essential today. His work threaded through concerns about the environment, race relations, politics, history, spirituality, and the depths and limitations of the human heart.  . . . 

In life as in his poetry he rejected loud conflict and social and political aggression. Let’s be reasonable and gentle with each other. Let’s greet the world with awe and an impish sense of humor. Let’s be honest with one another.

Stafford reveled in imagery from the natural world. Streams, rocks, trees, and prairie winds make recurring appearances as touchstones, inspiration, solid and fluid realities that guide our way. Contemplating the influence of those who love or hurt, Stafford offers solace in the stillness and hidden force of nature: “What the river says, that is what I say.”

To read Stafford today is to appreciate the richness and diversity of modern and contemporary poetry and to understand how he managed to make human connections, as if that were the absolute mission of his work. 

Stafford died at his Oregon home on August 28, 1993. The morning of his death he had written a poem containing the lines, “‘You don’t have to / prove anything,’ my mother said. ‘Just be ready / for what God sends.'” I find today’s poem and the testimony of William Stafford’s life to be helpful inspirations for navigating today’s troubled waters.

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