The Yogabliss, Your Heart Life on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning.  Today we reflected on the great uncertainties of living with climate change.  We cultivated compassion by exploring the willingness to feel the difficult emotions of our past, present and future losses.  We considered the teaching that truly living with uncertainty can free us to engage more deeply with the world.  We can do this by “coming new” to each day with open minds and feeling hearts.

We drew on Lama Willa Blythe Baker’s essay, Five Practices for Working with the Immense Challenge of Climate Change.  Lama Baker, Ph.D. is the Founder of Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston.  She is the author of four books including The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom.  You can hear her fascinating interview, How to Get Out of Your Head with Dan Harris on the Ten Percent Happier podcast.

We drew inspiration from Roshi Joan Halifax’s view that every human is a river of life.

We hard Nancy Paddock’s poem, Lie Down, from her collection Trust the Wild Heart.

We ended with Rebecca del Rio’s Prescription for the Disillusioned. The poem is drawn from her eponymous collection which:

is an invitation to enter into a world of the magical mundane, a meditation on the curious and unique life given to everyone. . . . The poems are a response to the human condition, a conversation with life and loss, as well as an uncovering of the mystical in the day-to-day walk that we call our lives.

Relaxed Reflection

Here we are together in the midst of another Summer. In the Northwest, our flowering friends are opening their faces to the sun.  Their petals are withering and luscious fruits are forming: blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, salmonberries, thimbleberries and huckleberries. There is a beautiful tenderness in the way they offer themselves up to life.  They seed and sustain.  They nourish humans and more than humans. We, too, have a kind of fruit that we offer the world: Our compassion.

Like the wild fruits in fields and forests, our compassion ripens with the light of our minds, the warmth of our hearts and the water of our tears. We know Earth’s fields and forests, streams and rivers, ice and oceans are in peril. Every day we lose more strands in the web of life. Right now we can notice how the depth of these words land in our hearts. This is why we practice. We practice so that we may hold this perilous time in the tender gravity of our compassion.

Author Willa Miller encourages us to access our Bodily Wisdom to cultivate compassion. She writes:

To encounter our human body is to encounter the natural world. . . . The closer we come to the body, the closer we draw to the truth of our own wildness. This connects us to the planetary wildness that we aspire to protect.

While the mind is tugged into the past and future, the body is fully present. The body’s present wakefulness is one of its great wisdoms, and we can easily access that wisdom. It is as close to us as this moment’s inhale and exhale. While we want to stay mindful of creating a sustainable future, we don’t want to do that at the expense of missing our life. The body reminds us that we are here, now, and our presence is our most powerful resource.

How are you experiencing your body today? You might sense the spine as a column of support holding you up. You might center your awareness here. You might open your awareness like a field. Can you be with what arises? Pure, open awareness, expansive, unadorned. You might feel breathing coming, going, pausing, flowing. How is it be a breathing conscious being, a strand in the web of life? Can you broaden your awareness to include your inter-being in the web? Can you sense life’s struggles to survive?

Perhaps a particular creature, landscape or waterway may come to mind. It might be a lost opportunity or even a future. I invite you to let the breath be easy. Feel what you are feeling. It may be fear, sadness, anger or despair. Notice any tendency to pull away, to be overwhelmed. It’s o.k. you can come back to the breath. You can give yourself space, take a break. When you’re ready, you can return to the sense of being in a field of kindness and caring. You might imagine our circle of support as a wider field of compassion. You are part of this circle and this circle is a part of you. Roshi Joan Halifax reminds us that:

Each person is a river of life. I have found myself nourished by so many strong and beautiful rivers.

May we feel ourselves as nourishing, strong and beautiful rivers flowing through our troubled world.

Willa Baker encourages us to feel:

Tibetan Buddhism teaches that the states that we most wish to avoid are actually the key to our freedom. Instead of erasing emotions, we can metabolize them. If we take our reactivity into a contemplative space, it is possible to liberate the energy of emotion, transforming it into supple responsiveness.

When you’re ready, begin to notice the ground beneath you. Notice how Earth is supporting you, solid and steady. See if you can connect with the perspective of a wise elder: one who has a more timeless view in which everything comes and goes. Life can be hard. We’re doing the best we can. Touch that place of equanimity inside yourself. I invite you to reflect on the meaning of compassion. You can place your hand over your heart. Can you stay present for what arises: feelings, images, memories, the willingness to care. You might silently say “I care” and see what comes.

And remember, you can rest when you need to. As poet Nancy Paddock writes:

Lie down with your belly to the ground, like an old dog in the sun.
Smell the greenness of the cloverleaf, feel the damp earth through your clothes, let an ant wander the uncharted territory of your skin.
Lie down with your belly to the ground.
Melt into the earth’s contours like a harmless snake.
All else is mere bravado.
Let your mind resolve itself in a tangle of grass.
Lie down with your belly to the ground, flat out, on ground level.
Prostrate yourself before the soil you will someday enter.
Stop doing.
Stop judging, fearing, trying. This is not dying, but the way to live in a world of change and gravity.
Let go.
Let your burdens drop.
Let your grief-charge bleed off into the ground.
Lie down with your belly to the ground and then rise up with the earth still in you.

Come back to Earth. Lie down on the ground in the tender gravity of kindness. Let yourself be nourished by the breath; supported by Earth.  As you become aware of any tension in your body, soreness in your heart, difficulty in your mind, can you offer yourself some tenderness? Perhaps being with the question: ‘What is needed now?’ So often the answer is “I don’t know.” How is it for you to be with discomfort and uncertainty? Perhaps you feel the inherent vulnerability of not knowing.

The Zen instruction “only don’t know” places us squarely in the present moment. In her reflections about the myriad consequences of climate change, Willa Baker encourages us to welcome uncertainty. She writes:

If there is one thing that climate scientists agree on, it is that we don’t know for certain what will happen as the earth warms. . . . We have no idea how much we can slow or ameliorate the suffering. . . .

We want to know if our children and grandchildren will be able to visit the shoreline, walk in the forest, breathe clean air, and live in safety. . . .

Many of the Buddha’s teachings focus on uncertainty, not as an inconvenience, but as a source of liberation. . . . If . . . we embrace the truth of uncertainty, we can develop the courage to stay open and engage with the world. If we can accept the fragility of life on earth, we can invest ourselves in the possibility of collective action.

Today we are pausing to reflect on the truth of our vulnerability. We cultivate the courage and resolve to stay open and engage with the world. Here is poet Rebecca del Rio’s Prescription for the Disillusioned:

Come new to this day.
Remove the rigid overcoat of experience,
the notion of knowing,
the beliefs that cloud your vision.
Leave behind the stories of your life.
Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation.
Let the stale scent of what-ifs waft back into the swamp

of your useless fears.
Arrive curious, without the armor of certainty,
the plans and planned results of the life you’ve imagined.
Live the life that chooses you,
new every breath, every blink of your astonished eyes.

May we come new to this day. May we be curious, without armor and embrace life anew with every breath.