The Columbia City Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation class met this morning.  We explored the transformative energy of curiosity.  Offering ourselves and other curiosity can be liberating.  We have the possibility of experiencing what it is like to be undefended and all that brings.  Think about that.

We continued to draw from Oren Jay Sofer’s  book: Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love.  Oren believes:  “True curiosity allows us to see beyond structures, messages and roles we have been handed by society and history – roles that can feel so innate we may have never examined them.  Curiosity holds a mirror up to nature, questioning what we believe and why, how we behave and why.  . . . This curiosity is radical.”  This is a liberating invitation!

We drew from the tenth chapter of Kathleen Dowling Singh’s book, The Grace in Aging: Awaken As You Grow Older.  Kathleen observes:  “Even if most of the moments of our lives were lost in the dream of self, of form only, we’ve all spent some time in presence – the experience of formless awareness. . . . To forget the self and its pettiness, even for a moment, is liberation from tension, from the perpetual stress of maintaining the self’s boundaries.  To forget the self . . . is to actually show up, open and embracing, in the present moment’s play of form and formlessness. . . . our hunger for awareness greater than this small self, bound by birth and death, can still be ours to fulfill and to experience and to abide in.”

We heard Padraig O’Tuama’s poem, How to Be Alone.   You can hear Padraig reading his poem in Leo G. Franchi’s Poetry Film.

Guided Reflection

Welcome.  In our last class together we reflected on the different causes for wisdom to arise.  It can develop by bringing mindfulness to our inner lives and by deeply engaging with others.   Both touch on an essential vulnerability that David Whyte describes as “that first vulnerability of being found, of being heard and of being seen.”

This week we’ll consider the transformative energy of curiosity.  I appreciate the energy of curiosity that brought you here today.  In his book, Your Heart Was Made for This, Oren Jay Sofer writes:

Contemplative practice turns the immense power of curiosity inward.  integrating interest with energy, mindfulness, concentration and wisdom we can open to transformative realizations about the human heart, consciousness and the nature of existence.

With mindfulness and interest we can understand, heal and transform . . . [our] patterns – be they personal habits of control, harshness, or avoidance, or socially conditioned dynamics like unconscious racism or internalized oppression.  Support from good friends and caring community are indispensable.  

This sounds liberating to me.  I recently took a journey outside my habitat.  For a week and half I lived in community with people I did and didn’t know well.  In placing myself in a retreat setting I surrendered many of my habitual habits.  I was challenged to yield my assumptions and preferences and to understand in a non-conceptual way.  In several experiences of conflict I was able to find my heart’s understanding:  the love that mattered most.  I think curiosity, a willingness to understand, and caring community helped me discover this opening.  

Open and curious.  Kathleen Dowling Singh writes:

Curiosity is a mind controlling nothing.  . . . without prejudice or expectation, undefended  . . . It becomes absorbed in the ever novel and endless display of the ground of being.  

I was also blessed with the experience of feeling completely undefended.  It came with a sense of quiet happiness and well being.  Kathleen describes this too:

Joy arises with surrender, with the sane and natural trust that engenders surrender.. . . It is the taste of increasingly bare, increasingly subtle awareness.  . . . There is no need to grasp at joy.  It is always present, always within the airy easy spaciousness of now.

I think this is available to all of us with the causes and conditions of spiritual practice and the support of loving community.  Alone and together.  Here is Padraig O’Tauma’s poem, How to Be Alone:  

It all begins with knowing
nothing lasts forever.
So you might as well start packing now.
But, in the meantime,
practice being alive.

There will be a party
where you’ll feel like
nobody’s paying you attention.
And there will be a party
where attention’s all you’ll get.
What you need to do
is know how to talk to
yourself
between these parties.

And,
again,
there will be a day,
— a decade —
where you won’t
fit in with your body
even though you’re in
the only body you’re in.

You need to control
your habit of forgetting
to breathe.

[Remember when you were younger
and you practiced kissing on your arm?
You were on to something then.]
Sometimes harm knows its own healing
comfort its own intelligence.
Kindness too.
It needs no reason.

There is a you
telling you a story of you.
Listen to her.

Where do you feel
anxiety in your body?
The chest? The fist? The dream before waking?
The head that feels like it’s at the top of the swing
or the clutch of gut like falling
& falling & falling and falling
It knows something: you’re dying.
Try to stay alive.

For now, touch yourself.
I’m serious.

Touch your
self.
Take your hand
and place your hand
some place
upon your body.
And listen
to the community of madness
that
you are.

You are
such an
interesting conversation.

You belong
here.

Again, thank you for being here. You belong here.  I invite you to practice being alive:  listening, open and curious.  Sense your body resting on Earth’s body.  If you like, you can place your hands on the places you can feel your body breathing.  Perhaps you can sense comfort and open to its intelligence.  There is you.  There is the kindness that needs no reason.  

You can relax your hands and explore breathing without controlling the breath in any way.   Can you be curious about how the breathing is expressing itself?  You might notice the transitions between breaths:  each breath becoming the next. 

Can you venture further into this opening awareness?  Can you accept the breath just as it is? In nonjudgmental openness breath can be an instrument of understanding. Is it possible to open to all this:  to the known and unknown?  Do you sense the voice that arises, speaking in a language of sensation?  Let it be known as Body breathes.  We learn to look with our eyes, we begin to look with our heart’s eyes also. To be in touch with one’s body is to be in touch with the world.

This is our practice.  We take the utmost care and kindness with all things: body, breath, sensation, emotion, thought. We take the utmost care and kindness with all beings.

As you sense your body resting on Earth’s body.  Notice what surfaces in the field of awareness.  Sensation. Emotion. Thought. Presence.  Can there be a simple willingness to orient toward being aware?  No need to grasp or struggle.  Can you set your sails and be carried?  As you become aware of drifting notice the energy of attention reorienting to awareness.  Perhaps just a slight adjustment – a whisper brings you back.  Back to the field of awareness.  Notice the nature of presence. Available.  Open. Quiet.  There may be an absence of wanting.  There may be  a fullness of what you are witnessing. 

If there’s a sense of struggle, you might move your attention to a place where you feel a sense of ease.  Gently allow it to move. You might sense  the Earth’s support beneath you  or the continuing movement of being breathed.  You might allow the struggle to rest in this field of support. Let it rest in awareness.  Let it move as it will.  You might meet it with open hearted curiosity and listen.   What arises with surrender?  What is it like to abide in awareness?

Curiosity is a mind controlling nothing.  . . . without prejudice or expectation, undefended  . . . absorbed in the endless display of the ground of being.  

May all beings know the joy that arises with surrender.  May all beings know the trust that engenders surrender.