The Yogabliss, Two Rivers/RiverTree Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning. Today’s practice was about appreciating our bodies. We allowed felt experience to draw our awareness more intimately to presence. We experience feeling and time differently in the spirit of allowing.
The flowers of Being open in their own time given the right conditions.
Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have. Mark describes this work as a “spiritual daybook.” I have drawn on its beauty for nearly twenty years.
Sufi poet, Rumi, encouraged us to appreciate the wonder of embodiment in his poem, Bird Wings. In Wild Geese, Mary Oliver reminded us “to let the soft animal of [our] body love what it loves.”
Our Embodied Awareness meditation was inspired by Alan Fogel’s excellent Kosmos Journal article: Embodied Thinking and Embodied Feeling. Alan is a somatic therapist whose work invites us to allow felt sensation to call our awareness home. His article describes “the thinking and feeling components of Embodied Self Awareness.” He lists our bodies’ primary felt experiences and their related feelings. It helped me to appreciate the different gifts of thinking and feeling.
We ended with a few of Erin Geesaman Rabke’s blessings from her Embodied Beatitudes. A more complete list from her “work-in-progress” is like a prayer of appreciation for our amazing bodies.
Relaxed Reflection
Each day we wake up to change and challenge. In our practice we can find inner stability, some ground to stand on. We can cultivate resilience and the inner resources that help us to adapt and respond to the people and the world we care about. We can find our ground. We can cultivate resilience with our dearest friend, our Body. I love these words from Mark Nepo:
There is a gravity of spirit that pulls the essence of who we are into being. Our job, like all our sister creatures, is to find the abundance of air and water and light, and to unfold what is already within us.
We can tune into the direct experience of gravity gently holding us to Earth. Can you feel this gentling weight, just enough to hold you together? Can you feel Earth beneath you, Earth inside you, abiding and alive? Tune into your own living hum and vibration. As you are sitting or lying down, can you relax and stay present?
Can you find the middle ground between being relaxed and alert?
Let the breath come to you. Where do you feel the incoming and the outgoing breath? Feel Body breathing in the stream of time. Thoughts and emotions may surface naturally. You can continue breathing, feeling and being alive. Body’s language is sensation. What sensations are speaking to you right now? Body isn’t always a comfortable place to be. Notice what’s true for you. Sense Body’s fluid and changing nature; how you are relating to your experience.
We come into this world deeply connected to our Bodies and yet over time we begin to relate to Body as an “it”: a vehicle, a machine or an image. As long as our vehicle functions or our image delights we can push past our limits or even harm ourselves. Until the day comes and something wakes us up from our trance. All of us experience illness, injury, aging and loss. These experiences call us back home to our Bodies. Body can be a guide on our healing journeys. Body can teach us how to nourish and nurture.
Body reveals so much about living. Right now you reflect on your relationship with Body. How do you care? Do you listen? Do you understand? Are you at home? These might be questions that you live with for a while. See if you can hold the answers without judgment and with loving kindness.
Body offers us the experience of intimacy. Befriending Body begins with acceptance. Body holds our inheritance, race, gender, conditioning and culture. All of us are differently abled. Body holds effects of trauma at the deepest levels. All our experiences enable us or become obstacles to accepting Body. When encountering these obstacles it can be helpful to find a part of Body that you can accept. You can dwell on its goodness, how it supports your well being, how it makes a difference in your life.
Rumi writes of this heartfelt appreciation in his poem Bird Wings:
Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
if it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
and expanding,
In coming home to Body, we come back to our senses. Body invites us to rest our minds so we can feel our emotions and learn. We can open to what is revealed with curiosity and care. We can remember Mary Oliver’s words from Wild Geese: You only have to let the soft animal of your body, love what it loves.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
When Body calls our awareness we have the potential for healing, developing resilience and experiencing joy. We can find our “place in the family of things.”
We experience Embodied Awareness by entering the field of sensation, relaxed and curious. Allow your attention to wander over and through Body letting curiosity and impulse move you along. Let your attention be free-floating or diffuse. Let these felt experiences call you. No need to make the feeling get better or understand it. Let yourself go wherever felt experience takes you. Some sensations or emotions may capture your attention and hold it for a little while. Aware of breathing; feeling breathing. Aware of lying down; feeling lying down. Aware of moving; feeling moving. Bring awareness, feeling, sensation together right now. This can be our way to aliveness and joy – it’s where we meet our lives, each other and the planet.
We can create the conditions for healing by giving it the time and space in which to unfold. In discomfort or pain, we can find the place to rest our attention that doesn’t hurt. We let it be our place of equanimity where we can establish some balance. A place we can return to when feeling overwhelmed. Can you find a place like that right now? Find a place that feels o.k. When you’re ready, kindly, warmly open to felt experience. You can access this healing field in openness, vulnerability and love.
Here are some of Erin Geesaman Rabke’s Body blessings:
Blessed are those whose bellies are free – swelling with every breath and posturing for no one; they shall know ease in their own skin and sense the truth of things.
Blessed are those who love the earth through their feet as they walk, through their pelvis as they sit, and through their full bodies as they lie down to rest: the love of life for life itself shall flow through them without hindrance, blessing their very cells as it nourishes all those near them.
Blessed are those who respect their breath like a mysterious wild animal and befriend it accordingly; not to fix or control or perform, but maybe, with gentling and plenty of room to roam free, they shall ride together in beautiful ways through their moments and their hours; they shall never suffer domination and their wildness will bless them as it heals the world.
Blessed are those who befriend themselves thoroughly; the soft animal of their bodies shall be free; they shall end the wars within and shall never contribute to wars without.