The Yogabliss, Your Heart Life on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning.  We explored the experience of embodiment sensing inside and outside our bodies.  We explored the experience of inter-being:  how we are born and sustained in mutual relationship with others.  We cultivated appreciation and love: for Earth, her human and more than human inhabitants and the ordinary miracles of being alive.

We heard one 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.

We heard Daniel Ladinsky’s translation of Hafiz’ poem Today from The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master.  You can find more of his irreverent and whimsical writings, including Buddha After Hours in a Bar, at his blog.

We drew extensively from Orrin Williams’ Humans and Nature essay, Skinfolk, Kinfolk, and the Kingship of Oneness. Orrin is a community advocate and educator.  His work focuses on making urban space more productive and more efficient, particularly in terms of feeding people and generating energy.  His essay embraces  a vision of kinship consciousness.

We drew inspiration from Toni Spencer’s beautiful poem Reciprocal Rhythm.  Toni is a Deep Adaptation Advocate, poet, mentor and teacher.  She “seeks to enable a richer engagement with the ecological, cultural and social issues of our times.”  You can learn more about Toni’s work and her seven week course, Living Deep Adaptation at her web-site.

Relaxed Reflection

I invite you to gather your awareness to this moment of being. There is so much unseen and yet embodied.  Together we experience the ordinary miracle of feeling.  I invite you to feel the weightiness of your bones meeting Earth.  You might sense the quiet aliveness of bone and Earth; how they inter-are. Bone is living, growing tissue, collagen protein, calcium phosphate. Earth is living, growing tissue.  Her soil a mix of minerals, living organisms, air and water. 

We can stretch time and wonder in the continuous stream of changes in our bodies.  How does your body make itself known to you? 

I invite you to move awareness through your body.  If this inner focus is uncomfortable, you are welcome to open your eyes, rest your gaze on an object and pause before moving to another.  I invite you to feel your feet. Explore sensation in your legs and thighs. Sense the pelvic bowl and what it holds. Travel the riverbed of your spine. Enter the deep liveliness of your belly. Feel life pulsing in your chest, the subtle movements of heart and lungs. Move awareness through shoulders along arms. Sense the intelligence of your hands.  Explore how you sense your brain. Know how it interrelates and orchestrates your whole body.  Sense your whole body. Reflect on its history:  your life lived. Its future unfolding with each breath, each moment, present becoming past.  

Know how precious life is.  How it arises from endless, miraculous conditions.  How it is sustained by this magical inter-being of countless bodies – sentient and non-sentient.  May you receive Erin Rabke’s blessings:

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.

We sit together in the love of life.  We are nourished and sustained as we practice mindfulness.  In the light of awareness we can see all life has value.  We can recognize we are part of a more than human world. We can be because we inter-are.  We are nested in an elegant web of inter-relationships. 

 In his poem, Today, the Sufi poet Hafiz writes:

I
Do not
Want to step so quickly
Over a beautiful line on God’s palm
As I move through the earth’s
Marketplace
Today.
I do not want to touch any object in this world
Without my eyes testifying to the truth
That everything is
My Beloved.
Something has happened
To my understanding of existence
That now makes my heart always full of wonder
And kindness.
I do not
Want to step so quickly
Over this sacred place on God’s body
That is right beneath your
Own foot
As I
Dance with
Precious life
Today.

As we rest on Earth’s body we experience miracles:  the ordinary miracles of being alive.  Right now we experience our sensing awareness. We can appreciate the many magical ways we perceive and respond to our inner and outer world.  Feel the river bed of your spine, the firm bones of pelvis and head. Sense the soft muscles cushioning bones, protecting organs. Imagine the many fluids coursing throughout your body carrying oxygen and nutrients. Know the electric light of neurons. Explore the many ways the outer world enters your inner world. 

We become who we are in relation to the world around us.  The first thing we do is entrain with the eyes of our mothers who interpret the world for us and teach us how to speak.  We can recall the many eyes that have held our gaze:   a deer in the woods, a dog or cat we live with or encounter on the street.  We can recreate the echoes of the voices made by the faint call of an owl in the woods, the bleating of a sheep or neigh of a horse.  We have scent and taste memories of flowers and fruits.  Our hands know the soft and hard sensations of skin and fur.  Our being is enriched by all of these relationships.  Our bodies, hearts and minds develop in relationship with them. 

Writer Orrin Williams describes his spontaneous realizations of this inter-being as:

. . . episodes of realization about my true interconnected self occur . . . during the early morning hours . . . when the veil between the cosmic spirit realm and the earthly realm is the thinnest. Sometimes I will tune in to my breath and recognize that it is a miracle, that my life and that of all beings is a miracle, and the word miracle becomes a mantra recited silently with each exhalation.

I invite you to feel breathing.  Take in the world.  Release out into the world. What mantra, what sacred sound, affirms your experience?  

Orrin writes:

When I am looking out of the window . . .  I sometimes begin a spontaneous mantra of “interbeing,” repeating that word silently with every being I see, be it a human, bird, dog, or rabbit.  . . . [W]hen I sit in my garden . . . watching the gathering of birds and pollinators while connecting with each plant spirit . . .  the mantra “gratitude” emerges from somewhere deep inside, forming a chorus with the singing birds . . . 

I invite you to call to mind a human or a more than human that you recently recognized.  Notice who surfaces.  What mantra emerges for you?  As you hold this being in your mind’s eyes, you might affirm their presence with sacred sound – hearing the sound in your mind’s ears. 

Looking deeply into our relationship of inter-being we realize we are who we are because of many expressions of life that have touched us.  Orrin considers:

. . . how we might craft a consciousness of kinship and oneness that allows us to see each human, plant, animal, river, lake, ocean, and microbe as a sacred whole. 

When we realize our inter-being, we recognize our part of Earth’s greater wholeness.  We acknowledge our responsibility to offer ourselves to her.  What can we give in return for the many gifts she has given?  Poet Toni Spencer’s poem, Reciprocal Rhythm, describes our kinship and the love that can bring the world into balance:

Reciprocal rhythm
There is a reciprocal rhythm. A flow between things.
A velocity of reciprocity that builds a village, builds
a dream, builds the world.
For we are kin and kin means I need
you, and you need me. And the sun.
And the water. And the soil
born of things long dead.
Most of us grew up in little boxes. Little boxes
made of ticky-tacky. My house.
Your house. My plate. Your plate.
In the desert, there is one plate at dinner. One plate
where we all tuck in, fingers first, food for all.
I want that.
I want you to ask me for stuff.
I want you to ask because asking is
the kind of boldness we need.
Tell me what you want and I come
a little closer to you, and we dance.
It’s not the yes or the no, but the asking
that rocks the world to this rhythm.
And the ticky-tacky begins to crumble, walls fall
and we need each other all the more.
There is a reciprocal rhythm. Let me
give you things. Don’t hold back
your receiving, because it leaves us both
bereft of the kinship that ties us, reminds
us of our entwined-ness as ecological beings.
I cannot. No. I will not survive without you.
OK yes, some kind of half living but
not the kind I’m worthy of.
Not the kind you’re worthy of. And not
the kind they are worthy of.
Help me, not to fix but to fill the heart. Not to trade but to
till the soil of inter-being that is all there has ever been.
There is a reciprocal rhythm and it’s not in 4-4 for it
doesn’t follow straight lines. It’s a wild rhythm where
I help you and you help her and she gets to stop and he
gives all he has for love.
There is a reciprocal rhythm and it’s not in 4-4.

Let’s not hold back.  Let’s hear the rhythms.  Let’s chant the mantras.  Let’s give our hearts.