The Yogabliss, Two Rivers/RiverTree Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning.   We practiced ways of deepening body awareness.  We used imagination, sensory experience and deep relaxation to allow life to move through us.

We contemplated Brooke McNamara’s poem Vessel.  Brooke is a poet, dance-theater artist, teacher, and Zen dharma holder.  Her beautiful poem creates a meeting place in our living vessel – our body – in which we can be together in a space of forgiveness.

We practiced an adaptation of the “Flowering Hand” meditation to attune to the life force energy flowing through all of nature.  This practice was introduced to me by one of my teachers, Nate Summers. Nate is a Chinese medicine practitioner. He teaches many forms of movement including Qigong, ancestral movement and survival skills. He is author of Primal: Why We Long to Be Free and Wild among other books exploring our relationship with nature.

We practiced a Budding & Blossoming Hand Meditation adapted from Margaret Rinaldi’s Flower Hand guided meditation.  As a somatic educator Meg offers Body Centered Inquiry to enable practitioners to cultivate awareness of their inner resources.

We heard part of Tibetan Buddhist teacher and writer, Reggie Ray’s Tricycle Magazine Essay, Touching Enlightenment.  Reggie has written a book of the same name.  Reggie teaches somatically based meditation and encourages us to allow our bodies to be our most intimate teachers.

We ended with poet philosopher John O’Donohue’s Blessings for the Senses.

Relaxed Reflection

Vessel
This breath together
in and out
right now
creates a vessel
for our travels
through rising, wilding waters,
this breath
a remembrance
that if we look between toes,
eyebrows, ideas, or organs,
between vertebrae,
words, and selves,
what we’re looking for
finds us:
forgiven,
in this
breath together
in and out
right now,
already forgiven
in each other’s eyes,
we’re now able to taste
our own innate goodness
through spontaneous sighs,
tense bellies, unlocked jaws,
and riotous thighs,
to receive
unsung abundance
from our sentient,
wombing worlds
rushing in
to remember us
connected.
I’ve discovered
under the tongue
an innocent wanting
to just be together,
to just be together
breathing
in and out
right now,
already forgiven.
This vessel
of shared and undulating awareness,
tangled intentions
rising and dying,
will carry us
as
home
especially when
there is no escape
from this terrible, miraculous mess
we so intimately are.
This breath together
in and out
right now,
our vessel.
This breath together
in
and
out.

Breathing . . . “to just be together breathing . . . in and out . . . right now, already forgiven . . . “ Can there be some tenderness in feeling the soft edges of forgiveness . . . for your self . . . for another?

Breathing . . . “. . . shared and undulating awareness . . . tangled intentions . . . rising and dying, will carry us . . . as home . . . “ Can there be a yielding in the subtle movement of body . . . of mind . . . of heart?

Breathing . . . “ . . . we so intimately are. . . . This breath together . . . in and out . . . right now . . . our vessel . . . “ Can there be an opening . . . to let go . . . to embrace . . . to touch . . . to be touched?

“Human skin is porous; the world flows through you. Your senses are large pores that let the world in. By being attuned to the wisdom of your senses, you will never become an exile in your own life, an outsider lost in an external spiritual place that your will and intellect, have constructed.”
― John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

I invite you to attune to your senses . . . let there be some tenderness toward yourself . . . as we cultivate intimacy . . . with our bodies . . . our breath . . . and the ground that supports us . . . I invite you to nourish yourself in the open awareness of being . . . alive to sensation . . .

In his Tricycle Magazine article, Touching Enlightenment, Tibetan Buddhist teacher and writer, Reggie Ray writes:

In the classical Buddhist traditions, meditation is deeply somatic—it is fully grounded in sensations, sensory experience, feeling, emotions . . . Even thoughts are related to as somatic—as bursts of energy experienced in the body . . .

The body is open, the body is sensitive, the body is vulnerable, the body is intelligent, and the body is completely beyond judgment. . . . Whatever occurs in our environment, our body receives.

When the body calls us back, we begin to find that we have a partner on the spiritual path that we didn’t know about—the body itself. In our meditation and in our surrounding lives, the body becomes a teacher, one that does not communicate in words . . . we find that we have to begin to learn the language that the body naturally speaks. . . . in meditating with the body as our guide, we come to feel that, perhaps for the first time in our lives, we are in the presence of a being, our own body, that is wise, loving, flawlessly reliable, and, strange to say, worthy of our deepest devotion.

Let’s breathe for a moment together and really take that in . . . our own body as wise, loving . . . worthy of our deepest devotion. . . . Right now we can feel into our bodies . . . we can open to the continuous expressions of cells . . . tissues . . . organs . . . pulsing electricity . . . chemical and thermal energy and the ineffable life force energy that is the fundamental aliveness we share with all of life . . .

Once again poet, philosopher John O’Donohue offers us a blessing. As I read this Blessing for the Senses you are free to substitute the his references to you and your to I, me and my:

A Blessing for the Senses

May your [my] body be blessed.
May you [I] realize that your [my] body is a faithful
and beautiful friend of your [my] soul.
And may you [I] be peaceful and joyful
and recognize that your [my] senses
are sacred thresholds.
May you [I] realize that holiness is
mindful, gazing, feeling, hearing, and touching.
May your [my] senses gather you [me] and bring you [me] home.
May your [my] senses always enable you [me] to
celebrate the universe and the mystery
and possibilities in your [my] presence here.
May the Eros of the Earth bless you [me].