The Yogabliss, Your Heart Life on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning.  We explored growing awareness from the experience of embodiment to communion with all beings.  It is both a lifetime journey and a leap of consciousness.  Love brings so much possibility.

We with 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 Julia Fehrenbacher’s poem, The Cure for It All.  Julia is a poet, life coach, teacher and painter.  You can find more of her beautiful poems at her web-site. The poem is about accepting life – including yourself – with forgiveness and love.

We drew from the fifth chapter of Kathleen Dowling Singh’s book, The Grace in Aging: Awaken As You Grow Older. In this section, Opening to Our Own Mortality:  A Meditation on Death, Kathleen describes the process of gradually letting go.  As we let go we also explore the spaciousness of freedom.  These are both practices of preparing for death and living life more fully.

We heard, The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee, a poem written by Pulitzer prize winning writer N. Scott Momaday.  In 2007, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. His work centers around the oral tradition of his Kiowa roots and the natural world.  You can find a documentary about this life at Return to Rainy Mountain.  The poem we heard today speaks to the communion we hold with all beings.

Guided Reflection

I invite you to bring awareness to your body.  Notice those areas that continue to move.  Feel breathing.  You can explore the way chest, ribs and lungs expand.  You might place hands on belly.  Enjoy softness and ease of  swelling in-breath, releasing out-breath.  Explore the cool stream of air moving into nostrils and the warm current flowing out.  

I invite you to sense your bones.   How you are touching Earth through your pelvis as you sit or through your whole body as you are lying down.  Know how your bones rebuild themselves as gravity’s pull draws you to Earth.  How do you experience this support from above and below?  Can you draw on the support you have to find ease?

What is your experience of embodiment?  I invite you to explore the soft animal of your body.   Is it possible to welcome all parts of yourself?  Can you meet them with gentleness?  Kindness?  Can you allow yourself a little freedom, even wildness?   

I invite you to explore generosity of spirit.  Can you bring awareness to illuminate the wonder of your being? I invite you to explore inner spaciousness.  What is it like to be the space in which all is perceived?   I invite you to open to space outside the boundaries of self.  Explore a space in which the changing weather of memory, emotion and thought can play and dance.  

Perhaps you will encounter the bigger spaces of love and its many expressions.  Erin Rabke’s Beatitude is an incantation of such spirit:

Blessed are those who become large; who are willingly stretched by gratitude and grief, who see ordinary moments as blessings, and who welcome enough sadness to make obvious the preciousness in all things. They shall become a tender domain where all beings may find rest and refuge.

Let us deepen our intimacy with life through felt experience.  Let us become large with loving presence. Aware of the preciousness in all things. Together becoming a tender domain, a sanctuary for all beings.  As poet Julia Fehrenbacher describes in her poem:

The Cure for It All

Go gently today, don’t hurry
or think about the next thing. Walk
with the quiet trees, can you believe
how brave they are—how kind? Model your life
after theirs. Blow kisses
at yourself in the mirror
especially when
you think you’ve messed up. Forgive
yourself for not meeting your unreasonable
expectations. You are human, not
God—don’t be so arrogant.
Praise fresh air
clean water, good dogs. Spin
something from joy. Open
a window, even if
it’s cold outside. Sit. Close
your eyes. Breathe. Allow
the river
of it all to pulse
through eyelashes
fingertips, bare toes. Breathe in
breathe out. Breathe until
you feel
your bigness, until the sun
rises in your veins. Breathe
until you stop needing
anything
to be different.

I invite you to slow down.  Can you relax the habit of anticipation?  Can you enter states unknown, unpredictable, uncontrolled?  Can you “become a tender domain where all beings may find rest and refuge?”

In this tender domain we become deeply aware of our own impermanence.  We recognize every fleeting moment is precious.  Loving presence arises.  Compassion arises.  Kathleen Dowling Singh teaches us to meditate with awareness of death is to let go.  We begin by allowing.  Allowing ease to arise.  Gradually freeing ourselves from  “I,” “me” and “mine.”  In her book she encourages readers to:

Completely let go.  . . . Silence reveals itself as refuge, as awareness that can be trusted, tender with the luminous quiet of mystery.  . . . 

We see clearly all the places where we hold back . . . the places that bind us.   

. . . Each letting go is a death, an acknowledgement of the moment just passing, the moment that is no longer.  

. . . We let go into freedom.  . . . becoming familiar with the freedom that lies beyond grasping to self.  It prepares us for dying and it opens us for living.  

What is it like to let go into freedom?  What choices would you make in preparation for death and opening for living?  Kathleen writes:

With illusions undone, we are no longer separate.  Fear disappears as we rest in communion. 

What does it mean to rest in communion?  We are here together in the practice of awareness and loving presence.  We explore letting go and opening to embrace the world  beyond the edges of our skin. 

Native American poet N. Scott Momaday describes a fearless freedom in his poem: 

The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee

I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind
I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake
I am a flame of four colors
I am a deer standing away in the dusk
I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche
I am an angle of geese in the winter sky
I am the hunger of a young wolf
I am the whole dream of these things

You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to the gods
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsoai-talee
You see, I am alive, I am alive